Research questions

As the literature cited in chapter 1 would suggest, state regulation of labour migration is confronted with a double dilemma. First, while markets require a policy of open borders to provide as many foreign workers as employers demand, citizenship requires some degree of closure to the outside. Second, while the exclusive character of citizenship demands closed membership, civil and human rights would seem to undermine the state capacity (or, as some would believe, the state right) to exclude foreigners once they’re in the country. In fact, rather than two separate dilemmas, the different factors involved shape a trilemma between markets, citizenship and rights. Their characteristics have been analysed in relation to specific historical events, for example, the introduction of guestworker programmes in Western Europe. As we have seen, several scholars have signalled that post-war guestworker programmes ‘failed’ because the attempt to resolve the dilemma between markets and citizenship was eventually challenged by rights. The dilemma between citizenship and rights has also been analysed with the focus on family migration and refugees in Western Europe from the 1970s onwards. In particular, it has been pointed out that liberal democracies could not stop ‘unwanted migration’ as they were constrained by an international human rights’ regime, constitutional rights and national courts.

While the relationship between markets, citizenship and rights has dominated most analysis of migration policies, three key aspects have systematically been left out of the debate. First, little research has been done on the markets-citizenship-rights trilemma after 1973. This may be explained by the fact that most studies focus on Western European countries, where the demand for foreign workers stopped (or is commonly thought to have stopped1) with the oil crisis of 1973. Second, research done in non-Western countries has scant presence in this discussion, so that little is known about the trilemma in other political settings. This lack of (more general) comparative research makes it difficult to disentangle – as Brubaker (1995) observed regarding Freeman's work – what might be an exclusive feature of migration in liberal democracies from what could be deemed a feature of migration in general. Third and finally, this trilemma has almost exclusively referred to legal migration.