Towards a partnership approach to labour migration?Temporary labour mobility in the new generation of bilateral migration agreements of France & Spain

The first century of the new millennium has seen a renaissance of bilateral migration agreements. These have not been systemically studied in either international law or political science. Set against this proliferating set of agreements, most of which are concluded with migrant source countries in North and West Africa, but also Eastern Europe and Latin America, this PhD will fill this gap and examine how far the new agreements are accountable for the paradigm shift towards a partnership approach to jointly manage migratory flows.

Slightly diverging systems of preferential labour market admissions between the French and Spanish agreements make for an interesting comparative study. The PhD will ask how labour market admission schemes ought to be tailored to complement and “compete”, rather than conflict, with the temporary movement of service suppliers liberalised at the multilateral level (GATS mode 4). It investigates how policy space in bilateral migration agreements is constrained by the most-favoured nation clause of the WTO GATS and the Schengen/Dublin visa harmonisation, but also how France and Spain’s agreements conflict with the increasingly “communitarised” readmission and labor market policies at the EU level.