REGINE Regularisations in Europe Final Report - European ...

denying residence permits to existing residents over the age of retirement: it merely creates yet
another category of ‘illegally staying’ that is probably non-deportable anyway. In line with ECHR
jurisprudence conferring rights on legal or illegal residents (see §6.2), the minimum resources
provision of the EU long-term permit should be dropped for pensioners already residing on the
territory.
Related proposal(s):Option 6a, 10
3.3.4 Regularisations in lieu of labour migration policy
In the expert studies commissioned for this project, but also generally in the academic and
professional literature, most of the countries engaging in large-scale regularisation programmes have
done so partly through their failure to recruit sufficient TCN workers (other than seasonal labour)
through official channels. 139 In particular, Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal exhibit this characteristic,
although illegal labour migration can also be seen as structurally embedded throughout highly
developed capitalism, including the USA and Northern Europe. 140
The result of simple abandonment of regularisations would be to increase the extent of informal
employment and the size of the informal sector. The problem of illegal employment has already been
addressed in a Commission study of 2004, 141 which noted the apparent disinterest of MS in
identifying and dealing with the issue of the enlarging informal sector: furthermore, the economic
sectors primarily affected (construction, services, tourism, agriculture) are those in which illegal
immigrants are almost exclusively employed.
One solution, carried out on a small scale under the Spanish Contingente of the 1990s, is to permit
illegal residents to apply for work permits as if they were not resident – in other words, allocating a
quota for overseas recruitment to illegally-resident TCNs. This has also been done on a large scale in
2006 by Italy, 142 whereby some 350,000 143 illegal TCN workers were granted residence permits. Thus,
a de facto regularisation was carried out and mostly evaded public and political scrutiny. In the long
run, however, more pro-active and open labour recruitment schemes are required, with the objective
of shifting illegal migration flows into formal processes.
Related proposal(s): Option 10b
139 See: Reyneri, E. (2001) op. cit., and Baldwin-Edwards, M. and Arango, J. (eds) (2000): Immigrants and the
Informal Economy in Southern Europe, London, Routledge. This policy failure is also openly acknowledged by
the relevant MS returns of the ICMPD questionnaire, although geographical location and other factors are also
relevant for the magnitude and characteristics of irregular immigrant stocks and flows.
140 Baldwin-Edwards, M. (2008): ‘Towards a theory of illegal migration: historical and structural components’,
Third World Quarterly, 29/7
141 Renooy, P. et al.: ‘Undeclared work in an enlarged Union’. Final Report, DG Employment, May 2004
142 The questionnaire return by the Italian government makes no mention of this issue: see REGINE country
study on Italy. For a detailed study of the use of annual quotas as regularisation policy in Italy, see Cuttitta, P.
(2008): ‘Yearly quotas and country-reserved shares in Italian immigration policy’, Migration Letters, 5/1
143 Ibid., p. 48
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