REGINE Regularisations in Europe Final Report - European ...

3.1.1 Regularisation Programmes
Over the period 1996-2007, data from 42 regularisation programmes show a total of about 4.2 million
applicants in 17 countries, of which at just under 2.9 million were granted legal status. 100 Including the
Italian de facto regularisation of 2006, the total number of programmes is 43, involving 4.7 million
applicants, of which more about 3.2 million were granted a status. Table 2, overleaf, shows summary
data for each of the programmes, ordered by total applications over the period. Italy (including the de
facto regularisation of 2006) appears in first place with just under 1.5m applications; Spain is second,
with 1.3m, and Greece is in third place with just under 1.2m (although this is overstated by about
230,000 owing to a 2-stage process in 1997-8). These three countries account for 84% of known
applications in regularisation programmes.
In the 42 regularisation programmes, the number of applicants varied considerably between
programmes ranging from 51 applicants in Lithuania in 1996 to over 700,000 in Italy in 2002.
From the data available, regularisation rates of individual programmes are typically over 80% in
southern countries, with lower rates for Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg and extremely low rates
for France (21% and 53%). The weighted mean regularisation rate (only for those programmes where
both application and grant numbers are known) is 80%. Figure 1, below, shows the distribution of
known regularisation awards, by country.
Figure 1
Grants of regularised status through programmes, EU (27), 1996–2007
100 The real figure is higher, owing to missing data from Greece (1997, 2001) and the countries listed in Fn.99
31