This open access short reader provides an introduction to the theoretical debates regarding irregular migration and aims to bridge these theoretical debates to current empirical developments. It ...defines irregular migrants and irregular migration by discussing the wide variety of definitions and highlights the reasons for the presence of irregular immigrants in developed countries. The book provides an overview of the variation in policies regarding irregular migrants and elaborates on how irregular migration is facilitated and supported. It discusses the trends and dynamics between border enforcement, human smuggling/trafficking, and on the support irregular migrants obtain by citizens and civil society while residing in the EU. Last but not least, the book also focuses on the agency and political mobilization of irregular migrants. As such, it provides a great resource for everyone interested in learning more about irregular migration.
This article scrutinizes how local responses to irregular migrants vary across European cities. Existing literature shows that cities develop inclusive policies and practices for irregular migrants ...as a response to the restrictive asylum and migration policies of welfare states. This article goes beyond this monolithic understanding of cities by unpacking city actors into local governments and local civil society organizations, as well as exploring various dynamics between them. This benchmarking study builds an overarching urban solidarity typology based on an empirical analysis of policies and practices in 13 European cities between 2015 and 2019, inclusive. Binary coding of collected data leads to an inductively built descriptive typology that consists of analytical categories of urban solidarity (top-down; bottom-up; hybrid; limited). These four different categories reveal that urban solidarity is not one-size-fits-all. It emerges as a spectrum of transformative practices of various actors, as well as a constellation of displays of diverse sets of contentions, solidarity repertoires, compromises, negotiations, and consensus as well as their various combinations over a long period.
•Irregular migrants (undocumented migrants) have fewer rights than refugees and asylum seekers.•Local governments and/or local civil society organisations have a capacity to build urban solidarity for irregular migrants.•Urban solidarity is sum of contentions, compromises, negotiations, and consensus between various actors.•Urban solidarity constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs new possibilities of coexistence in the city.•Urban solidarity is not one-size-fits-all, because it is contextual, fluid, pragmatic, and transformative.
In 2015 the increased migratory pressure in Europe posed additional challenges for healthcare providers. The aim of this study was to inform the development of a "Resource Package" to support ...European Union (EU) member states in improving access to healthcare for refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants.
A mixed method approach was adopted: i) interviews and focus groups were carried out to gather up-to-date information on the challenges the different healthcare providers were facing related to the refugee crisis; ii) to complement the results of the FGs, a literature review was conducted to collect available evidence on barriers and solutions related to access to healthcare for refugees and migrants.
The different actors providing healthcare for refugees and migrants faced challenges related to the phases of the migration trajectory: arrival, transit and destination. These challenges impacted on the accessibility of healthcare services due to legislative, financial and administrative barriers; lack of interpretation and cultural mediation services; lack of reliable information on the illness and health history of migrant patients; lack of knowledge of entitlements and available services; lack of organisation and coordination between services. These barriers proved particularly problematic for access to specific services: mental health, sexual and reproductive care, child & adolescent care and victim of violence care.
The findings of this study show that solutions that are aimed only at responding to emergencies often lead to fragmented and chaotic interventions, devolving attention from the need to develop structural changes in the EU health systems.
This article demonstrates the usefulness of time-geographic approach in research with irregular migrants. Time-geographic approach acknowledges individual space-times as being assembled of multiple ...elements (e.g. housing, the Internet, friend, fear, legal status). Through an ethnographic research with 50 irregular migrants in Finland, I demonstrate how these irregular migrants try to transform their space-times in order to overcome the adversities in their lives. To transform one's space-times, it is necessary to intervene on the elements that affect it. Irregular migrants in this research transform their space-times, by trying to withdraw from constraining elements (e.g. unpleasant places, dangerous people, fears) and approaching inciting elements (e.g. safe place, friend, knowledge). In this article, I suggest this theoretical-methodological framework to investigate the interlinkages of these multiple elements in the lives of irregular migrants.
In this response, we caution against making ‘irregular migrants’ the object of investigation. Instead, we suggest that a focus on encounters, rather than on becoming, offers a more productive and ...ethical approach. By considering the relationality of affective and ethical encounters, we can identify not only how migrants become subject to particular state categories, but also how these encounters shape people’s ways of knowing the state and each other. This knowledge is situated, embodied, and—most importantly—offers the possibility for political action and change.
