Working for Legality: Employment and Migrant Regularization in Europe

Abstract

Recent programs to regularize undocumented migrants suggest the increasing role of employment as a requirement for foreigners to legally reside in Europe. Taking as illustrations the cases of Spain, France, Austria, Belgium and Germany, this article examines how regularization policies frame work. Employment provisions follow a civic-performance frame that breaks with the criterion of vulnerability. While secure forms of employment paying standard wages are privileged, the crisis has made such jobs even less accessible to migrants seeking to regularize or maintain their status. Residence permits granted through legalization have become increasingly temporary and conditional, often involving repeated transitions in and out of illegality. A vicious circle of "disintegration" thus threatens to set in where employment precariousness becomes both the source and the consequence of legal precariousness. POLICY IMPLICATIONS• The article shows how employment provisions are tightly linked to policies of "earned legalization".• The article shows that employment can be part of a broader regularization policy emphasizing ties to the host country.• The article brings attention to potential conflicts between access requirements based on migrant vulnerability, and those based on migrant integration.• The article warns against the exclusionary workings of employment-based regularization in times of economic downturn.

Becoming Less Illegal: Deservingness Frames and Undocumented Migrant Incorporation

“… We are grateful to Apostolos Andrikopoulos, Jaeeun Kim, Maaike van Vree, Gail Zuckerwise, and our two anonymous reviewers for their useful advice on the first draft of this article. Our elaboration on camouflage was triggered by a seminal discussion with Mattia Vitiello in preparation for the 2010 European Science Foundation workshop on “Migrant Legality and Employment.” Our review of deservingness frames expands analyses developed with the International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe Research Group on Migrant Employment and Legality (2010–2013), and in particular collaboration with Albert Kraler on legalization policy and migrant deservingness (Chauvin, Garcés‐Mascareñas and Kraler , ). A first sketch of this review benefited from comments by participants in the mini‐symposium on “Economies of migrant deservingness” at the 20th International Conference of Europeanists in June 2013.…”

National Immigration and Integration Policies in Europe Since 1973

“…To cope with the discrepancy between planned legal infl ows and the actual needs of the economy they have applied regularization programmes "ex post" with a certain degree of periodicity, though governments presented them each time as exceptional "one time only" measures (Arango and Finotelli 2009 , 31 (Chauvin et al 2013 ). Interestingly, research shows rather the opposite effect: regularizations in Italy and Spain have "stabilized" a large part of the immigrant population (Carafagna 2002 ;Blangiardo 2004 ;Arango and Finotelli 2009 ;Cachón 2007 ).…”

Managing the National Status Group: Immigration Policy in Germany

“…As Chauvin et al. (: 127) suggest – and we illustrate here – there is a “blurring [of] the cultural and the economic” in immigration policies that define a particular kind of economic subject as admissible. Many people who would be economically useful to Germany – e.g.…”