REGINE Regularisations in Europe Final Report - European ...

1.4 The meaning of ‘regularisation’
The term ‘regularisation’ has no clearly defined meaning, either legally or through general usage.
Historically, legalisation or amnesty for those in an irregular status has very different origins across
countries. Differing patterns include corrective or accommodating measures related to changes in
post-colonial nationality laws (the UK, the Netherlands), similar recent changes for some Baltic
countries, post-hoc legalisation of non-recruited (but needed) illegal labour migration flows (southern
Europe and France), legalisations for humanitarian reasons (most of western Europe), legalisation of
rejected asylum-seekers by virtue of the length of procedure (Belgium, the Netherlands), for family
reasons (France), and ‘earned’ regularisation 27 by virtue of duration of residence, employment record,
etc. (the UK, France, Spain et al.).
For the purposes of the REGINE project:
Regularisation is defined as any state procedure by which third country nationals who are
illegally residing, or who are otherwise in breach of national immigration rules, in their
current country of residence are granted a legal status.
This broad definition covers all procedures through which third country nationals in breach of
national immigration rules may acquire a legal status, whether or not these are explicitly intended to
offer a legal status to migrants in an irregular situation. In some cases, we categorise as regularisations
certain procedures which the Member State involved does not consider to be such. Specifically, these
include the de facto regularisation of 2006 in Italy, the various regularisation programmes of Germany
for long-term ‘tolerated’ persons, and an employment-based regularisation in Austria implemented in
1990. We also take account of a process that we call ‘normalisation’ 28 by which a short-term
residence status is awarded to persons already with legal (but transitional) status: this includes
categories such as students or asylum-seekers who change their status (e.g. exceptional grant of a nontransitional
legal status on grounds of marriage). 29
The definition provided above does not specify the dimensions covered by such procedures, i.e.
whether it pertains to residence (residence permits), access to employment (work permits/ residence
permits giving access to employment) or compliance with employment and social security regulations
(possession of a formal work contract; compliance with tax and social security obligations).
27 Our usage of the term ‘earned’ regularisation is different from its specific meaning of the concrete proposals
for an earned regularisation scheme as developed by MPI president Demetrius Papademetriou (see infra, chapter
2, for a description of the scheme).
28 This is our own terminology (although it is taken from the Spanish normalización, as used in Spain’s 2005
legalisation), used in the very specific sense of ‘adjusting’ the status of persons, rather than actually granting a
legal status to those without. It is not, therefore, a regularisation as defined above.
29 Various regularisation programmes and mechanisms provide, or have provided, for the regularisation of longterm
asylum seekers, including in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK, often targeting
specific categories of long-term asylum seekers. In particular in the 1990s, such programmes were often
intended to provide complementary protection to persons not covered by the Geneva Convention, notably
refugees from the former Yugoslavia. According to Koen Dewulf (Centre for Equal Opportunities and
Opposition to Racism, Belgium, comment, International Seminar on Longitudinal Follow-up of postimmigration
patterns based on administrative data and record-linkage, Belgian Federal Science Policy, Brussels,
23 June 2008) existing regularisation mechanisms have been extensively used to award unrestricted legal
statuses to other persons with liminal legal status, notably students who had developed ties to Belgium.
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