7 Items

A photo of the Bundesverfassungsgericht ("Federal Constitutional Court") in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Flickr/Al Fed

Policy Brief

Pushing the EU to a Hamiltonian Moment: Germany’s Court Ruling and the Need to Build a Fiscal Capacity Force a Constitutional Debate

May 20, 2020

The recent ruling of the German Constitutional Court on the ECB was an economic and political bombshell. The deep controversy that resulted – within Germany and on a European scale – illustrates that the ambiguity surrounding the euro area’s legal order and architecture may have reached its limit.

Ambassador Nicholas Burns Testifies in Front of the House Foreign Affairs (March 26, 2019)

House Foreign Affairs Committee

Testimony

The Historic Alliance between the United States and Europe Testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, Energy and the Environment

| Mar. 26, 2019

Maintaining U.S. leadership in the NATO Alliance and sustaining the critical relationship between the U.S. and the European Union will continue to be among the most vital strategic aims of the United States in the decade ahead. Both of our political parties and the great majority of Americans in recent public opinion polls support a continuation of American leadership in NATO. We should also continue to view the over 500 million people who live in the European Union as our allies, friends and economic partners.

A Yazidi refugee family from Sinjar, Iraq arrives on the Greek island of Lesvos after travelling on a vessel from the Turkish coast. Dec 3, 2015.

AP Images/M. Muheisen

Policy Brief

"2015: The Year We Mistook Refugees for Invaders"

| January 4, 2016

"As 2015 comes to a close, the annual numbers of migrants smuggled to Greece and Italy and asylum claims lodged in Germany have passed a million, as well as the number of additional displacements produced this year by the conflict in Syria. Moreover, Europe’s Mediterranean shore has now the unchallenged title of the world’s most lethal border. Not only this. The migrant crisis is also putting to the test some of Europe’s most fundamental values, from the freedom of circulation within its territories, to international protection beyond..."

Foreign illegal laborers wait in a long queue outside the Saudi immigration offices at the Al-Isha quarter of the Al-Khazan district, west of Riyadh.

Getty Images (FAYEZ NURELDINE)

Policy Brief

Addressing Irregular Migration in the Gulf States

| November 2015

"Irregular migration has great resonance in the Gulf, just as in the West. Migrants in irregular situation avoid state administrative procedures and so their numbers are unknown. The largest amnesty (Saudi Arabia 2013) would have affected more than 50 per cent of the migrants in the country. Irregular migration is by definition a breach of legislations that regulate the migrant’s status.

In the Gulf States it is, in particular, a by-product of: the sponsorship (kafâla) system that hampers both a migrant’s individual freedom of movement and the free functioning of the labour market; nationalisation policies that continue to extend the list of occupations reserved for nationals; and nationality laws that bar citizenship to all but a very few first- and second-generation migrants."