Irregular migration is a multifaceted phenomenon that comprises various perspectives, policies, and actors. In this concluding chapter, we sum up some key findings of research on this contentious issue.

7.1 Beyond the Narrative of Invasion

As the first part of this book shows, there is no empirical evidence to substantiate the idea of an invasion by irregular migrants entering the Global North from the Global South (De Haas et al., 2020). International migration exists and is a significant phenomenon, but the number of ‘people on the move’, although it has increased over time, does not justify the term ‘invasion’ so frequently employed by anti-immigrant actors in developed countries. To recall what we reported in the Introduction, at present, about 280 million people are involved in all kinds of international migration, but this figure represents only about 3.6% of the world population – a proportion that has only slightly grown over time. More than 96% of the people of the world remain settled in their country, notwithstanding the local, sometimes harsh, living conditions. In fact, mobility requires resources that people in need often lack: they are forcibly immobile. Moreover, irregular migration concerns a minority of migrants, maybe 1% of the world population (Spencer & Triandafyllidou, 2020). Whilst the phenomenon is widespread in several countries of Asia and Africa, estimates for the United States of America show that, despite what one might think on looking at migrant marches through Mexico or turnbacks at the Mexican border, the numbers of irregular migrants are declining in that country (Warren, 2021). Estimates for the EU, even if they appear less reliable, are similar (Spencer & Triandafyllidou, 2020).

An ‘invasion’ would imply a singular movement of irregular migrants towards the Global North, which governments would try to halt by enforcing their borders. This perspective disregards various aspects of the phenomenon of irregular migration, primarily the fact that what is considered ‘irregular’ is a question of legal definition and social representation. Throughout this book, we have sought to show how the phenomenon of irregular migration is shaped by the combination of actual movements of people and the meanings and definitions that are attributed to these movements. This makes irregular migration a multifaceted and continuously evolving phenomenon; it comprises several dimensions and many ‘grey areas’ encompassing various uncertain cases. It is therefore essential to bear in mind that a crucial aspect of irregular migration is that what is considered irregular depends on what states define as irregular. Irregularity may concern entrance, stay, work, documentation, or a combination of these aspects (Baldwin-Edwards & Kraler, 2009). Irregular migrants exist by virtue of being defined and perceived as such.

As we pointed out in Chapter Two, the distinction between regular and irregular immigration is often blurred. Irregular migration is not a dichotomy; rather, it is a spectrum along which several situations fall between entirely regular and clearly irregular migration (Triandafyllidou & Bartolini, 2020; Hellgren, 2012), encompassing various biographical circumstances, legal aspects, and social conditions.

It is therefore important to take one’s distance from the conventional wisdom and political discourse to see that immigration policies largely produce irregular migration. They define certain forms of migration as regular and others as irregular. The case of asylum seekers provides an example. In principle, asylum seekers are not irregular immigrants because, in their case, crossing a national border without authorisation is a matter of force majeure. Seeking asylum is a human right and, therefore, cannot be labelled as a felony. However, because irregular migration is increasingly defined, by governments, mass media and the majority of public opinion, in terms of unauthorised border crossings, asylum seekers are increasingly seen as illegal immigrants. Not only have governments made it nearly impossible to apply for asylum from abroad, but they have also increased controls on physical borders, built walls and fences, reinforced border patrols, and established and heavily funded agencies such as Frontex in the EU. This leaves people who want to claim asylum with no other option than to cross borders irregularly.

With all these measures, states have tried to reassure their citizens that borders are under control and internal security is ensured. However, not only does this turn people who are in principle entitled to at least apply for international protection into ‘irregular’ migrants, but identifying irregular migrations with the violation of borders is misleading. From what we know, both in the USA and in the EU, most people who sojourn in a country without possessing a valid permit have not entered illegally (for the USA: Alden, 2017; for the EU: Spencer & Triandafyllidou, 2020). They are mainly overstayers; they have entered with some kind of proper documentation and have remained beyond the expiry of their permit.

