ABSTRACT
European Union (EU) migration policy is of relatively recent provenance. Correspondingly, scholarly interest in the matter emerged only in the late 1990s. The aim of this chapter is to trace the genesis of European-level labor migration policy and chart the scholarly debate analyzing it. I will also point to lacunae and gaps in the existing scholarly literature. The central focus will rest on labor migration as opposed to other channels of legal or illegal immigration. We will proceed chronologically by juxtaposing both policy development and the concurrent treatment in the scholarly literature in the first major section, followed by a thorough exploration of key research questions. In the final section I put forward several possible future trajectories that will in time pose significant policy challenges and theoretical research questions for scholars.
