The Schengen option ?

The March 2016 government document titled Alternatives to Membership has a discussion of this. It’s what people including now apparently Boris (!) have in mind when they talk about the EEA option. Note also that your hypothetical scenario for Scotland is a real dilemma now for Ireland, which is non Schengen.

Ze is right that you’re not distinguishing between free movement of labour (which currently applies in the UK) and the no border controls / single process for visitor visa applications (which the UK has always opted out of). The Leave campaign seemed equally happy to confuse the two, without your excuse of living on the other side of the planet.

(Republic of) Ireland is not in Schengen but in the EEA. So free movement of EU workers but off-putting treatment of travellers with visas in my experience.

Free movement across borders under Schengen does not imply the right to work in any Schengen country. These are two dfferent aspects of EU membership and, as noted by others, UK opted out of one (Schengen) and not the other (work rights for EU citizens).

An example which shows this might be: a non-EU citizen gets a Schengen visa and can travel freely throughout the Schengen area. But he will not be allowed to work in any of the countries without some sort of additional work permit. Thus, travel and work permits are handled differently. Just because you have Schengen travel rights does not mean you have labor rights.

One relevant document is the recent declaration by the Prime Ministers of the Visegrad Four (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary), made in Prague on 8 June. The V4 Group appears to be committed to preventing a post-Brexit UK from joining the EEA unless it concedes freedom of movement. It is not wholly clear what ‘freedom of movement’ means in this context, but the V4 is surely committed to vetoing the sort of proposal put forward by Boris Johnson in his Telegraph column yesterday, whereby the UK would have access to the EEA while controlling immigration “with a balanced and humane points-based system to suit the needs of business and industry”.

… and as many have pointed out, the V4 would face a 10% tariff on goods they export to the UK if they don’t do a deal. Not sure why they would vote for this.

JQ your reading of implausibility of Johnson position sustained by NYT here today: “The few countries that have been given access to the European free-trade zone without joining the European Union — notably, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland — all contribute to the bloc’s budget and accept its bedrock principle of free movement of workers, the very issues that angered so many of the Britons who voted to leave.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/world/europe/boris-johnson-brexit.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

But schengen has nothing to do with migration

Presumably that’s why the Title of the Treaty of Rome that establishes it is “Visas, asylum, immigration and other policies related to free movement of persons” and the relevant chapters of the Treaty of Lisbon are “General provisions”, “Policies on border checks, asylum and immigration“, “Judicial cooperation in civil matters”, “Judicial cooperation in criminal matters”, and “Police cooperation”

From Europa website

Free movement of persons is a fundamental right guaranteed by the EU to its citizens. It entitles every EU citizen to travel, work and live in any EU country without special formalities. Schengen cooperation enhances this freedom by enabling citizens to cross internal borders without being subjected to border checks. The border-free Schengen Area guarantees free movement to more than 400 million EU citizens, as well as to many non-EU nationals, businessmen, tourists or other persons legally present on the EU territory.

Ad Salem:

I do not think you have described Johnson’s current position (or at least, his position yesterday; who knows where he stands today). This is from his Telegraph article:

“British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down.”

If he means that they will be able to do all these things *as of right*, he clearly envisages a much closer involvement with the EEA than the US enjoys.

“The only change” from the status quo, he goes on, “– and it will not come in any great rush — is that the UK will extricate itself from the EU’s extraordinary and opaque system of legislation: the vast and growing corpus of law enacted by a European Court of Justice from which there can be no appeal.”

On his view, then, those who voted to leave were NOT “mainly driven by anxieties about immigration”, but by concerns about the European corpus juris.

It’s all nonsense, of course, but you can see why Ukippers are already crying betrayal.

Zamfur if you don’t understand the difference between ‘nothing to do with each other’ and ‘related but distinct’ that’s not really my problem I’m afraid.

@13 There is no obligation for a member state to allow “economic migrants” to simply “turn up and claim housing and benefits”. Per the Citizens Rights Directive, EU/EEA citizens and their family members can come and reside in a member state “for a period of up to three months without any conditions or any formalities other than the requirement to hold a valid identity card or passport” (Article 6), but “the host Member State shall not be obliged to confer entitlement to social assistance during the first three months of residence” (Article 24 (2)).