Anxiety about international migration, and especially about irregular migration, is then connected to fears concerning political stability, social cohesion, and the well-being of developed societies. Terrorist attacks have repeatedly triggered increased border enforcement, as in the USA after 2001 and in several European countries in the following years, instilling in citizens’ minds the idea of a link between terrorism and unauthorised immigration. But this link has been only rarely confirmed by the facts. Moreover, unauthorised migrants, together with asylum seekers, allegedly embody threats to the social order: not only, as in the past, in terms of competition on the labour market, but also in terms of tensions ranging from national sovereignty, personal safety, welfare provisions, to national identity. Migrants have in some way become the scapegoats of neo-liberal globalisation and its consequences, one of which is the increased insecurity that many citizens of the Global North now feel.

This anxiety relates to the fear related to the ‘mobility paradox’ (Faist, 2019), namely the deep inequalities in mobility rights. The difference between aspirations and opportunities to enter more developed countries forms the core of migration governance. As we saw, citizens of the Global North and elites of the South enjoy more freedom to move abroad than ever before, or at least in the past century. Citizens of intermediate countries, such as Eastern Europe or Latin America, or some Asian countries, stand in the middle of this cartography of mobility rights. Ordinary people with a ‘weak’ passport, mainly from developing countries, are excluded from international mobility, and especially from the right to settle in developed countries (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013). Because citizens of the Global North are favoured in their mobility rights against people of the South, they are scared by the possibility that people from the South may try to overcome this structural inequality.

7.2 Enforcement of Borders and Persistence of Irregular Migration

What is important for the legal framework of international migration is that people outlawed, or hindered, by the rules in place are in some way forced to search for other ways to fulfil their aspirations to settle abroad. Increased border controls have not completely stopped peoples’ aspiration to move abroad. International migrations have come to occupy a high place on the political agenda, and national governments, together with supranational institutions such as the EU, have invested a larger amount of material and symbolic resources in controlling migration and fighting against unwanted population movements. These efforts have served “to create an appearance of control” (Massey, 1999: 288).

It is hard to deny that all these efforts have had an influence on the entrance and settlement of irregular immigrants. In the case of the EU, for instance, the efforts of European States to stop migration have transformed the Mediterranean Sea into a “macabre deathscape” (De Genova, 2018: 1766), where many people continue to die each year (Carling, 2007). Asylum seekers, as well as other migrants, have no alternative than try to cross one or more national borders irregularly to reach a country that they consider their desired destination. Since this may cause political protest and legal accusations if receiving states are openly involved in rejecting asylum seekers, many states have now delegated this part of border enforcement to states that tend to be less compliant with human rights obligations. The efforts to stop migration lead to the externalisation of migration control to transit countries: Mexico for the USA, and a range of bordering countries for the EU, including Turkey, Libya, Niger, and Bosnia. Developed countries have engaged their partners in the ‘dirty work’ of stopping border crossings through a mix of economic support, political influence, and some other concessions. By paying this price, the EU has been able to reduce the numbers of landings and asylum applications: 416,000 in 2020, more than 200,000 fewer than in 2019 (631, 300), and one third of the peak reached in 2015–2016 (respectively, 1,321,000 and 1,259,000 applications).Footnote 1 The pandemic influenced asylum seekers’ movements in 2020 and 2021, 2022 saw a new increase of numbers (881,000), but on the whole the decline of refugee reception has been a constant trend in the past few years.

Furthermore, the enforcement of border controls increasingly moves away from the actual borders because it is being externalised to transit states, as well as internalised as the establishment of boundaries within societies. Those migrants who, despite all the efforts to stop them, have managed to settle irregularly, are then confronted with internal borders designed to exclude them from society. These internal borders can be found in areas such as identity checking, access to the labour market, provision of social services, police raids and evictions. These controls have, on the whole, also been strengthened in most of the developed countries: recent provisions in UK and Denmark to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda are probably the most striking example in recent years, but Australia enacted a similar policy several years ago, involving its weak neighbouring countries. When unwanted migrants are not deterred from entering, social exclusion becomes the goal of receiving states, in order to hinder their settlement and frustrate their efforts to live a normal life (Engbersen & Broeders, 2009). The lives of irregular immigrants have often become more arduous and apparently without visible ways out (Hajer, 2021). More resources have also been devoted to forced removals and voluntary returns, widening what has been called ‘deportspora’, a kind of ‘abject diaspora’ (Nyers, 2018).

