In April 2022 the European Commission’s Communication on attracting skills and talent to the EU presented Talent Partnerships as a new tool to attract labor from outside the European Union and fill the shortages on the EU labor market. The tool is part of a new approach to better match skills and needs for both the EU and partner countries as well as a comprehensive approach towards migration that connects development of new legal migration pathways to reduction of irregular migration. The European Commission intends to focus first on the long-term care sector, where future job openings will only be partly covered by the EU labour market. It sees Talent Partnerships as supporting the admission to the EU of long-term care workers while ensuring ethical recruitment and mitigating the risk of brain drain in the care sectors of countries of origin. New constellations of private-public cooperation arose and glocal urban assemblages feed into nurse migration industries (Hillmann, Walton-Roberts & Yeoh 2022).

This Panel takes as its focus EU (Talent) Partnerships as a tool to attract long-term care workers to the EU. It critically examines how ‘talent’ is defined, in what way there is a ‘partnership’ between EU member states and countries of origin, if and if so how the migrant worker perspective is taken into account, and which party is responsible for protection of migrant workers against exploitation. The papers address these questions each with their own critical (intersectional) lens.

The EU is taking the informal turn to ‘deal’ with countries of origin over skills partnerships for the care sector. It’s a conditional partnership, or informal formality (Cardwell & Dickson, 2023), on cooperating on migration management issues and forced return. The focus in these partnerships is often on temporary or ‘circular’ labour migration schemes, yet what this entails remains obscured in the policy documents. The legal scope as well as the migrant worker and partner country perspective on ‘circularity’ is understudied. However, employers might have different interests than ‘circularity’, e.g. keeping the workers once they are trained; migrants might have different strategies as well e.g. stepwise migration, moving onward from one EUMS to another or to other countries of destination – all clashing with the partnership logic of ‘circular’ or ‘temporary’ migration yet legally permissible alternatives you cannot ‘contract away’ in a partnership, esp. without the employers and the migrant workers being a party to the partnership (Baubock & Ruhs 2022). The paper will also build on (Ashiagbor, 2021) trade agreements and “bilateral agreements as a continuation of predatory capitalism and neocolonialism in a supposed postcolonial era.” Does this also apply to so called circular migration schemes of Talent Partnerships, or could they be contributing to mutual well-being?

The paper re-assesses the notion of circular migration through a neocolonial or well-being lens engaging examples of partnerships investigated in different research projects looking into the care sector in the Netherlands, Germany, and Egypt.

The EU advocates the partnerships as a triple win, yet little is known about the chances of improved employability upon return. Also, little is known about the interplay of the institutional actors involved in the program. It was a primary goal of the triple win program to bring together the interests of the countries of origin, of the migrants involved and to work for the benefit of the country of arrival, in sum: to set standards for fair migration. The program was spelled out differently in the different participating countries. This program – running for over 10 years now – resulted to be small in numbers (approximately 10.000 nurses in 10 years time), but its effects on the national and international recruitment scenery were immense. In 2021 Germany extended its triple win program to Indonesia. The new agreement has motivated a number of stakeholders to work together and to build up new coalitions. The triple win programs with other Asian countries (the Philippines, Vietnam) served as a blueprint for Indonesia. Our presentation will present the Indonesian case by shedding light on the “making” of the recruitment, e.g. the practices that are adopted to organize the field.

Talent Partnerships are a part of the ‘comprehensive approach’ to migration. The idea is that effective legal pathways can help reduce irregular migration and help fill gaps on the EU labour market, notably in the long-term care sector. Though the Commission does not have the competence to determine on first admission of labor migrants to the EU, it is expanding the EU’s reach via the proposal of tools such as Talent Partnerships and the Talent Pool Regulation. The draft latter instrument, proposed on 15 November 2023, includes a provision that sets out specific rules for the participation of jobseekers from third countries in the context of Talent Partnerships. According to the Regulation’s preamble, the EU Talent Pool should ‘support the implementation of Talent Partnerships, which are one of the key aspects of the external dimension of the Pact on Migration and Asylum’. The partial and differential EU policy on migration (Geddes 2021) allows several key actors to play a role: the European Commission, the individual Member States, and private actors. The proposed paper will focus on the formal and informal construction of Talent Partnerships and the Talent Pool as well as their financial underpinning. Are they a sign of expansionist EU governance of legal migration? And if so, what are the political and legal responsibilities, if any, this construction imposes on the various key actors to protect the talents against unfair recruitment practices and exploitative working conditions?