Two Doors, One Gate: Policy Coherence between Protection and Human-Capital Migration in Germany, Czechia, Poland and the Netherlands, ۲۰۱۶–۲۰۲۶

European migration is studied as two subjects. One literature examines asylum, reception and protection obligations; another examines the recruitment of students, researchers and skilled workers. Administratively they are not two subjects at all: the same authorities process both populations, and both terminate in a single set of institutions governing labour-market access, secure residence and naturalisation. This article treats them as one administrative system and asks how coherently that system performs. Drawing on the policy coherence, administrative burden and multi-level governance literatures, it develops the Pathway Coherence Audit, an eight-dimension coding scheme that renders protection and human-capital pathways commensurable without collapsing their distinct legal foundations. The audit is applied to six legal pathways in four member states — Germany, Czechia, Poland and the Netherlands — at the point at which the core instruments of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum became applicable on ۱۲ June ۲۰۲۶, with the preceding decade traced as a documented change trajectory. Two findings are reported. First, incoherence is sequential rather than distributive: no case is uniformly restrictive, every case blocks at least one pathway, and no two cases block at the same stage. Second, the dimension that discriminates most sharply between systems is administrative quality. The evidenced failures take three distinct modes — judicially corrected, administratively concealed and legislatively suspended — while Germany's post-Pact labour-market rules illustrate a separate legally differentiated access regime. A comparison with the temporary protection regime for displaced Ukrainians isolates the mechanism, holding the protection rationale constant while removing the administrative sequence that normally precedes labour-market entry. The article concludes that reform should target the seams between stages rather than the balance of entitlements between groups.

کلیدواژه ها:

policy coherence ، administrative burden ، migration governance ، multi-level governance ، good administration ، Central Europe