However, irregular migration has not been stopped or eradicated despite all these efforts. Although fewer in number than in the middle of the last decade, asylum seekers continue to arrive in Europe and put pressure on the US Southern border. Policies of containment have achieved substantial results, but they have shown persistent gaps at the discursive, implementation and efficacy levels (Czaika & De Haas, 2013). The implementation of migration controls and the related fight against irregular migration has proven to be more complicated in practice than what can be supposed on analysing laws and policies on paper.

An important factor that makes the enforcement of immigration policies less straightforward is the role of legal systems. In different ways, the political and legal systems contribute to forming a minority of unauthorised residents. Irregular migrants are produced, first of all, by complicated or unreasonable rules on either obtaining a residence permit or changing the type of permit from, for instance, student to worker, or for reuniting the immigrant’s family. Moreover, rules dictated by foreign policy can favour citizens from some countries by relaxing their visa requirements, as is the case of Eastern European countries engaged in the process of gaining EU membership or involved in cooperation agreements as part of a web of EU neighbouring policies. A relaxation of visa requirements fosters overstaying.

Furthermore, the infrastructure of human rights and international conventions maintains several ‘liberal constraints’ on immigration policies. Even though this seems to have been weakened by the restrictive turn of security policies, states must protect the civil rights of citizens, but in many cases also those of non-nationals and even irregular immigrants (Hollifield et al., 2014). Measures of detection, detention and removal therefore encounter obstacles to their harsh implementation. In addition, funding such measures is an obstacle, even though it is one that is often overlooked: public expenditure must be reduced in other sectors in order to redirect resources to the seizure, custody and deportation of unauthorised immigrants, which is also complicated by the problems of properly identifying them and their homeland (Ellermann, 2010). Moreover, sending countries often resist the repatriation of their citizens (Cassarino, 2020); their cooperation has to be achieved, often with economic costs and political concessions.

To recap, implementing policies that categorically exclude migrants is difficult because irregular immigration not only originates from outside but is deeply embedded in the internal dynamics of receiving societies. Several forces, interests, values and actors reduce the efficacy of declared closures of borders. Therefore, it is important to remember that irregular migrants are not ‘ghosts’ that manage to hide in the interstices of developed countries. As we have seen throughout this book, irregular migrants find a way to carve out a place for themselves in receiving societies, circumventing controls or enjoying tolerance, because they are situated at the point of convergence among different societal factors.

Labour-market needs are a case in point. Although the extent to which the informal economy and hidden labour are tolerated varies among developed countries, the overlap of efficient economic systems with segmented labour markets and traditional labour relations has been repeatedly recognised (Ruhs & Anderson, 2010). The functioning of global cities, households overloaded by care needs, outsourcing of activities, casualisation of work in supply chains, labour-intensive sectors which cannot be relocated abroad, such as construction, agriculture, catering: all these areas benefit from irregular immigration providing cheap labour (Lewis et al., 2015). Moreover, the need for labour force is combined with the internal interests that favour international exchanges and flows of external visitors, because these vested interests demand the relaxation of entrance requirements, thus indirectly paving the way for unwanted population movements. Tourism, education, international trade, culture, sport, and entertainment can be mentioned in this regard. They explain why most irregular immigrants are overstayers: they have entered legally which these kinds of visas.

