Abstract

Nowadays regulation of migration flws is one of the main political tasks for many European countries. A great number of asylum seekers and ordinary people trying to improve their welfare abroad force the recipient countries to make their migration regulations more effiient and strict to some extent. Ukraine also faces many challenges in a migration sphere, caused both by internal and external factors. Active emigration flws became the result of the war in Donbass and annexation of the Crimea, national military conscription and deep social-economic crisis in general. Meanwhile, the number of immigrants in Ukraine has been exceeding the number of emigrants since 2005, which means that the state migration policy should also focus on effiient integration means for this category of population, taking to account legislative, economic and trade frameworks. In December 2015 the European Commission stated that Ukraine met all the criteria for visa liberalization, so the country made one more step towards EU-integration and European standards of good governance in total. Ukraine successfully passed two phases of Visa Liberalization Action Plan, which among other rules required forming of legislative procedures for migration flws regulations, State Migration Policy Strategy in particular, and creation of a State Migration Service. Nevertheless, this decision of the European Commission is an advance for Ukraine as there are still a lot of legislative gaps and weaknesses in the state migration policy. For instance, the state migration strategy does not correspond to modern challenges and gives no answer to the problem of institutional division of powers and duties in the migration fild. The attempt to create a unifid e-register of Ukrainian citizens with excessive amount of personal information showed the imperfection and secrecy of the legislative process in Ukraine, on one hand, and activeness of civil activists and lawyers, who protested towards this law, – on the other hand. Consequently, the Ukrainian government managed to meet the most important criteria of EU in the migration fild, but still there are many tasks it needs to fulfil in order to make this reform truly signifiant.