Departament de Dret i Ciències Polítiques

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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    UAO
    Micro-Management of Irregular Migration. Internal Borders and Public Services in London and Barcelona2022

    This open access book provides an analysis of the functioning, consequences and inherent limitations of internalised immigration control. By adopting the perspective of irregular residents as well as local service providers, the book sheds new light on the intricate mechanisms that either help or hinder the diffusion of immigration control into concrete institutional settings, like schools or hospitals. A simple and innovative analytical framework enables thesystematic comparison of three different spheres of service provision across two distinct local as well as also national contexts. This is necessary to understand the complex interplay between formal law and policy, the intrinsic rules and logics operating within institutions, and the ethical or practical obligations and constraints attached to particular roles and professions. Based on empirical findings and rigorous analysis, the book argues that internalised control is part of the problem that irregular migration poses for society, rather than constituting a potential solution to it.

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    UAO
    Integration against the state: Irregular migrants’ agency between deportation and regularisation in the UK2017

    Reducing the number of foreigners residing unlawfully within the borders of a state requires either their removal or the legalisation of their presence within the territory. Increasingly, governments also employ measures of internal control and limit irregular migrants access to rights and services in order to encourage them to leave autonomously. This article aims to contribute to current debates on how to conceptualise and account for the agency that irregular migrants themselves exercise in such contexts. Within critical migration and citizenship studies, many of their everyday actions have been described as ‘acts of citizenship’ but also as instances of ‘becoming imperceptible’, neither of which captures the whole range of strategies irregular migrants employ to strengthen their fragile position vis-à-vis the state. I argue that conceptualising their agency in terms of (self-)integration allows us to account for both: practices through which they actively become political subjects as well as those that precisely constitute a deliberate refusal to do so. Empirically, this is underpinned by an analysis of recent policy developments in the United Kingdom and a series of semi-structured interviews I conducted during 8 months of fieldwork in London with migrants experiencing different kinds and degrees of irregularity.

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    UAO
    Health Care Versus Border Care: Justification and Hypocrisy in the Multilevel Negotiation of Irregular Migrants’ Access to Fundamental Rights and Services2019

    Providing—and also not providing—public services to unlawful residents implies a certain cost for host societies, and both inclusion and exclusion involve localized renegotiations of fundamental rights, legitimate needs, and social membership. Based on original qualitative research data, this article compares how, why, and under which conditions irregular migrants are granted or denied access to healthcare services provided in London and Barcelona. From a multi-level perspective and by drawing on organization theory, I highlight key differences in how the responsible governments deal with the underlying contradictions and thereby either help or hinder effective policy implementation.

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    UAO
    "Our aim is to assist migrants in making a well-informed decision": how return counsellors in Austria and the Netherlands manage the aspirations of unwanted non-citizens2021

    European governments widely celebrate and extensively fund ‘assisted voluntary return’ (AVR) programmes and assume that return counsellors play an important role for their implementation. At the same time, relevant legislation only vaguely defines this role and reduces it to a passive and neutral provision of ‘objective information’. In this article, we therefore ask how much and what kind of agency individual counsellors exercise and how this affects the aim and nature of AVR. We argue that counsellors fulfil a highly ambiguous function within a system that overall aims to bring unwanted migrants’ decision-making in line with restrictive immigration law. This function requires considerable autonomy to choose and use the various kinds of information they provide. We conceptualise their work as ‘aspirations management’ that mediates the ‘asymmetrical negotiation’ between precarious status migrants and the governments seeking to deport them. Based on original qualitative data from Austria and the Netherlands, we analytically distinguish three fundamentally different counselling strategies: facilitating migrants’ existing return aspirations, obtaining their compliance without aspirations, and/or inducing aspirations for return. This framework not only helps us to conceptualise AVR counsellors’ specific agency, but will also be useful for analysing how other actors manage the aspirations of unwanted non-citizens.