REGINE is a research project on regularisation practices in the European Union. The aim of the project is to provide a thorough mapping of practices relating to the regularisation of third country nationals illegally resident in EU Member States. Two additional non-EU countries - Switzerland and the US - will also be covered to gain insights in regularisation practices and the impact of regularisations elsewhere. In examining regularisation practices, the project also investigates the relationship of regularisation policies to the overall migration policy framework, including to protection issues and refugee policies. Moreover, the project examines the political position of different stakeholders towards regularisation policies on the national level. Finally, the project examines potential options for policies on regularisation on the European level, incorporating Member States as well as other stakeholders' views on possible instruments on the European level.

The great majority of EU member states currently use, or have used in the last decade, some sort of regularisation measure. Yet regularisation is also a highly contested policy tool, raising a range of issues regarding the effectiveness of regularisation measures: the economic, fiscal and social impact of such measures, the extent to which regularisations exert a pull effect on irregular migration and the relationship of regularisation with other policies on irregular migration, notably prevention and return. REGINE - Regularisations in Europe addresses these debates surrounding regularisation. Apart from comprehensively documenting and analysing patterns of regularisation in the eu-27, it investigates possible rationales for regularisation, the impact of regularisation and the relationship of regularisation to the wider policy framework on migration and asylum.

As the financial crisis continues to cast its long shadow over Europe, the view that immigrants compete unfairly for jobs and present an unsustainable burden on the European Social Model appears to be gathering support in some circles. But at the same time, the 'right' type of immigrant has often been perceived as a potential cure for Europe's sluggish labour markets and ailing welfare systems - especially immigrants who are young, easily employable and who arrive without family. So far, efforts to solve this conundrum - as in the UK's points-based system - have focused on increasing the selectivity of the admissions process. In this book, leading immigration experts question the effectiveness of this approach. Besides efforts to regulate the flow and rights of immigrants, they argue that governments across Europe need to devise labour market, welfare and immigration policies in a more integrated fashion.

In Scandinavian countries immigration is a sensitive issue and legislators’ approach to the questions it has raised has varied over the years. Whatever immigrant and integration policies are adopted in a democratic society, it is clear that the legislation and the authorities have to ensure that the individual rights of the immigrants residing in its territory are respected. With Canada as a point of reference, this book draws attention to weaknesses in the regulation and implementation of integration provisions threatening the immigrants’ individual rights in the EU member states of Denmark, Finland and Sweden. The study challenges readers to critically review the meaning of rights and the notion of global caring. It takes a critical look at how vulnerable immigrants fare in a largely immigrant nation with a welfare capitalism legacy, when compared to three European nations which claim to embrace institutional welfare models. This book will be of great interest to scholars and decision-makers interested in Scandinavian or Canadian immigration and integration policies.

Irregular Migration in Europe contributes to our knowledge of the scale and nature of the much discussed but under-researched phenomenon of irregular migration in Europe, whilst improving our understanding of the dynamics of irregular migration and its relation to European societies and economies. Presenting a comparative analysis of the experiences and policies of different EU member states, this book draws on an extensive range of sources, many of which have so far been absent from English-language analyses, to offer an overall picture of irregular migration in twelve EU member states. This volume will be of interest to policy makers and researchers within the fields of migration, sociology and social anthropology, political science, European integration and European studies, political science and public administration.

This open access book explores the conceptual challenges posed by the presence of migrants with irregular immigration status in Europe and the evolving policy responses at European, national and municipal level. It addresses the conceptual and policy issues raised, post-entry, by this particular section of the migrant population. Drawing on evidence from different parts of Europe, the book takes the reader through philosophical and ethical dilemmas, legal and sociological analysis to questions of public policy and governance before addressing the concrete ways in which those questions are posed in current policy agendas from the international to the local level. As such this book is a valuable read to researchers, practitioners and policy makers as well as to students working on irregular migration in Europe in a comparative and/or country based perspective.

Principally, this book comprises a conceptual analysis of the illegality of a third-country national's stay by examining the boundaries of the overarching concept of illegality at the EU level. Having found that the holistic conceptualisation of illegality, constructed through a combination of sources (both EU and national law) falls short of adequacy, the book moves on to consider situations that fall outside the traditional binary of legal and illegal under EU law. The cases of unlawfully staying EU citizens and of non-removable illegally staying third-country nationals are examples of groups of migrants who are categorised as atypical. By looking at these two examples the book reveals not only the fragmentation of legal statuses in EU migration law but also the more general ill-fitting and unsatisfactory categorisation of migrants. The potential conflation of illegality with criminality as a result of the way EU databases regulate the legal regime of illegality of a migrant's stay is the first trend identified by the book. Subsequently, the book considers the functions of accessing legality (both instrumental and corrective). In doing so it draws out another trend evident in the EU illegality regime: a two-tier regime which discriminates on the basis of wealth and the instrumentalisation of access to legality by Member States for mostly their own purposes. Finally, the book proposes a corrective rationale for the regulation of illegality through access to legality and provides a number of normative suggestions as a way of remedying current deficiencies that arise out of the present supranational framing of illegality.