Trade against migrants? How the EU uses its preferential trade agreements to deter unwanted migration

Migration has become a top priority in the EU’s foreign policy since the refugee reception crisis of 2015. Yet the EU’s efforts to externalise migration through cooperation with third countries in border management and readmission date back to the inception of EU-level migration policies in the early 1990s. A major obstacle to such cooperation is interest-asymmetry as transit and sending countries benefit from remittances generated by their emigrants and apprehend the costs of reintegrating returnees. In this context, trade agreements provide a potentially powerful but hitherto under-investigated tool for leveraging commercial power for migration control. This paper has a twofold aim: first, we provide a systematic qualitative analysis of the evolution of the trade-migration-control linkage in EU PTAs, which suggests that EU efforts at including migration control clauses in PTAs have faced contestation from partner countries, leading to increased demands for conditionality first and then to a shift towards other instruments for cooperation on migration control. Second, we leverage an original dataset of migration provisions in PTAs and other migration control instruments to analyse the determinants of including migration control in trade agreements. We test hypotheses related to trade dependence of the partner country, geographical proximity and the type of agreement. Furthermore, we analyse in how far the linkage of trade and migration control is associated with a higher likelihood of a subsequent dedicated migration control agreement. The findings have important implications for our understanding of the EU as a global migration policy actor and contribute to the growing research on the linkage of trade and non-trade issues in the EU’s foreign economic policy.