REGINE Regularisations in Europe Final Report - European ...

that a year after regularisation some 80% were still in the social security system and were able to
renew their residence permits. In both Spain and Italy, expert reports conclude that regularisation has
had a significant effect in reducing illegality. This is probably less true for the regularisations in
Greece, although no reliable data or studies are available. 114
For Spain, our report concludes that transition back into the informal sector was low for those
migrants working in construction and restaurants, but very high (up to 90%) for agriculture and
housekeeping. There is also an observable trend for a change of employment sector after
regularisation – from agriculture to construction (males) and from domestic work to restaurants
(females). For Italy, the study cited concludes that migrants’ actual employment often differed from
that shown on the residence permit; 115 on the other hand, it calculates that in the South of Italy
employment opportunities for legalised workers were roughly doubled in construction and agriculture.
Again, for Greece and Portugal there are no data.
We should note the European practice in regularisations of granting work visas, temporary cards (e.g.
6 months) or very short-term permits (1 or 2 years). This is in contrast to the amnesties of the USA
and elsewhere, which grant long-term residence rights with a view to citizenship. The European
policies are of two broad types: those that are predicated on immigrants as workers, and tend to
recreate illegal statuses where labour market conditions are poor; and those that are predicated on
humanitarian or social inclusion issues. In both cases, 6-month or 1-year permits are the norm, with
onerous (and frequently different) conditions for their renewal or conversion to a normal residence
permit. There are also some serious problems of a bureaucratic nature in implementing the transition
from work visas, temporary cards or permits to normal residence permits. Thus, the award of longerterm
statuses would seem to be an obvious route to improving retention rates; equally, setting
different criteria for permit renewals is counterproductive and should be avoided.
3.3.1.2 Criteria for eligibility
Most of the regularisation programmes have similar criteria, although with different emphases on
health status, ethnicity, family connections etc. The principal variable criterion of note is that of
employment contract or employment record (as distinct from social insurance payments); a pattern is
evident that requiring employers to actively participate in the regularisation process leads to a more
successful outcome. When the programme is run in parallel with enforcement of labour laws by the
Labour Ministry (i.e. a clampdown on the informal economy), and the dual Ministry approach also
actively involves all the major social partners, the policy is more securely effective. The Spanish
programme of 2005, as well as the Italian one of 2002, shows superior results over previous
programmes (particularly compared with the Greek programmes) apparently for these reasons. The
114 For an explanation of why this is likely to be the case, see REGINE country study for Greece.
115 This is also shown by Reyneri’s study of earlier Italian regularisations, where falsified employment contracts
and complex mixes of formal, informal and even fraudulent employment were common. See Reyneri, E. (1999):
"The mass legalization of migrants in Italy: permanent or temporary emergence from the underground
economy?", in Baldwin-Edwards, M., Arango, J. (eds): Immigrants and the Informal Economy in Southern
Europe, Routledge, 1999, pp. 83—104.
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