International Law of Economic Migration: A Menage a Trois? GATS Mode 4, EPAs, and Bilateral Migration Agreements

摘要

International economic migration is steered internationally by the interplay of migration-related agreements at three levels: the multilateral opening of services markets for natural persons in the so-called 'mode 4' of the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services, the preferential trade agreements, which replicate the GA'TS modalities at regional or cross continental levels and the non-trade, bilateral migration agreements concluded in a securitarian context, 'this fragmentation in terms of hierarchical norm allocation is further exacerbated by a split running horizontally or thematically through trade and non-trade agreements in terms of occupational skill levels. Wliereas bilateral, non-trade agreements correct the high-skill bias of unilateral immigration law and the multilateral regime for liberalizing the movement of natural persons in WTO/GATS, the economic partnership agreements (UPA), for their part, combine openings for the highly-skilled with access for lower-skilled professions. In the final analysis, the most-favored-nation clause (MTN) of the WTO/GA'TS functions to defragment the incoherent landscape of agreements pertaining to economic migration. Insofar, as the MTN-clause of WTO/GA'TS requires multilateralizing market openings, it disciplines the preferential recruitment schemes based on nationality characteristic for bilateral migration agreements. In so doing, the MTN clause takes pressure off the classic corridors of migration and thus contributes to distributing the burdens of receiving migrant workers more evenly among the WTO Membership.