Obviously, a member state can choose to extend social benefits in such cases, anyway – for example, to incentivize jobseeking activities – but that is then the choice of that member state.

@12 It doesn’t even matter what the V4 say. Freedom of movement is part and parcel of the single market, going back to the Treaty of Rome. It is one of the four freedoms that define the single market. The UK simply cannot offer something good enough to make the EU think that setting a precedent where allowing countries to opt out of free movement of workers but otherwise retain full access to the single market is a remotely good idea.

We (sadly) voted to leave the EU. We did not vote to leave the EEA. The EEA treaties do not have any implicit or explicit automatic exit provision. I think we might end up in the EEA (like Norway, Iceland, and Lichtenstein). EEA does not imply Schengen, and there is zero possibility of us entering Schengen.

@Nick – Unfortunately we are only in the EEA by dint of being in the EU (Norway and the other EFTA countries are in because the EFTA also has access). Leaving the EU, without joining EFTA or concluding a different agreement, automatically puts us out of the EEA. BTW – Switzerland is not part of the EEA either, the agreements that give it access are bilateral ones between Switzerland and the EU, but these also require freedom of movement.

Freedom of movement here necessarily means the ability to move freely to take up work, and should be distinguished from Schengen membership.

Basically, the idea that we can have free trade without freedom of movement was and is a lie of the Leave campaign, and if you bought into it, you were conned.

So, to be more specific, there is no barrier to a US/EU sort of trading relationship, possibly even with reduced tariffs (which would benefit both sides); but freedom to work in Europe for UK citizens logically requires the converse. It’s not entirely obvious to me from the outside where the requirement to obey EU regulations comes from, and why this is tied up with immigration issues; isn’t this the other major objection on the UK side?

EU keeps saying the UK can’t be in the free market without accepting EU market regulations and the free movement of people; and Leave leaders (and some CT commenters) keep saying they’ll negotiate a deal which keeps the UK in the free market and lets UK citizens move and work freely within the EU but frees the UK from regulation and the obligation to permit freedom of movement and work to EU citizens. They’re still dissembling about what it means to leave.

People on both sides of the immigration issue always confuse/ conflate border controls with the right to work in countries you are not originally from. These are quite separate, though they both relate to immigration.

A country can have strong border controls and not do anything to stop employers from hiring non-native workers. This is effectively the situation in the US, where though legally there are legally requirements for work permits and penalties for hiring people without work permits, my understanding is that they are (quite deliberately) not enforced.

Or a country can not check the documents of people entering, but be insistent of checking to see if newly hired employees have work permits, and have the government come down like a ton of bricks on employers who disobey or circumvent that. My guess is that this is the current situation with Norway.

Since nearly everyone living in a country, unless they have a non-work related income stream (and normally countries are OK with people on pensions drawn from their home countries from settling in the new place), eventually has to obtain employment there, being strict on work requirements winds up being a more effective bar against immigration than border controls. Border controls are really for a show of national sovereignty, catching fugitives from criminal justice, and countering smuggling. With immigration, the real action is on employment.

The employment issue is also what clearly divides the elites from the ordinary public. Put simply, expanding the supply of labor helps the elites a-lot and hurts people seeking work, eg most members of the public. So the votes for anti-immigration measures come mostly from people whose interests is in restricting the ability of employers from hiring immigrants, both because this is a more effective immigration control measure, and because it directly addresses the issue of competition for jobs. This is the last thing elites want, even elites leading anti-immigration movements. So you get the sort of nonsense that you are getting from most of the senior Tories in the Brexit camp.

My prediction is that the best case a program of the UK formally leaving the EU, and not abiding on EU regulatory directives in some areas, but still trying to keep the current trade, immigration (at least as it affects the labor market), and finance (as it affects the status of the City) regime will wind up with the same trajectory as the New Labour project. It can be put in place for 15-20 years and then collapse simply because most people, outside some of the elites, don’t want it and the whole thing depends on peoples’ appetite for flimflam.

Sigh. Everyone with any doubt read engels @22 for the basic idea of the difference.

Zamfir @27:

For example, ‘migration flows within the EU are hardly affected by Schengen’.

