Policy Entrepreneurship and the Harmonisation of Immigration Policies: Explaining the Adoption of the Intra-Corporate Transferee Directive

In the literature on EU policy-making on labour immigration, there seems to be general agreement that Member States are reluctant to agree on EU-level harmonisation and are eager to preserve national sovereignty. However, one of the more recent labour migration directives, the directive on intra-corporate transferees, goes quite far in creating harmonised admission conditions and introduces an intra-EU mobility scheme that includes the right to stay and work in more than one Member State. What is more, these features of the directive were not highly controversial during the negotiations. How can we explain this high level of harmonisation? In this paper, I trace the negotiations of the ICT Directive to test two explanatory hypotheses based on Member State preferences and strategies employed by the European Commission. respectively. I find that preferences-based accounts cannot fully account for the outcome of the negotiations, and that the European Commission strategically framed the directive as a matter of trade and economic policy, rather than immigration, thus facilitating agreement. The findings imply that existing explanations of EU migration policy-making should be nuanced to take into account how immigration policies are linked to other policy fields and should consider the importance of framing strategies to explain policy outputs.