With its focus on the external dimension of the rapidly evolving European Union immigration policies, this article seeks to contribute to the debates on the EU's impact on states and international relations in two ways. Firstly, it seeks to move beyond the inward-looking focus of contemporary studies on the EU's effects on the member states, and proposes a framework for analyzing its external effects on non-EU member states. Secondly, and in contrast to traditional accounts of the EU's strengthening international role, which focus on external trade policy or foreign and security policy, it highlights a hitherto overlooked aspect of the EU's foreign relations related to immigration control. Drawing on the recent literature on Europeanization and policy transfer, it is shown that the external effects of European policies take place along a continuum that runs from fully voluntary to more constrained forms of adaptation, and include a variety of modes such as unilateral emulation, adaptation by externality, and policy transfer through conditionality. The scope and shape of policy transfer is conditioned by existing institutional links between the EU and the third countries concerned, the latter's domestic situation at hand, and the costs of nonadaptation associated with an EU policy.

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In the European Union (EU), rights advocacy NGOs increasingly seek to influence supranational policy making. The success of immigration and asylum NGOs in inserting themselves into policy making depends on existing (in)formal ties to EU institutions. In contrast, human rights-based NGOs received institutional support through the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) containing a civil society platform that aggregates NGO claims. This article applies a comparative framework derived from the literature on transnational advocacy, using the distinction between venues and frames as starting points for analysis. It compares both sets of NGOs, exploring issues of institutional access and agenda-setting, and examines the strategies and objectives of advocacy NGOs in these two different political settings: while immigration and asylum advocates rely mainly on pluralistic lobbying strategies and pre-given, exogenous institutional opportunity structures, Fundamental Rights Platform NGOs engage in a novel approach in which civil society actors endogenously co-constitute aspects of participatory governance in the EU. On the basis of interviews with NGOs and EU officials, we conclude that each of these strategies exhibit specific trade-offs based on the nature of the relationship to the EU institutions. It is argued that each type of access has its idiosyncratic drawback: while immigration and asylum advocacy may result in dispersed opportunities to steer outcomes at the EU level, the inclusion of rights-based NGOs in the FRA limits their strategic repertoire. Finally, issue-specificity also conditions agenda-setting as higher issue convergence enables more focused framing, while a diffuse issue spectrum yields weaker frames and authority.

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