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Purpose — The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the ways in which the European Union (EU) is influencing policy making in EU member states. It covers the historical development of the UK, France and Germany. There is evidence to suggest politics and economic policy making in these countries are now similar particularly in the areas of adopting anti inflationist strategies and opening up markets. However, some differences remain particularly regarding the flexibility of labour markets in the various member states. Design/methodology/approach — The paper draws on the various components of integration theory and incorporates also a business history approach. Findings — The main findings indicate that the EU is gradually having more influence over member states, newer areas of development include social policy, immigration and an increasing neoliberalist approach towards opening new markets. However, countries are still given some flexibility, for example, there are still a number of countries not yet willing to join the Euro currency. Originality/value — The paper illustrates the important role of the EU in formulating policy for member states in today's increasingly competitive business environment Business needs to be fully aware of these implications in order to become more successful while operating in the expanding European market [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the opposition to immigration, comparing the European Union as a whole and Portugal, United Kingdom, France and Germany. The first hypvothesis that was examined posits that the perception of economic, security and cultural threats are significant predictors of the orientation towards immigration. The second hypothesis states that racial prejudice is an important predictor of threat perception. Results show that, globally, attitudes towards immigration in EU are more close to openness than they are to closure. As predicted, cultural, economic and security threats are significantly associated with the opposition to immigration. These results are stable across compared countries. Moreover results show that in the EU as a whole political conservatism and racial prejudice are the main predictors of the perception of threat in the economic, security and cultural domains. These same results were obtained in France, Germany and United Kingdom. Except in the case of security threat, also in Portugal prejudice is an important predictor of threat perception. These results are discussed in the context of the immigration integration policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relationships between the migratory policies of the EU countries with more experience of immigration and their national political cultures. It focuses on France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It then looks at Italy, a relatively new country of immigration, which, with 3,000,000 legal immigrants, has become the fourth country of immigration in Europe and the first in the Mediterranean basin. In its final part it highlights the incipient process of 'communitarisation' of the immigration policies of EU countries in the last decade. This process, which has already entailed a significant convergence of their migratory policies, is expected to continue after the recent enlargement of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western European states have increasingly linked immigration and welfare policy. This trend has important implications for European welfare-state trajectories, but accounts of the policy reasoning behind it have diverged. Are policymakers attempting to delimit social citizenship to secure welfare-state legitimacy? Pursuing new, market-oriented welfare-state goals? Symbolically communicating immigration control intentions to voters? Or attempting to instrumentally steer immigration flows? These accounts have rarely been tested empirically against each other. Redressing this, we employ 83 elite interviews in a comparative process-tracing study of policies linking welfare provision and immigration status in Germany, France, and the UK during the 1990s. We find little evidence suggesting welfare-guided policy reasonings. Rather, this policy linkage appears "immigration-guided:" meant to control "unwanted" immigration or resonate symbolically in immigration politics. Differences in exclusions from welfare support for migrants grew from existing national differences in welfare-state design and politicizations of immigration, not from policy intentions, which were largely shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on a new data set which is constructed from a combination of national micro-data bases, we highlight differences in the structure of migrants to four countries - namely, France, Germany, the UK and the US - which receive a substantial share of all immigrants to the OECD world. Looking at immigrants by source country, we illustrate the important role of distance, both geographical and cultural, immigration policies and migrant networks. Differentiating immigrants by their educational attainments, we observe interesting patterns in the skill composition, employment opportunities and wages of migrants to the different destination countries. Focusing on migration between the four countries in our data set, we find that migration within western Europe is small and rather balanced in terms of skill structures, while there appears to be a brain drain from Europe to the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]