Undocumented Workers' Transitions

Legal Status, Migration, and Work in Europe

Sonia McKay, Eugenia Markova, Anna Paraskevopoulou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136681943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Emigración e inmigración

This book explores how immigration laws, while aimed at discouraging undocumented migration, actually sustain it. It documents the circumstances that have caused previously documented migrants to become undocumented and explores the impact of their changing status on their families and on their own employment opportunities. The authors argue that undocumented migrants are forced into the most precarious types of work, and changes in the way that employment is organised, with a shift into temporary, agency and sub-contracted work, makes undocumented migrants particularly attractive in some employment markets. This groundbreaking volume draws substantially on data collected from a two-year research study in seven European countries that was focused on understanding the impact of migration flows on EU labour markets.

1 The Lived Experiences of Undocumented Migrants

Employers wanted workers, but workers without families, who needed no schools or community services. They wanted workers who could be housed in homeless shelters or packed into trailers like sardines.

(Bacon, 2008: 181)

In his book Illegal people (2008), David Bacon, an American journalist, vividly describes the situation of undocumented migrants in the US. Our study leads us to concur with his description also in relation to European-based employers. Those who are undocumented in Europe today fit into Bacon’s description for a number of reasons. As migrants they are more mobile than indigenous workers, because they have (at least on first arrival) no ties to specific geographical areas. As undocumented migrants they are less likely, than other groups of migrants, to be accompanied by their families. They generally arrive as adults, so that their countries of origin have borne the costs of whatever education and training they have had; they are over-represented within the under 40-year-old population and thus can be said to be in the ‘healthiest’ phase of their lives, having overcome childhood illness and not reached the second phase of illness, in middle to old age. They are more ‘willing’ or ‘accepting’ of poor living and working conditions, in part because they construct these as temporary challenges, which will be overcome through time and the acquisition of financial security but, more than this, because they have no alternatives. The impact of this model of subservient labour is witnessed predominately, although not exclusively, in global cities, whose economies demand a workforce that is seen as doing low-skilled work (Sassen, 2001; Wills et al., 2010). Increasingly, however, undocumented migrants have been spreading beyond these narrow geographical confines, moving from the principal cities to smaller towns and to more rural areas. In part this is driven by competition for jobs, but they are also responding to an expressed need for ‘flexible’ workers in rural areas, where the demands of the agriculture and food processing sectors are for workers who can be hired and laid off, dependent on specific production needs. However, moving to smaller localities means undertaking the risk of detection and expulsion and for some of those whom we interviewed for this study, the risks of detection were too great to compromise through moving to such areas even if work might be more plentiful.

International migration has become a highly politicised issue on a global scale, regularly debated by governments at international, national, and local levels. The migration phenomenon has also become a topical subject for the media, often reported in ways that reflect the overall political climate of the time but also the specific opinion of the media and its viewers or readers. Consequently, much of the emphasis has been on policy making, with specific government departments being set up to control migration, assess the scale of it or develop policies that deal with the issue. Although migration policy varies between different states, in our study we have noted an increasing inter-state cooperation, with mechanisms being put in place that have shifted the debate to a more global dimension. These mechanisms include bodies such as the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD); the High Level Dialogue on Migration, as part of the United Nations (HLD); or the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM). But other organisations, such as trade-focused ones, also now bring migration into their debates, discussing it within the framework of global developments, for example, unrestricted migration and terrorism (Düvell, 2006:7).

Equally, migration has generated a great deal of activity from various nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in many states, working nationally or internationally and predominately on general issues related to the protection of human and migrant rights. Often this NGO work has a more practical focus, offering help with issues of settlement, housing, employment, language learning courses, education, and health, among others. Trade unions are another example of organisations that have offered their support to migrant workers, especially in relation to employment law and employment rights and by incorporating and promoting relevant policies. Indeed throughout the history of labour movement struggles, migrants have assumed active roles within the structures of trade union organisations and helped mobilised other migrants to participate in trade union activities or struggles, such as strikes. The two-year strike of the Grunwick women workers, which began in 1977 in the UK; the janitors’ strikes in the US, from the early 1990s onwards; and more recently, the fight back by African origin migrants working in agriculture in Italy, against the attacks on them in Rosarno, Calabria, all demonstrate the potential power of organisation among migrants. Finally, the phenomenon of migration has always been of interest to researchers, ranging from social scientists, to economists, historians, anthropologists, and demographers. The recent and accelerated trends of migration, as this book demonstrates, have given rise to further interdisciplinary research—both quantitative and qualitative—commissioned either with the purpose of supplying data useful to policy making or for academic purposes or more often as a combination of both.

