European Birds of Passage - An Empirical Legal Theory of Temporary Labour Migration in Europe

Project Information

E-BoP

Grant agreement ID: 101041246

DOI

10.3030/101041246

EC signature date 23 February 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 395 888,00

EU contribution

€ 1 395 888,00

Coordinated by

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - E-BoP (European Birds of Passage - An Empirical Legal Theory of Temporary Labour Migration in Europe)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Temporary labour migration is increasingly presented as a solution to a number of challenges faced by societies in the Global North, ranging from labour shortages to demographic pressures (ageing). In addition, it is often identified as the politically feasible compromise between calls to “take back control of the borders” and the need of employers to access a migrant workforce in several essential sectors of the economy – such as agriculture, domestic and care work, construction. The legal framework of temporary labour migration schemes generally features an exchange between the possibility for migrant to access employment opportunities in the country of arrival and a restriction of their rights, starting from the time-limited nature of their visas, and expanding to the access to labour and social rights.

Temporary migration schemes put in place by destination countries such as the US, Australia, Canada, but also the Gulf states, have received important scientific attention. Far less attention has been paid to the European Union, due to a fragmented migration regime (up to 2014) and the distinction between intra- and extra-EU migration.

E-BoP develops the first empirical legal analysis of the construction of the EU legal framework for temporary labour migration, by examining the concepts which provide the foundation for the unequal treatment reserved to temporary labour migrants in the fields of social and labour rights. This covers the concepts of “labour market”, and the relationship of temporary labour migrants with it, and the one of “temporariness”. How does EU law justify the departure from the principle of equal treatment? Our systematic document analysis on the use of the concept of “labour market” by EU law documents offers the first investigation of its kind into this pivotal concept.

Having identified the internal legal meaning of these underdefined concepts, E-BoP will compare these with socio-economic data concerning temporary labour migrants in the EU. These will be collected to cover a set of Member States representative of different welfare traditions and varieties of capitalism. Are the assumptions behind the legal regulation of temporary labour migration tenable in light of empirical evidence?

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The central effort of the team thus far has been on the analysis and historiography of the legal framework for temporary labour migration in the EU (WP1), focusing on building an innovative methodology to analyse and operationalise underdefined legal concepts. This has resulted in the development of a protocol for systematic document analysis, which has so far been applied to use of the concept of “labour market” in EU law. The resulting corpus is comprised of 1803 items, each of which has been coded separately by two coders. The results will be exploited by E-BoP to explore the legal and socio-economic impact of our findings (WP3). However, given the importance of the concept, these also represent a useful reference for future research outside the scope of E-BoP. Similarly, the methodology developed by our team aims to be applicable to other similar scientific challenges.

Work on the second stage of E-BoP, namely the quantitative analysis of temporary labour migration in the EU (WP2), has been focused on data collection concerning incoming and outgoing temporary labour migrants in two of our four target Member States, namely Poland and Sweden. The complex data structure, which varies across different entities and countries, involves substantial data transformations, including translation. While time-consuming, this exercise is a crucial step of data analysis and will ultimately result in a database that will be cleaned, properly annotated, and fully available in English for future research.

The methodological work carried out in WP1 and WP2 has also led to the organisation of a successful international Summer School focused on interdisciplinary legal research on labour migration. The event took place in Strasbourg during July 2024 and brought together 10 participants and 9 speakers from a broad range of disciplines.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Our work on systematic document analysis (WP1) constitutes an innovative contribution to legal research. Our protocol was built from the ground up and represents a powerful tool to identify the conceptual scope of under-defined concepts used in legal acts. It aims to reinforce the systematic nature of legal research and to allow researchers to prove that the corpus selected to answer the given research question has not been “cherry picked” to lead to a pre-determined conclusion. Coupled with its high transferability, it has the potential to contribute to the advancement of legal research.

Our exploration of the concept of “labour market” also goes beyond the state-of-the-art, as there is no existing systematic analysis of the use of such a concept in EU law. This is significant, as the concept of “labour market” is often relevant in other areas of the law, from migration law to social security law. To maximise the potential impact of our work, our corpus, codebook, and the results of our coding are already publicly available.

In our work, we also advance the new idea of analysing together the legal framework for temporary labour migration both intra-EU and coming from third countries. This breaks with the tradition of legal analysis, based on the strict distinction between intra-EU “mobility” and extra-EU “migration”. Such an innovative scope allows for the identification of previously underexplored vulnerabilities which are only beginning to be identified in the literature.

The data collection and analysis carried out to develop a quantitative analysis of temporary labour migration in the EU (WP2) goes beyond the state-of-the-art due to the use of innovative data sources, such as services trade by enterprise characteristics and international driving permits, to overcome the well-known limitation of data concerning temporary labour migration. Also, our quantitative analysis of the Polish case focuses on the sending country perspective when it comes to the intra-EU posting of third country nationals. This goes beyond the existing literature, which remains largely focused on the perspective of receiving countries.