Items tagged with MIGRATION POLICY

More than twenty years have passed since the 1999 Tampere European Council launched the project to build a common immigration and asylum policy. The main objective was to formulate a public policy that was balanced and that allowed the management of legal immigration, as well as controlling irregular migratory flows in equal parts. Furthermore, all of this would be governed by the principle of solidarity and equity in burden-sharing among the Member States.

There is a dichotomy between the measures that recognize the positive contribution of migrants and migration management in the economic sphere of the country of origin, mainly. Faced with other measures that represent a reaction to migration and migrants as a harmful and threatening phenomenon for the countries of destination, and with the new migration trends, the vertical border is expanding, and the transit countries are gradually becoming the country of prolonged stay, as is the case in Mexico.

There have been contradictory trends in migration policies in advanced countries since the 1990s: states have actively recruited desirable immigrants while they continued to deter and exclude unwanted migrants. The case of Japanese state not only represents this trend, but also shows a profoundly paradoxical case in the sense that it officially negated incorporation of “immigrants” consistently though it has built up multiple channels of transnational labor supply for their urgent needs. It is particularly so because Japan has maintained the divergent policies in the middle of well-known demographic crisis with aging population.