The final chapter of the book synthesizes the findings from the institutional and policy change analyses to provide a comprehensive conclusion on the governance of labor immigration for low-skilled occupations (LILSO). By employing a set-theoretic, configurational research design, the study demonstrates that migration policy-making is a multidimensional process where long-term institutional structures and short-term economic or political factors interact in complex ways. The conclusion highlights that the economic rationale for liberalization is most influential when trade unions are weak and the democratic system is exclusionary, particularly in countries following the Liberal Rights Model. Conversely, as countries become more numerically open to LILSO, economic factors diminish in significance while international policy diffusion and regional dynamics become primary drivers of policy change. The chapter also addresses the inherent trade-offs in migration governance, noting that liberalizations for low-skilled workers often coincide with restrictive turns in other migration policy areas. It identifies a significant threat to rights-openness posed by the rise of right-wing populism, especially in exclusionary democratic systems where anti-immigration sentiments can more easily dominate policy discourse. Methodologically, the study advocates for the continued use of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to capture equifinality and conjunctural causation, while acknowledging limitations such as data scarcity for low-skilled migration and the static nature of the analysis. Ultimately, the manuscript contributes a novel macro-perspective to the migration regime framework, offering an analytical toolkit applicable to other complex policy fields and providing a foundation for future research into the mechanisms of global inequality and policy diffusion.

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Conclusion: The Intertwined Forces of Institutions, Economics, and Politics in Migration Policy-Making

  • Anna-Christine Görg

摘要

The final chapter of the book synthesizes the findings from the institutional and policy change analyses to provide a comprehensive conclusion on the governance of labor immigration for low-skilled occupations (LILSO). By employing a set-theoretic, configurational research design, the study demonstrates that migration policy-making is a multidimensional process where long-term institutional structures and short-term economic or political factors interact in complex ways. The conclusion highlights that the economic rationale for liberalization is most influential when trade unions are weak and the democratic system is exclusionary, particularly in countries following the Liberal Rights Model. Conversely, as countries become more numerically open to LILSO, economic factors diminish in significance while international policy diffusion and regional dynamics become primary drivers of policy change. The chapter also addresses the inherent trade-offs in migration governance, noting that liberalizations for low-skilled workers often coincide with restrictive turns in other migration policy areas. It identifies a significant threat to rights-openness posed by the rise of right-wing populism, especially in exclusionary democratic systems where anti-immigration sentiments can more easily dominate policy discourse. Methodologically, the study advocates for the continued use of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to capture equifinality and conjunctural causation, while acknowledging limitations such as data scarcity for low-skilled migration and the static nature of the analysis. Ultimately, the manuscript contributes a novel macro-perspective to the migration regime framework, offering an analytical toolkit applicable to other complex policy fields and providing a foundation for future research into the mechanisms of global inequality and policy diffusion.