REGINE Regularisations in Europe Final Report - European ...

The ‘reluctant regularisers’
(France, the UK)
These ‘old immigration countries’ with colonial histories and, in the case of France, large post-war
labour recruitment programmes, have struggled to manage immigration over many decades,
occasionally resorting to regularisation programmes as a policy instrument (but with fairly small
numbers, although overall numbers in France are higher). They have developed extensive and
sophisticated regularisation mechanisms, which are used to a significant degree although (particularly
in the case of France) with a serious lack of transparency. 105 In both countries, the asylum process is
caught up in the issue of illegal immigrant stocks, although a considerable proportion of irregular
migration takes place outside of the asylum nexus . Policy responses include more aggressive
deportation of failed asylum-seekers, toleration, and regularisation of some on humanitarian grounds.
The extent to which medium-level stocks of illegal migrants are actually managed is open to debate –
especially in the UK, which we classify as having high irregular TCN stocks.
The ideological opponents of regularisation
(Austria, Germany)
These are distinguished by their political opposition to regularisation as a policy instrument, even
though Germany uses mechanisms that amount to regularisation (awarding ‘tolerated’ status) and in
addition several small-scale programmes for specific target groups; generally, both Germany and
Austria extensively utilise regularisation mechanisms. 106 In both countries, the asylum system is
thought to be linked to the creation of illegal immigrant stocks, although the number of asylum
applications in both countries has sharply decreased recently: this is particularly true in Germany,
where asylum applications have constantly decreased since the early 1990s. In both countries, stocks
of irregular migrants have significantly decreased as a result of EU enlargement . Despite this, the
stock of irregular migrants in Germany is considered to be relatively high, resulting in significant
social exclusion and labour market segmentation.
The non-regularising ‘new’ Member States
(Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Rep., Latvia, Malta, Romania, Slovenia)
To some extent, the principal characteristic shared by these countries is transition from state-driven to
market-based economies, with the implicit larger role for the informal economy. With the major
exceptions of Cyprus and the Czech Rep., all have low stocks of illegal migrants, with little policy to
manage these. The situation is acute with Cyprus, which has high immigrant stocks on temporary
permits: there is an interaction with the asylum system, going in the opposite direction from the usual
105 The data for France (see Fig. 3) show this; the UK is unable to provide data, but we believe that the figures
are very high.
106 Germany is the foremost country in awarding legal status through mechanisms – see Fig. 3
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