European migration policies face great challenges. After many years of mostly unregulated inflows of foreigners into the EU, it is time to take a new approach focusing on economic criteria and taking the new social and economic realities in the EU into account. The recruitment of «high potentials» must become a cornerstone of a new EU migration policy. With the eastward enlargement in sight, the union must agree on new migration regulations or quotas for the highly qualified from Eastern Europe. Closing the borders to the West for citizens of the new EU member states for up to another seven years - as the majority of member states plan to do - would result in a loss of important human capital needed to further strengthen the competitiveness of a larger EU in the world economy. only subscribers can see the full article

Within the EU there is currently an explicit struggle to articulate and render coherent a range of policies, narratives, definitions and processes for governing migration, and in particular for introducing new governing logics and relationships under the heading of ‘new immigration policy’. The struggle to assert a coherent governance regime in the field of migration involves combining and re-combining different policy narratives, institutional assumptions and relationships within the EU, and between EU and member states. In this article we identify and evaluate the key, often contradictory narratives, mediated among the institutions and broader dynamics of EU policymaking: (human) rights, security, economic needs, and social integration. These discourses interact to construct a new, identifiable policy terrain of European migration governance. only subscribers can see the full article