Negotiating varieties of capitalism? Crisis and change in contemporary British and German labour migration policies

Abstract

Just a decade ago, the liberal British and cautious German approaches to labour migration policy (LMP) counted as institutional spillovers of two opposed varieties of capitalism. Since 2014, however, Germany has offered one of the most liberal labour migration legislations across the rich world, while the Coalition government in London has severely curbed the rules of admission. Is the explanatory power of capitalist variation already exhausted for comparative labour migration policies? To what extent has the economic crisis disrupted policy paths? By adopting a cultural political economy perspective, this paper examines the interaction of crisis discourses and capitalist varieties in explaining LMP changes. A comparison shows that Britain treats the liberal market economy's openness to foreign workers as a root cause for a deeply felt migration control crisis and seeks to tame firms' profitability strategies with restrictive policies. By contrast, German decision-makers have come to view the skill provision mechanisms of the coordinated market economy as key cure to the perceived demographic crisis, liberalising migration routes alongside this economic coordination model. Overall, the paper dethrones capitalist varieties as seemingly deterministic informants of labour migration policies. Instead, policies have both the aim and capacity to negotiate national capitalisms according to shifting notions of crisis.

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