Depends.

Migration flows of EU citizens within the EU, not greatly, though there are effects of, let’s call it friction.
Short-term visitor flows of non-EU citizens? Schengen surely helped tourism — one visa, and you can just travel around. Though people got into trouble with the formalities of traveling between Schengen and both individual Schengen and non-Schengen countries (a US friend of mine nearly was deported from Prague the other day because of some wrinkle between her Schengen-visa, which was valid, and the validity of her US passport, which had run out).
Migration flows of non-EU citizens who come with a work or study permit? No impact.
Migration flows of undocumented or overstaying or not fully visa’d up migrants from one EU/EEC country to the other? Schengen makes quite a difference, yes, because you can turn them back at the corner, which generates the pile-ups and unsolved ad-hoc camps at key points. (Note also that for the longest time, these undocumented migrants were trying to get to the UK because they’re treated better there or at least believed that they had a better chance of a fair hearing of their case than in Germany or France.)

Schengen never meant “completely no controls”. There were mobile units along the German/French border that could do spot checks.

Also, “free movement” also is by no means uniform. Try to go to work in Switzerland as an EU citizen — they have to take you if you have a job offer, but at least for a long time, there were huge restrictions on whether spouses could work, or the how to change jobs. But yes, overall for me working in the UK and in France required exactly the same paperwork as for a British citizen.

The normal and most effective way to deal with illegal immigration would be to check peoples immigration status when they start a job. That does not require border controls or id cards.

@37

As I understand it, the UK, like the US, has a current account deficit which means it needs money from outside to finance its trade deficit. It’s borrowing money to spend.

The stupid nationalists want to cut off trade and immigration but fail to realize this could also mean cutting off foreign money, i.e. their financing.

I think capital controls are a good idea to manage “hot money” which tends to flow in and out too quickly (see the East Asian Financial Crisis, or the European PIIGS debt crisis with Portugal, Ireland, (Italy), Greece, and Spain.)

But international economic regulation agreements are about investment and financing and not just imports, exports, and immigration.

What employers have to do about checking right to work in the UK:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/286642/summary-guidance.pdf

South Korea, of course, has actual trade negotiators.

… won a *referendum* that demands immigration quotas [Regret the typo]

“there isn’t much ‘establishment’ to speak of in Switzerland”

You must be the expert. But it’s nice how you completely ignore what I actually said: the nativists are ardent free-marketeers and free traders, led by a billionaire, and oppose labor protection measures that protect the wages and labor conditions of the masses of workers. But yeah, as long as they oppose immigration, they are bona fide “anti-globalists”.

Had to run the gauntlet of outraged Remain supporters at work this week. What a nightmare! I’m soft Remain and have no idea what the future holds, but the same gang of clowns who smugly predicted victory less than a week ago only to have their world up-ended are now explaining how most of Europe, the UK, and the world is going to react.

One day was enough. I went in early, hid before classes, and then took the elevator to top floor of a secluded building to enjoy my lunch and the view in peace. I was ambushed in the lounge by a genial superior who I like very much, but who insisted as a non-UK citizen and as an expert in education, all the reasons why the economy of Britain is about to collapse. When I got a word in I observed that he was making precisely the arguments that the Leave camp had already rejected and perhaps it might be a good idea to wait more than a week before the next round of predictions.

Did that stop him? Three guesses. I predict more of the same, only worse.

I thought your argument was that it was one in the eye for Capital?

You will find extensive discussion of the questions of immigration, market access, and all else relevant to the UK/England’s choices before, during, and after Brexit at eureferendum.com. I am surprised no one seems to have mentioned this outstanding source.

@ 64 I am unclear about what the future holds in most respects. But some things don’t change. You, for example.

You make no effort at all to disguise your hostility towards me ever. Moreover, you’re frequently moved to announce your unhappiness with me to the world. What a way to show you care!

I’m equally confident that the same set of smug turds (feel free to include yourself, if it fits) are going to further alienate the very folks they purport to care most about – namely the downtrodden and drive them right into the arms of UKIP, or worse.

I find much to like in everyone I meet, including you!

@Ze K, when you don’t like a particular piece of information, attack the source.