Building the common: Immigration policy discourses in the European Union

In opposition to positivism the so called postpositivism reject the emphasis on the empirical truth and proposes an interpretative approach to the social world (Fischer, 1993). Policy analysis begins to address the sense-making constructions and the competing discourses on social meanings whilst discourse analysis, especially inspired by Foucault’s work, shows to be appropriate to challenge the understanding of policy making as a rational process and reveal its contingency (Hewitt, 2009). AS policy discourse analysis requires a complementary examination of text and context (Gasper & Apthorpe), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is introduced to achieve a more detailed acknowledgement of how language must is used (Hastings, 1996; Martson, 2000) and the consequences of the way the policy problem is framed, including the solutions implied by its formulation.
The methodology I will apply combines a wider social approach based on Maarten Hayer’s (1995) discourse analysis of policy making and the more linguistic one, specifically Ruth Wodak’s (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001; Wodak & Weiss, 2005) Historic Discourse Approach (HDA). Thus I will be able to identify which discursive structure on immigration policy in the European Union is constructed and the categories and themes that are discussed. I will look also at the discourse strategies to show the linguistic representations of the social actors, who are excluded from or include in such representations.
I will analysis a European Commission’s policy document, A Common Immigration Policy for Europe: Principles, actions and tools (2008) as a part of Hague Programme (2004) on actions against terrorism, organised crime and migration and asylum management and influenced by the renewed Lisbon Strategy (2005-2010) for growth and jobs. My aim is to explore the implications of the categorization of the immigration that the European Union wants to manage based on the ten common principles. I will attend to the creation of the European immigrant (third-country nationals) and its different categories (economic immigration, labour immigrants, potential immigrants, other categories of immigrants) under the more general legal immigrant. The economic discourse defined the immigrant in terms of adequacy to the European labour market through metaphors and new categories (immigration profiles, circular migration, brain waste – opposite brain drain). The new EU narrative on migration as positive for economy (and demography) and its realistic acceptation (the immigration flows will not decrease) is partly based on its reduction to an economic (as legal) or security (as illegal) issue that can be managed with appropriate means.