REGINE Regularisations in Europe Final Report - European ...

5 Positions of social actors
5.1 Introduction
This chapter reviews the positions of non-state stakeholders towards regularisation policies, including
trade unions, employers organisations, NGOs and migrant organisations. In so doing, the chapter
draws on desk research on the positions of organisations towards regularisation, and if these are
lacking, on their overall positions towards recent EU policy proposals on both illegal and legal
migration as well as on irregular work; on questionnaires sent out to NGOs and trade unions; on
interviews with representatives from selected organisations; and on documents provided by NGOs
and other interested parties in response to our questionnaires.
All of these actors have, either in practice or in principle, and to varying degrees, stakes in
regularisation processes. Thus large-scale regularisations based on employment criteria naturally fall
naturally within the mandate of interest organisations (i.e. employers’ organisations and trade unions)
as they are designed to have a major impact on the labour market and to correct certain labour market
deficiencies, notably informal employment and the resulting exploitative labour conditions. However,
employment-based regularisations might also be implemented to redress problems resulting from
inadequacies of legal migration channels, as a result of which some employers resort to informal
channels of recruitment and to post-immigration adjustments of migrant workers. 156
Non-governmental organisations working on migration issues, most of which are engaged both in
advocacy and provision of services to immigrants, are involved in both employment-based
regularisations and those based on family, humanitarian, protection or other grounds. Employers
organisations and most trade unions, by contrast, rarely consider non-employment based
regularisations as falling within their mandate.
Both types of organisation – those with vested interests on the one hand and advocacy NGOs and
migrant organisations on the other – have been involved in regularisation processes in several stages
of the policy making process and in a number of ways. These include interest formulation, advocacy,
lobbying and thus policy formulation in the broadest sense; and in terms of campaigning –
disseminating information, mobilisation and monitoring of implementation during regularisation
processes Both trade unions and NGOs usually also provide legal counselling and representation to
individuals, while employers organisations provide legal information on employer related aspects of
employment-based regularisations. Finally, social actors too have an important role to play in regard
to the evaluation of the implementation and outcome of programmes and regularisation mechanisms.
Indeed, in the absence of systematic post-regularisation evaluations carried out or commissioned by
156 In most continental European states, except perhaps the Nordic countries, post-immigration status adjustment
was the rule, rather than the exception. In the early 1970s, for example, more than 60% of immigrants to France
obtained a permit only after arrival, despite state efforts to clamp down on informal recruitment (Hollifield, J.
(2004): ‘France: Republicanism and the Limits of Immigration Control’. In: Cornelius, W.A., Tsuda, T., Martin,
P. L, Hollifield, J. F. (Eds): Controlling Immigration. A Global Perspective. 2 nd edition. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, pp. 183-214. In other countries, such as Austria, informal recruitment mechanisms and postimmigration
status adjustments have been relevant until the early 1990s.
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