A comprehensive labour market approach to EU labour migration policy

"Opening up new legal migration channels" to respond to economic needs for labour is one of the four priorities of the European Commission for its upcoming European Agenda on Migration. The EU approach to legal labour migration has, to date, been very fragmented and limited. It has focused, indeed, on specific categories of potential legal migrants: highly-qualified, intra-corporate transferees, seasonal workers or students and non-remunerated trainees and researchers. The approach is clearly not up to the challenges posed by the EU labour market prospects and does not integrate, in a comprehensive way, all third-country nationals accessing European labour markets, including family reunification beneficiaries, asylum-seekers and foreign students. The main challenges related to the development of a EU labour migration vision are the following. How to articulate intra-EU mobility and international migration to the EU labour market? How to make EU- and Member States legal migration systems and competences compatible? How to ensure that employers can tap workers from a sufficient pool of suitably qualified individuals (and that qualifications obtained abroad are recognized)? And how to reduce international labour matching costs? This policy brief aims to provide some ideas to address those challenges over a medium- to long-term perspective, starting from the EU's labour market needs and dynamics.