In Europe today hundreds of thousands of workers live out their lives in the shadows, as undocumented migrants. In many cases this means that they are denied employment rights, have limited or no rights to healthcare¹, are forced to live apart from their families or, where they do manage to reunite with them, have difficulty in finding schools for their children or in securing adequate financial or health provision for their families. They may have arrived intending to stay for a short time, as work permit holders, students, holiday makers, or tourists, but then found that their situations changed as they began to organise their new lives, perhaps meeting partners, establishing new friendships, and developing new visions, all of which would make a return to a previous life difficult. They may also have had long and arduous pathways to Europe, relying on smugglers to arrange their journeys and in the process creating debts which they then find they may never be able to re-pay. They rarely feature in public debates, other than when linking their presence to criminality and illegality, and it is precisely for this reason that we have rejected the use of the term ‘illegal’ in relation to undocumented migrants, noting that it is perhaps not coincidental, that during the Nazi period it was a term used in relation to Europe’s Jewish populations. Defining people as illegal removes elements of their humanity and sends out messages that discrimination and exploitation against such peoples is not of the same calibre as when the same actions are applied to those who are ‘legal’. This is why in our research we have chosen to use the term ‘undocumented’ to describe a variety of experiences relating to the presence of foreign citizens on the territory of a state, in violation of the regulations on entry or of continued residence. It has been argued that the term is ambiguous, as it refers both to migrants who have not been documented (recorded) and to those without documents (passports, etc.), but for us it has been important to capture the diverse experiences that contribute to a person being ‘undocumented’ while utilising a vocabulary that does not stigmatise individuals whose status is a consequence of the absence of alternatives. Although policy frameworks concerning immigration and migrant regularisation operate both at national and EU level, our research demonstrates that defining ‘illegality’ or ‘illegal status’ is not a straightforward question but is linked to the legislative changes that may occur in each country. Moreover, considering that there has only been limited research on the scope and process of irregular migration in the EU, further complexities may arise in attempts at defining who is an ‘illegal’ migrant. So long as states remain antagonistic to migration, other than when it is believed to serve particular economic interests, it is inevitable that some migrants will try to circumvent the rules and no number of border controls appear capable of completely halting undocumented migration—in Europe, North America, or indeed anywhere in the world—where the advantages that migration brings appear to outweigh the disadvantages that undocumented status confers. In our view it is states that play a crucial role in socially constructing status, through policies of inclusion and exclusion. However, what we have concluded from our research is that these conditions of status are not fixed and that from the many migrants that we have interviewed, both in the Undocumented Workers’ Transitions research and in other research (both individually and collectively), we have established that the immigration status attached to individuals is not constant. In more than 200 in-depth interviews conducted with migrant workers in the course of the our study, more than seven in ten had experienced at least one status transition, and some had gone from one status to another more than once, with at least one in five having had documented status before losing it. This has strengthened our conclusion that the status an individual holds is not cemented, in a sense that someone is consistently either documented or undocumented. More often than not they will have shifted between ‘documented’, ‘semi-documented’, and ‘undocumented’ (or what Ruhs and Anderson (2006) refer to as ‘compliant’, ‘semi-compliant’, and ‘non-compliant’). What we show is that migration status is much more fluid and that many migrants experience changes in their status throughout their period of migration. They may start as documented and fall into undocumented status when a permission to work or a residence permission ends, but equally they may move from undocumented to documented status due to a change in their own personal circumstances (for example, marriage) or a change in the legal regulations permitting migration. As a national expert, commenting to us on the situation in Italy with regard to status, noted:

Obtaining a residence permit does not necessarily mean escaping illegality: the introduction of the ‘residence contract’ which demands the satisfaction of specific contractual and residential requirements, has made it far easier to lose one’s residence permit and therefore fall back into illegality. (Italy, trade union official)

In other words, what we have conclusively found is that the concept of the ‘documented’ and the ‘undocumented’ as being two separate and distinct categories of migrant is flawed and that the focus of states on the ‘undocumented’ ignores the changeable character of status. In Chapter 3 we place our theory on transitions within a discussion of migration theory in general and of undocumented migration in particular. To do this we first turned to earlier theories on migration, which we have suggested have been premised on attempting to find answers as to why individuals migrate, and it is instructive that it was really not until about 40 years ago that researchers started to try to present an analysis of what happened to migrants within Europe once they had migrated.

