REGINE Regularisations in Europe Final Report - European ...

9.2 Regularisation practices in Switzerland and the USA
As part of this study, we have examined two federal governance systems external to the EU – namely,
Switzerland and the USA. 367 Both have extensive experience with irregular immigrant residence,
albeit with very different immigration structures and histories. Switzerland is now considered to be a
country with not only high immigrant stocks, but also high irregular immigrant stocks (>2% of total
population); the USA for some time has had declining legal immigrant stocks whilst illegal stocks
have risen continuously, currently constituting over 4% of total population. By most estimations,
these stocks are high enough to be considered serious policy failures – certainly, they are higher
proportions than exist in all but two EU Member States. It only remains for us to pose the question:
‘Does the EU have anything to learn from those experiences’?
Taking first the case of Switzerland, the most pronounced aspect of its policy approach is a
disjuncture between the federal and canton levels. The federal government pursues an extremely
conservative approach to the issue of regularisation, emphasising the negative consequences that
(allegedly) arise from large-scale programmes and choosing to restrict its activities to case-by-case
humanitarian regularisations. (In this, it follows a policy approach very similar to that of Germany.)
Some of the cantons, on the other hand, are less concerned with ‘high policy’ and instead emphasise
the twin issues of economic and social integration of the irregular migrants. What follows is a
structural conflict between the policy competences of the federal government and the cantons – with
relatively small numbers of irregular migrants being regularised. Superimposed on this, is a more
usual Left-Right political debate, with the Left (and trade unions) canvassing for regularisation
programmes, while the centre-right opposes them.
In the case of the USA, the federal structure appears not to have played an important role in the deficit
of policy. The last ‘proper’ large-scale regularisation 368 was in 1986, and although it was a general
amnesty it set a long period of residence (5 years) in order to qualify. Thus, it failed to address about
half of the estimated irregular population. Since 1986, primarily owing to the unwillingness (or
inability) of the federal government to permit either temporary or permanent unskilled labour
immigration, the labour market needs of the US economy have been filled by mass illegal
immigration, primarily from Mexico. Unlike European labour markets, the weakly-regulated US
labour market readily employs illegal migrants within the formal economy: thus, the informal
economy is not a significant factor and most illegal immigrants in the USA are working in a
documented capacity. 369 Since 2003, there have been eleven attempts to legislate on immigration
reform – all have failed. The primary cause is ideological dispute over what the immigration policy of
the USA should actually be, and how regularisations or other specific policies would fit into that
framework.
There are some potential lessons for the EU from these two cases. First, the issue of governance: if a
common immigration policy were to be established at the European level, it is likely that some of the
problems of Switzerland would become evident. The appropriate policy instruments for the
367 See Boxes 3 and 4
368 Since 1986, the US has implemented various small-scale programmes. In 2000, some 400,000 irregular
migrants benefited from a “late” regularisation under IRCA’s general provisions.
369 For clarification of this, see Table 1. The relevant category is row 4 of the table.
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