7.3 Selective Enforcement, Selective Tolerance

The fight against irregular migration is not a categorical exclusion but a tacit selection which targets some cases with more determination while implicitly but systematically condoning other cases (Ambrosini, 2016). The term ‘unauthorised immigrants’, moreover, does not refer to a uniform category: it encompasses various cases, situations, and biographical careers. Selection may be based on various features: gender, economic role, type of accommodation, behaviour in public, relations with other residents – or better, with citizens. These differences create various categories of irregular sojourners in the eyes of the mainstream residents, whose perceptions and relationships influence the behaviour of the public authorities in charge of law and order. Authorities have limited resources in terms of personnel, time, means, and detention places. In practice therefore, they select the targets of their control and inquiries, concentrating their efforts on some security aspects, and paying less attention to others that they consider less threatening, less important for public opinion, too expensive, or sometimes too difficult to investigate.

Public opinion and various components of the receiving society, including ordinary citizens, take part in this selection process by deciding which migrants must be considered irregular and harshly persecuted, and which have to be tolerated, protected or even forgotten, or sometimes regularised. Citizens often demand more severity against certain types of migrations and certain migrant profiles and (implicitly) more acceptance of other migrants. What is surprising is that some migrants disappear almost entirely from the public discourse and remain invisible. A case in point is that of immigrant women engaged in domestic and care activities in many developed societies. Discussions and political disputes on irregular migrations rarely mention those women. Consequently, wide acceptance by receiving societies curbs public policies, induce security agents to overlook irregular immigrant domestic and care workers in their enforcement of immigration rules and focus their controls on other migrants.

But the opposite has also occurred in recent years. Migrants who used to be entitled to a residence permit as asylum seekers have been openly targeted by political forces, mass media, and voters as dishonest exploiters of the asylum system. Hostility has triggered political changes, legal reforms, restrictions in reception rules. An example of this is the criminalisation of NGOs and their search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea, together with policies that have returned potential asylum seekers to Libya, Bosnia and Turkey. In this case, societal reactions – or more precisely, the interpretation of public opinion by governments – have stigmatised migrants, redefining them as unwanted, and criminalised those trying to save them.

This point recalls another key aspect of the relationship between irregular immigrants and receiving societies: the support that irregular migrants receive from various intermediaries (Ambrosini, 2017). Immigrants are not pure victims devoid of agency. They can search for possible gaps in the obstacles erected by receiving states, exploiting the limited opportunities to enter a destination country and then remain after the expiry of their visa. But it is difficult for immigrants without valid documents to enter and settle in a foreign country without finding some form of assistance by intermediaries and local supporters. These intermediaries range from smugglers, through exploitative networks, unscrupulous employers, providers of forged documents, or of poor accommodation, to humanitarian actors, social movements, religious institutions, and trade unions. Moreover, irregular migrants are often supported by personal networks, especially when they have close relatives already established in the receiving society. If those relatives run a business, they often combine their social obligation with an economic interest by providing support in exchange for cheap labour and obedience.

Deplorable interests on the one hand, and various forms of solidarity on the other, form the complex context that allows irregular immigrants to escape the worst consequences of exclusionary policies. Ordinary citizens may also be involved, not only when they take part in some humanitarian mobilisation or when they hire a domestic worker without valid documents, but also when they engage in many everyday activities: giving money to a panhandler, buying a flower from an informal vendor, providing valuable information, recommending an informal worker to their networks. The manifold activities performed by this intermediation infrastructure can partially explain the efficacy gap and the fact that unwanted immigrants manage to remain, often for years, in countries that openly reject them.

7.4 Debordering Solidarity

In recent years, scholars have widely discussed what can be termed ‘solidarity from below’ (Agustín & Jørgensen, 2019), or ‘debordering solidarity’ as we have called it in this book. Such solidarity overcomes the distinction between citizens and non-citizens, authorised and unauthorised immigrants, and gives priority to human rights and people’s needs. Issues related to international migration and asylum have fuelled a polarisation of receiving societies and triggered mobilisations in favour of newcomers, without much consideration of their legal status. The German mobilisation in favour of asylum seekers in 2015, during the so-called ‘Summer of Welcome’, is the most striking case. According to estimates, the mobilisation involved between 10 to 20% of the adult population (Karakayali, 2017), and it included people who often had no previous experience of voluntary work and no political or religious affiliation. Pries (2018) has emphasised that the ‘summer of welcome’ strengthened local ties, created new communities of old and new citizens, and subverted traditional political divides. Besides this case, initiatives favouring migrants in need have multiplied on both sides of the Atlantic.

