The evolving EU asylum and migration law

This chapter introduces the Research Handbook on EU Migration and Asylum Law and provides a holistic panorama of the development of EU’s migration and asylum policies, characterised both by evolution and by stasis, drawing from the contributions in the collection as well as from our own research. We analyse the content and level of refinement of legislative harmonisation in EU’s asylum, legal migration, return and irregular migration, visa, external border control, and integration policies. We then focus on the development of the administrative component of EU’s migration and asylum policies using the interdisciplinary framework of administrative governance and exploring four issues: responsibility assignation in the EU asylum policy, EU agencies, EU funding, and migration databases. Finally, we critically assess the external dimension of EU’s asylum and migration policies stricto sensu but also the broader embedding of migration management imperatives in EU’s external relations.