We provide the first large-scale evidence on self-selection of refugees and irregular migrants who arrived in Europe in 2015 or 2016. Our analysis uses unique datasets from the International ...Organization for Migration and Gallup World Polls. We find that refugees are positively self-selected with respect to human capital, as are female irregular migrants. Male irregular migrants are negatively self-selected. These patterns hold whether analyzing individually stated main reason to emigrate, country-level conflict intensity, or sub-regional conflict intensity. Several additional analyses show that our results are unlikely to be driven by omitted variable bias or liquidity constraints. We offer a theoretical framework to explain these patterns, by extending the Roy-Borjas model to include risks related to staying in an unsafe country of origin, risks related to migration, and gender-specific returns to human capital.
•We provide evidence on self-selection of refugees and irregular migrants who arrived in Europe in 2015 or 2016.•We find that refugees are positively self-selected with respect to human capital, as are female irregular migrants.•Male irregular migrants are negatively self-selected.•We offer a theoretical framework to explain these patterns, by extending the Roy-Borjas model.•Additional analyses show that our results are unlikely to be driven by omitted variable bias or liquidity constraints.
This article explores the responses of European local authorities to the public service needs of residents with irregular immigration status and the tensions with national governments to which this ...can give rise. Drawing on a study of responses by national and local tiers, including a mapping of national legal frameworks on entitlements to health care and education, it identifies factors that lead to divergence between local and national policy framing and responses. Finding that socio-economic and individual consequences of exclusion dominate in shaping local framing of policy responses in contrast to national government priorities, it explores the implications for modes of multi-level governance (MLG) on this issue. It expands on the concept in the literature of 'decoupling', contrasting relationships of overt conflict with low-visibility strategies of conflict avoidance; demonstrating the differing forms this 'shadow politics' of migrants' rights and shadow provision of services can take, including arms-length provision through NGOs. Thus the dynamic of MLG is itself one part of explaining the nature of local responses to the challenges that migrants with irregular status can pose.
Understanding the irregular migrants' motivations for leaving their country of origin and their experiences in the host country have always been seen as an important topic in the field of migration ...studies. However, there is currently a gap in the literature on this subject area especially in the case of Iranian asylum seekers in Europe. Therefore, the current paper serves as a preliminary study for more comprehensive research that explores the migration process of Iranian asylum seekers in two main European transit countries based on semi-structured interviews. In total, there were 17 Iranian asylum seekers (M age = 36) recruited from Serbia (n = 8) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (n = 9). It explored their motivations for leaving Iran and the greatest difficulties they faced on their way to Europe. We found that the main motivations of Iranian asylum seekers for leaving Iran were due to the lack of job security, lack of social freedom, economic and political issues, family issues, and religious persecution respectively. All interviewees claimed that they did not have any idea about the difficulties faced by irregular migration when they were planning to leave Iran irregularly to Europe.
Welfare rights in Norway, as in other European nation-states, are increasingly used as techniques of control and management of irregular migration. Proliferation of borders is generated by dispersal ...of welfare rights, establishing structural differentiations. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with irregular migrants in Norway, we argue that the neoliberal welfare state produces precarious subject positions in three mundane ways: (a) through demarcation and diversification of rights; (b) through governmentality of time and temporality, such as the imposition of waiting; and (c) through access or lack of access to services in the welfare state, including what we call digital borders. Exploring the bordering structures of the welfare state we analyse the complex relation between technologies of government and its effect on everyday life of irregular migrants and we understand this relation as slow violence. This slow violence operates and is legitimized through the legal, policy and neoliberal welfare structures of the state. We show that the welfare state's implication in migration management is legitimated by the Norwegian state's principles of universalism and egalitarianism. Simultaneously, the seeping of migration management into welfare state principles and practices as well as the neoliberalization of the welfare state dwindle egalitarianism as a principle and value.
Nordic welfare states are imagined as generous and universal due to their residence- and needs-based welfare rights. We analyse how welfare state borders are implemented in practice through what we ...term bureaucratic bordering and how this bordering creates complex precarity for temporary migrants stemming from multiple sources. Drawing on qualitative research with asylum seekers and non-European Union/European Economic Area (non-EU/EEA) student-workers, we argue that migrants with temporary residence permits encounter an opaque system characterised by bureaucratic borders. These borders produce precarity in relation to the right to reside, work and access welfare services. We find that in the case of asylum seekers who find work and seek to legalise their residence through work, precarity is produced through limiting access to labour-based permits, while for student-migrants, precarity is produced through the indirect imposition of precarious part-time work alongside studies. In both cases, complex bordering practices emerge as the migrants attempt to navigate both the residence and the welfare system in the interstices of institutions, street-level bureaucrats and personal connections. We contend that the bordering practices necessarily also contribute to reshaping the welfare state itself by eroding residence-based access to rights, marginalising residents and creating new hierarchies based on temporary residence.
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