However, not all researchers have evaluated these mobilisations positively. Those enacted by volunteers who deny any political engagement have been especially criticised, on the ground that ‘humanitarianism’ is a misleading solution for asylum and migrations issues. Compassion has been seen as complementary to the repression of unwanted immigration (Fassin, 2005), while the ‘antipolitics of care’ has been stigmatised (Ticktin, 2011) and ‘contemporary humanitarianism’ has been condemned as an accessory of neo-liberal policies (Sözer, 2020). Other researchers, however, have emphasised the political implications of voluntary help, even when it does not assume an overtly political position. Askins (2015) claimed that “banal, embodied activities” of care can be viewed as “implicit activisms” and “acts or micropolitics”; while Kirsch (2016) called volunteering “politics by other means”. In the same vein, Artero (2019: 158) argued that “volunteering functioned as a micropolitical practice: it allowed volunteers to be outraged by structural injustices, sympathise with migrants and (…) engage in outspoken forms of dissent such as lobbying, advocacy and public demonstration”.

The concept of debordering solidarity is closely related to the concept of ‘inclusive solidarity’ introduced by Schwiertz and Schwenken (2020), who argue that “civil society initiatives acting in solidarity with those considered outside the nation have a crucial function in challenging social exclusion” (p.405). Other studies have detected a convergence between political activism and civil society actors working in favour of migrants. Fleischmann (2020: 18) states that “practices of refugee support can turn political when they strive to instigate change by enacting alternative modes of togetherness and belonging on the ground”. As Della Porta (2020) observes, recent trends show that the distinction between social movements and civil society actors has blurred. On the one hand, social movements have developed forms of voluntary help to migrants. On the other hand, migration issues foster a hybridisation of civil society organisations and social movement organisations, especially when they are faced by politicisation and the increasing criminalisation of solidarity activities.

To conclude, a last point deserves attention. Overall, the conditions of irregular residence have deteriorated in most developed countries, and opportunities for regularisation have been restricted. Nevertheless, migrants continue to arrive, and most irregular immigrants remain in the country. Sooner or later, it will become necessary to admit that removal did not and will not succeed. Irregular migrants have settled, have often found employment, have formed families or have entered into other stable relationships, have children who attend local schools, have established social relationships with neighbours, and participate in social activities. The social needs of irregular migrants challenge local authorities, welfare providers, and street-level bureaucrats (Spencer, 2018; Schweitzer, 2022), a struggle that solidarity actors and civil society support. In democratic societies, it is not easy to deny access to social services, especially when the claimants are minors, pregnant women, families, sick people, or victims of exploitation. Receiving states must recognise this fact and confront the issue of a transition towards a legal status.

This book has identified several avenues of regularisation. They are mainly based on deservingness, which is recognised especially through work; extended stay; appeal to liberal protection; marriage; and recognition of victimhood. However, these regularisation opportunities should be better institutionalised, made to depend less on arbitrariness, and rendered more attainable for the people concerned. Regularisation recognises the reality that irregular migrants are present in contemporary societies and participate in and contribute to these societies, and it is a practical alternative to the indiscriminate exclusion that demonstrably does not work. Moreover, we hope that policies will recognise that reducing the hardship of people crossing borders or sojourning irregularly is a fundamental aspect of protecting human rights. Mobility regimes are, at present, the main form of inequality at a global level (Faist, 2019). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises the right of movement; but a corresponding duty to accept international migrants has never been established. For asylum seekers, the right to ask for asylum has increasingly been circumvented and is, in practice, often denied by precisely those states that have the most resources to implement it. We wish that states, by implementing the two Global Compacts for Migration and on Refugees, will establish the possibility of safe, orderly and regular migration, and that when people arrive and settle in a country without prior authorisation, they will be supported in finding solutions to their situation, and granted a regular status when possible and reasonable.