Enhancing cooperation among the Prague Process states

Select your language

29 May 2020

Briefs

The policy brief looks at the migration trends of the past 20 years, outlines open questions to be addressed by national migration policies and makes an attempt to set forward four plausible scenarios of how migration to Europe may look in the future. In doing so, the brief also considers the impact of the CoVid-19 pandemic on migration.

The four scenarios envisage the following:

1) ‘Back to the early 2000s’. Rights-based admissions would still play a more important role than labour migration so that many third-country nationals settling in Europe would likely not immediately join the labour market. 

2) Migration could be driven by the ‘Instability in the neighbourhood’. Scenario two assumes large-scale future population displacements affecting Europe.

3) ‘More selective admission of immigrants’. This scenario assumes that shortages of labour and skills in a number of EU Member States could trigger major migration policy changes: a shift from present admission criteria to a stricter skills-based selection of labour migrants and/or to a more demand- and employer-driven selection.

4) ‘Going native’. Scenario four assumes that migration policies become ever more restrictive, coupled with a general political consensus on such restrictions and a social climate in which migrants are not welcome.

Authors

Professor Rainer Münz, Former Adviser on Migration and Demography to President J.C.Juncker during his time in office (2014-2019), now JRC_KCMD | This publication was produced in the framework of the ‘Prague Process: Dialogue, Analyses and Training in Action’ initiative, a component of the Mobility Partnership Facility II project, with the assistance of the European Union. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of the authors and the 'Prague Process: Dialogue, Analyses and Training in Action’ initiative, and can in no way represent the views of the European Union.