Contrary to the image conveyed by existing research on irregular migrants as powerless and exploited victims of restrictive immigration policies, irregular migrants in some European countries display a strong potential for collective action. In France, Spain and Switzerland since the mid-1990s pro-regularization movements have emerged which have claimed the collective regularization of illegal migrants. At the centre of these new social movements were illegal migrants from sub-saharan Africa, Latin America and former Yugoslavia who went public and claimed a legal residence status. This article starts form the assumption that despite important differences between the three countries, they share several central characteristics which enabled the emergence of these pro-regularization movements. In order to identify these preconditions, three country studies, based on an innovative social movement research approach, were carried out. The findings of the country studies show that the findings of the country studies shows that in the three countries the same specific preconditions existed which encouraged the emergence of the pro-regularization movements.

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The article focuses on the negotiation of a new labour migration policy in Germany in the years 2011 and 2012, and on the role that actors on both the regional and the European Union levels played in encouraging the introduction of a more open labour migration framework. Up until now, research has highlighted the German use of the European level for introducing more restrictive changes in migration policy. In line with these precedents, during the negotiation of a European policy for admitting highly-skilled migrants, Germany advocated a restrictive framework. However, at the transposition of the EU directive on highly-skilled migrants in national law, the German government used the directive as an opportunity to introduce a paradigm change in labour migration policies, establishing a significantly more open labour migration policy hitherto exclusively associated with Anglo-Saxon countries. The article will analyse the preconditions for this change, assessing the value of the goodness-of-fit approach for understanding processes of Europeanization.

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Under which circumstances do labour migration policies change? When do organizations become agents of change? And what triggers significant transformation in labour migration flows? We start from the assumption that, during the last years, change in the field of labour migration has intensified. In some countries, paradigmatic changes towards more liberal immigration regimes have taken place; new organizations have emerged; and the profile of intra‐European workers’ mobility has changed. The articles assembled in this volume shed light on developments in the field of labour migration by using the notion of change as their conceptual lens. They show that changes can best be captured with a multi‐level model and an interdisciplinary approach that connects labour migration issues to broader political science and sociological theories. Such an analysis shows that recent changes are paradigmatic, multi‐layered and ambiguous with regard to a further liberalization of the European labour migration regime.