Prying Open Fortress Europe The Turn to Sectoral Labor Migration [Hardcover]

Quite informative and educational....Recommended.Prying Open Fortress Europe is not another lament about immigration restriction. Alexander Caviedes instead explains why extensive labor migration to Europe continues. Rooting his analysis in a critique of the varieties of capitalism, he shows that both skilled and unskilled labor migration originate in employer preferences for flexible labor in specific sectors. The well documented case studies in this book uncover cross-national similarities of policy within sectors in spite of different national models.Globalization has increased international migratory pressures, but in advanced industrialized countries entrenched social interests eager to maintain restrictive policies make it difficult for governments to encourage mass migration. This book explains how countries in Western Europe have responded to this challenge by establishing sector-specific labor migration policies that are capable of managing migration toward industries with particular labor shortages while still offering the semblance of managed migration necessary to make such policy politically palatable.Prying Open Fortress: The Turn to Sectoral Labor Migration is unique in the field of migration studies since it traces the microeconomic motivations of the relevant economic actors who influence labor migration policy. The book updates the study of the political economy of immigration through a focus on the central and pro-active role of employers, exploring how they interact with trade unions and government to reconfigure the labor migration paradigm in Western Europe. By doing so, it is attentive to the logic behind their strategies, being sensitive to macroeconomic changes that produce sectorally variant policy outcomes. Beyond offering a micro-economically informed explanation for immigration policy, the study transcends the field of migration studies by offering insights relevant to larger debates concerning the nature of national varieties of capitallc0