Daily media coverage of dramatic events on the EU’s external borders have fostered the widespread public perception that current migration regimes do not produce generally desired migration outcomes. More and more, migration researchers and policy makers concur that traditional mechanisms of migration management have run into severe trouble and that new, innovative concepts for the regulation of migration are called for. Yet, new ideas for regulating regular migration, dealing with irregular migration and providing international protection to those in need of it remain elusive and far between.

To stimulate new thinking, therefore, an international workshop was convened by ICMPD in Vienna under the umbrella of the IMISCOE Network of Excellence with a special call for papers that had the explicit purpose to bring forward new, alternative and innovative approaches to the management of migration. This policy brief is directed at researchers and policy makers at all levels.

The first part identifies some common themes and principles in the design of alternative migration policies that run across the eleven proposals presented at the workshop. The second part then provides a short overview on the cutting-edge thinking presented by our participants.

One quite obvious theme that runs through all the presentations and proposals discussed at the workshop is a general dissatisfaction with the current situation in migration policy. And while participants agreed that not all problems conventionally labelled as “migration problems” can be tackled by migration policy alone – indeed many of the proposed schemes explicitly point to the complex interplay between migration and wider policy areas such as trade, welfare, labour market and development policies.

This policy brief is based on the conference and conference report also published within the IMISCOE publication programme as part of the Working Papers. Policy briefs are part of the IMISCOE publication programme.. By using policy briefs we want to bring IMISCOE research to the attention of policy makers and at the same time translate the results into meaningful and useful messages to them.

The IMISCOE Working Papers are part of IMISCOE which is an EU funded Network of Excellence in the Sixth Framework Programme

International Network of Excellence IMISCOE
Karen Kraal (Communication Officer), tel. +31 (0)20 525 3659

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Michael Jandl

research

Urban Policy

Social inclusion & integration