In 2009 the EU institutions adopted a directive regulating the admission, residence and rights of highly qualified third country nationals for purposes of relevant employment. This directive is commonly called the Blue Card scheme (Directive 2009/50). While the institutions trumpeted the arrival of a new labour migration tool on the EU market promising that the new directive would transform the attractiveness of the EU’s Internal Market to highly qualified third country nationals encouraging the world’s ‘best and brightest’ to come to work in Europe, the results have been paltry. As the Commission notes (more than once) in its presentation of a new revised version of Blue Card, the original scheme of the directive has “proven insufficiently attractive and underused, with only a limited number of Blue Cards issued.” (European Commission Fact Sheet 7 June 2016). (…)
