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Banja Luka College , Banja Luka , Bosnia and Herzegovina
Immigration to European Union (hereinafter referred to as the ‘EU’) as a reality and a need of refreshing its ageing population has made the EU to recently adopt some important documents. Traditionally, European countries seem to be more closed towards the immigration comparing to United States of America and Canada which enabled the entry of new population even through various lotteries. However, EU did recognize the need for import of experts from various areas. Thus the Council has adopted the EU Blue Card Directive for highly skilled workers (Directive 2009/50/EC). Still, having in mind the legal power of a EU Directive, the member countries are given the power to adopt their immigration policies. This paper analyses the regulations on immigration enacted by the EU and the implementation of such regulations at the level of member countries. Although the EU does regulate the immigration policy, it is up to the member states to deal with particular cases. In that respect the paper shall also address the issues of immigration which violated the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms by analyzing the key judgments of the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg. The issue of residence v. citizenship as the grounds of immigration shall also be explained. The short overview of inter migration in the EU, is presented for the purposes of comparison. The paper is based on a hypothesis that immigration policies in member countries still lack some consistency in the implementation of EU regulations, and therefore reveal weaknesses of the EU immigration policy. Method used in this paper is normative analysis, method of induction and deduction, comparative method and case study.
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