Migrants’ irregular status in Europe is commonly framed as a border control issue, unauthorised entry or failed return. However, irregularity and legal precarity are structurally produced through the interaction of migration, labour, welfare and family policy regimes at the EU and national levels. Legal precarity often occurs due to restrictive residence permit renewal criteria, employer dependency, income thresholds, administrative delays and limited status transitions. These are embedded in segmented labour markets and shaped by racialised and gendered hierarchies, meaning that precarity becomes economically functional and politically normalised.
This Policy Brief calls for reducing the structural drivers of irregularisation in residence and migration regimes, mainstreaming fundamental and socio-economic rights and non-discrimination in migration governance, separating labour protection from immigration control and addressing housing conditions as a structural dimension of labour precarity and irregularisation.
The authors of this policy brief also include Ilse van Liempt (Professor of Geographies of Migration and Urban Inequalities at the Utrecht University) and Nando Sigona (Chair of International Migration and Forced Displacement at the University of Birmingham and Director of the Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity (IRIS)). This report is part of the I-CLAIM Horizon Europe project.
