Memo to the commissioner responsible for migration

Memo

Memo to the commissioner responsible for migration

Publishing date: 04 September 2024
Authors: Jacob Funk Kirkegaard

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The European Union’s population is ageing and legal migration avenues must be expanded, while addressing concerns about irregular migration into Europe. EU countries retain control over most migration-related regulation, leading to highly diverging national utilisation of residency permits. Issuance of employment-based residency permits has been rising, while in the spring of 2024 the EU agreed a new Pact on Migration and Asylum, resulting in a fundamental reform of the EU approach to border control and asylum management. Immigration remains a politically potent topic and newly agreed common rules to better distribute the burden of irregular migration among all EU countries will prove especially controversial.

You must push reforms to the mandatory solidarity mechanism and to how migration is integrated into EU partnerships with third countries (Team Europe Initiatives), while greatly expanding the scope of the Blue Card, the only common EU-level entry/residence/work permit.

Key actions:

Improve the functioning of the solidarity mechanism
Greater transparency of third-country migration deals
Think bigger on the EU Blue Card

Read the full memo by clicking the download button at the top of this page.

About the authors

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard is a Senior fellow at Bruegel and a Non-resident Senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE). From 2020 to August 2024, he was a senior fellow with the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF). From 2013 until 2020, he was a senior fellow at PIIE, based in Washington, DC. He has also worked with the Danish Ministry of Defence, the United Nations in Iraq, and in the private financial sector.

Jacob is a graduate of the Danish Army's Special School of Intelligence and Linguistics with the rank of first lieutenant; the University of Aarhus in Aarhus, Denmark; the Columbia University in New York; and received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies. He is coeditor of Transatlantic Economic Challenges in an Era of Growing Multipolarity (2012), author of The Accelerating Decline in America's High-Skilled Workforce: Implications for Immigration Policy (2007), coauthor of US Pension Reform: Lessons from Other Countries (2009) and Transforming the European Economy (2004), and assisted with Accelerating the Globalization of America: The Role for Information Technology (2006). His current research focuses on European economies and reform, transatlantic economic transition, immigration, labor markets, foreign direct investment trends and estimations, the global demographic transformation, and the impact of information technology.