For the overwhelming majority of Europe’s undocumented migrants it is not a desire to engage in illegal activities that caused their migration, but the combination of unacceptable conditions in their countries of origin and of state policies in their countries of destination that have restricted rights of entry. Our central argument in this book is that workers do not ‘seek’ to be undocumented. They have to take the legal regime as they find it and as long as states, where opportunities are believed to exist for work and for better prospects, put up barriers that prevent migrants from entering or remaining with permission, some individuals will take whatever routes are available to them. We should not therefore be surprised when we find that false documents are bought by those seeking to better their lives and those of their families through migration. Nor should we be astonished that criminal elements might seek to benefit from the desperation of those seeking such a new life; or that those without the right documents end up working in the informal economies of Europe, beyond the reaches of the tax and social security authorities, but also outside of the protection of other regulatory bodies, like those dealing with health and safety and minimum wages. And, for precisely these same reasons, undocumented migrants are more likely than not to be outside of the areas of influence of trade unions and other collective bodies, making them particularly vulnerable to exploitation by employers, landlords, co-workers and even co-ethnics (Erdemir and Vasta, 2007). Policymakers can address all of these issues but only if they accept that how migration occurs cannot just be on the basis of a set programme determined to satisfy the declared interests of the host country but that undocumented migration will continue to occur, regardless of the attempts by states to exclude or return those without permission to remain. Arguments as to their numbers, whether they are increasing or decreasing, deflect from developing an appropriate and inclusive policy for dealing with those who are here and with those who, whatever the legal regime, will continue to come. This also means that governments need to consider how their own policies—for example, those that have led to the lack of adequate provision for the care of the young, the sick, and the elderly; the privatisation of previously public services; the subcontracting out of all but core activities in many large companies—have created a ‘market’ for a new army of workers, in increasingly fragmented employment situations, with ‘employers’ who either do not want to protect them or who do not have the means or the organisation to do so.

We want in this book to recount the experiences of those who are undocumented and to present their stories as told to us. Our specific focus is on their working lives, to bring to the surface that which is more often than not hidden and not admitted, to make it possible to better understand why it is that in Europe today (and, in particular, in Western Europe, in one of the richest regions of the world) some workers earn less than €4 an hour,² forcing them to work for long hours in appalling conditions, ensuring that our food gets picked, packed, delivered, and cooked and that the supermarkets can keep prices low in a never-ending spiral of competition; that our homes and offices are not only built and maintained, but are also cleaned; that our children, our sick, and our elderly relatives are looked after; and that our clothes are stitched in dimly lit factories that sit silently in many of Europe’s major cities.

The book draws mainly from a two-year study that we undertook between 2007 and 2009. The study, Undocumented Workers’ Transitions (UWT), was funded by the European Commission and brought together researchers from seven EU Member State countries which, in different ways, all ‘hosted’ undocumented migrants. The seven countries were selected to represent varied histories of migration and of undocumented migration in particular. Two of the countries—Belgium and the UK—had colonial histories that had resulted in early migration to them, initially from citizens of their ‘empires’ and later from migrants more generally. Two of the countries—Austria and Denmark—had also experienced the arrival of migrant workers over many decades. For the remaining three countries—Bulgaria, Italy, and Spain—their experiences of migration were different. Prior to the fall of the Soviet Union there had been limited inwards migration to Bulgaria, and equally its citizens had limited points of exit. Migration, in the form that we acknowledge it today, has been a more a recent phenomenon there, with little existing migration research and with a very limited amount of credible statistical data. Furthermore many of the migrants who were interviewed in Bulgaria perceived themselves to be relatively temporary migrants, looking for the occasion to move further westwards, to countries where they believed that the opportunities were greater. Italy and Spain, in contrast, were countries that had in the past identified themselves with emigration, as generations had left seeking better lives in the Americas or in Northern Europe. However, in the last 20 years, both countries had experienced a large-scale increase in migration, fuelled by a combination of job availability, geographies that assisted access, and legal systems which were initially less structured around the desire to keep migrants out.

Whereas these brief histories might lead to the assumption that what we found, in relation to undocumented migration, would differ widely, the more startling fact is how similar the situation was for those who were undocumented in the seven countries. In terms of country of origin, although there might be differences—for example, larger proportions of migrants from Turkey in Austria and from South East Asia in the UK—what work they performed, and the conditions under which they did this, was remarkably similar. In the seven countries we found that those who were not fully documented were more likely to be working informally and in terms of sectors were more likely to be working in caring, construction, catering, agriculture, and food production. In terms of occupation, the overwhelming majority were in exceptionally low-paid jobs, usually jobs which are regarded as ‘low skilled’.

