The Meritorious ‘Other’: The Interconnection of Merit and Race in EU Migration and Asylum Law

Adopting a law-in-context approach, this article suggests that merit-based migrant selection in the European Union (EU) is implicitly shaped by racial dynamics. With a focus on EU law and more specifically on cases from the Netherlands and Germany, it argues that the growing emphasis on merit enables a limited number of ‘racialised others’ to counterbalance the structural disadvantages associated with their citizenships, whilst simultaneously legitimising the exclusion of those considered insufficiently meritorious within the same group. By bridging two distinct strands of scholarship – critical analyses of the racial dimensions of migration policy and studies of merit-based selection mechanisms – this article advances existing debates on EU migration and asylum governance. It posits that the normative appeal of merit acts to justify existing hierarchies and to obscure the underlying racialisation processes that sustain them.