Citizenship in Practice Among Ir/regularized Migrant Workers: Acess to Labour Rights and Social Protection in Europe
This research project examines how processes of ir/regularization unfold not only at state borders, but also through migrants’ everyday encounters with administrations, employers, and welfare systems. Further, it looks into how migrant workers experience their access to rights and services in practice.
Based on over 200 semi-structured interviews conducted across agriculture, care, restaurants, and waste management in Austria, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and the UK, this project illustrates how migrants experience processes of ir/regularization as they navigate Europe’s legal and institutional landscape in everyday practice. In so doing, it sheds light on three central findings:
First, rather than being fixed in a category of “ir/regularized migrant workers”, the data reveal that people’s legal status changes continuously as permits expire, appeals are lodged, and contracts change. Further, administrative routes to regularity systematically produce precarity by tying access to rights to employers, place, and administrative timing. Across countries, migrant workers’ accounts reveal how temporal and spatial restrictions related to legal status – e.g. short permits, employer-linked visas and jurisdiction-specific asylum procedures - bind workers to particular places, jobs and institutions. These conditions increase vulnerability to exploitation in sectors such as agriculture, where employer-controlled housing and under-declared work are commonplace, and in the care sector, where long hours and self-employment classifications limit protections.
Second, access to healthcare, welfare, and other basic welfare provision depends on whether people are “in the system” when they seek support. Interviewees describe health treatments stopping when documents expire, welfare support disappearing with contract interruptions, and municipal services hinging on having the ‘right’ address. In this context, migrants actively “navigate the system” on “zig zag paths” involving visits to offices, negotiations with employers, help from NGOs and informal exchanges of information within migrant communities.
Third, the experiences of mobile EU citizen workers and third-country nationals of accessing rights and services overlap, despite the differences of rights and obligations attached to their legal status. While formal EU citizenship grants significant entitlements in terms of mobility and access to the labour-market, access to housing and social welfare across the EU is conditional and dependent on continuous employment. EU mobile workers are acutely aware of this conditionality and feel exposed to the risk of removal, or, as interlocutors call it, “deportation”.
In sum, the interviews analysed for this project show a Europe where irregularity is experienced not as a single legal status, but as a shifting, everyday condition continually shaped by how laws, labour-markets, and bureaucracies intersect in migrants’ lives.
Based on over 200 semi-structured interviews conducted across agriculture, care, restaurants, and waste management in Austria, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and the UK, this project illustrates how migrants experience processes of ir/regularization as they navigate Europe’s legal and institutional landscape in everyday practice. In so doing, it sheds light on three central findings:
First, rather than being fixed in a category of “ir/regularized migrant workers”, the data reveal that people’s legal status changes continuously as permits expire, appeals are lodged, and contracts change. Further, administrative routes to regularity systematically produce precarity by tying access to rights to employers, place, and administrative timing. Across countries, migrant workers’ accounts reveal how temporal and spatial restrictions related to legal status – e.g. short permits, employer-linked visas and jurisdiction-specific asylum procedures - bind workers to particular places, jobs and institutions. These conditions increase vulnerability to exploitation in sectors such as agriculture, where employer-controlled housing and under-declared work are commonplace, and in the care sector, where long hours and self-employment classifications limit protections.
Second, access to healthcare, welfare, and other basic welfare provision depends on whether people are “in the system” when they seek support. Interviewees describe health treatments stopping when documents expire, welfare support disappearing with contract interruptions, and municipal services hinging on having the ‘right’ address. In this context, migrants actively “navigate the system” on “zig zag paths” involving visits to offices, negotiations with employers, help from NGOs and informal exchanges of information within migrant communities.
Third, the experiences of mobile EU citizen workers and third-country nationals of accessing rights and services overlap, despite the differences of rights and obligations attached to their legal status. While formal EU citizenship grants significant entitlements in terms of mobility and access to the labour-market, access to housing and social welfare across the EU is conditional and dependent on continuous employment. EU mobile workers are acutely aware of this conditionality and feel exposed to the risk of removal, or, as interlocutors call it, “deportation”.
In sum, the interviews analysed for this project show a Europe where irregularity is experienced not as a single legal status, but as a shifting, everyday condition continually shaped by how laws, labour-markets, and bureaucracies intersect in migrants’ lives.
Projektleitung
- Sandra King-Savic, Katrin Kremmel - University of Zurich
- Sandra Karlsson - University of Uppsala
Kooperationspartner*innen
- European University Institute
- Uniwersytet Warszawski
- University of Bristol
Project PRIME “Protecting Irregular Migrants in Europe: Institutions, Interests and Policies”
Funded by: Horizon Europe