The pre-existence of informal economies also interacts with undocumented migration, and we know that the size/importance of informal economies in different European states affects the size/nature of undocumented migration. Our data confirms that whereas many migrant workers, both documented and undocumented, begin their employment in the destination country by working in the informal economy, for those who are undocumented this remains a sole source of employment throughout their migration. For us it is apparent that the existence of the informal economy is structural, operating within a co-reliant formal economy and that similar patterns of working arrangements operate in many EU Member States, suggesting there are specific production processes that are reliant on undocumented labour. These include fixed processes that are difficult to programme for (as in construction); the outsourcing of welfare (as in elder care); as well as the pre-existence of an informal sector within which local and migrant labour is absorbed. At the same time there are contradictory forces at play. In some sectors undocumented labour is sought out precisely because it is considered as flexible and disposable. However, it is also required for stable and long-term employment, in those sectors (like caring) where working conditions may be poor but where long-term employment relationships are highly prized.

There is currently an extensive and wide-ranging debate, both in the national states and at EU level, on the issue of undocumented migrants. In broad terms the focus has been in portraying the phenomenon as a problem that needs to be managed through stricter border controls and return policies, with, as we will show, a turn away from policies that are aimed at regularisation and at the integration of those who are already in the territory or that provided for some a right of entry for jobs that were defined as ‘low skilled’. Thus we hear regularly of plans by states to remove even basic healthcare rights from those who are undocumented and to imprison and to forcibly remove, if necessary. And yet these debates take place at the same time as the EU has formally adopted a Charter of Fundamental Rights which commits it to respect for family life (Art. 3); to the right to pursue a freely chosen and accepted occupation (Art. 15); and which gives specific protection to young workers (Art. 23). These can only be viewed as empty protections, when the conditions of life and of work and the characteristics of undocumented migrants are taken into account.

At the same time, the long-term application of strict migration controls, in combination with the increasing number of persons migrating in search of work, has led to the portrayal of migrants as breaking the law or as those that take advantage of ‘liberal’ policies so as to claim asylum. This results in both undocumented migrants and asylum seekers being stigmatised as unwanted or problematic migrants. This of itself has consequences, as it provides potential employers with a rationale for the exploitation of such workers. Moreover, it provides the media with an excuse to focus on the undocumented and on asylum seekers, as those who are taking away jobs from local people and who are thus not deserving of support, consideration, or even compassion. As a result, these policies have contributed to the violation of the rights of the migrants concerned, to an increase in racism and xenophobia, and at the same time, ironically, to the strengthening of smuggling and trafficking networks which take advantage of the market for ‘flexible employment’ and of the need of people to migrate.

The world has changed in many ways since Europeans began to migrate to North America more than 200 years ago and these changes, including new communications and transportation systems, mean that migration does not appear to be associated with the same sense of loss as it has been in previous periods. The notion that migrants can maintain their links with countries of origin are highlighted in the literature on transnational theory, but we question whether, for those who are undocumented, transnationalism can have the same positive meanings, when transport systems may seemingly permit relatively easy travel back and forth but where status means that those who have migrated cannot risk a journey to their country of origin, as the likelihood of return is slight.

As a consequence we have come to the conclusion that state policies, which formally should guarantee the fundamental rights of those within their territories, actively promote the creation of a group of people without social security or fundamental rights (Düvell, 2006) resulting in a pool of workers with sub-standard or no rights and thus obliged to accept work under the most precarious conditions and removed from any labour rights legislation. Of course this does not occur in a vacuum. Undocumented migration in Europe has been on the rise since the early 1980s, as the result of state policies tightening rights of entry to third-country nationals combined with neo-liberal economic policies which have promoted the de-regularisation of the labour market. These operate alongside changes within the labour market, with the promotion of new forms of work organisation, such as outsourcing, subcontracting, flexibility, and casualisation. One outcome is the growth of informal sectors of the economy, even in those countries, like Denmark, the UK, and Austria, where previo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Lived Experiences of Undocumented Migrants
• 2 Migration in a European Historical Perspective
• 3 Theories of Migration
• 4 What Works and What Does Not—Methodologies and Migration Research
• 5 Controlling Undocumented Migration at EU Level
• 6 Immigration Policies and Regularisation
• 7 European Undocumented Migration
• 8 Informal Economies and Dual Labour Market Theories
• 9 The Feminisation of Undocumented Migration
• 10 The Impact of Family on Undocumented Migration
• 11 Europe’s Undocumented Migrants—Here to Stay
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index