According to the ILO (2013), small shops and businesses, micro-manufacturing industries, warehouses, among subcontractors in the construction sectors and in agricultural activities. Under-declared work is even more frequent in industrialized economies and found in almost all sectors to avoid tax payment and decrease labour costs (for example paying under the table or not paying at all for nightshifts, weekend, or overtime work, but ensuring some social security coverage to workers by declaring the statutory minimum). The practice of subcontractors—used mostly in construction, transportation, logistics, and big commercial chains—often hides the use of cheap or undeclared labour hired by the subcontractor to replace regular, regulated and therefore more expensive, in-house employment. Temporary work agencies might also convey irregular practices in hiring and firing workers, while the extensive use of very short-term contracts for seasonal activities, on-call contracts, and voucher systems is generally found in the services sector (domestic and care, restaurants and hotels, entertainment, etc.). Finally, the practice of bogus or false employment is more common among highly-skilled, professional sectors where the presence of migrant workers is still rare across Europe; the widespread use of internships among young adults is likely to affect in high numbers both national and foreign prospective workers, and it is often more similar to unpaid work than to an on-the-job training period.

Indeed, irregular employment exists among local and migrant workers, with important implications at various levels. At the individual level, workers are excluded from social security coverage against the risk of illness, work injuries, unemployment, or age. Even when non-compliance with legal requirements is the result of an intended action of the workers—who might go for short-term benefits in-cash instead of long-term benefits in social security provisions—it implies some form of exclusion from what happens in the regular economy: higher vulnerability and more exposure to exploitation, low enforcement of labour rights, more insecurity and less continuity of employment or accruing of wages. This is true especially for low-skilled workers and less-qualified occupations, but it is not limited to them. At the structural level, irregular employment and the whole informal economy threatens the sustainability of welfare systems through a race to the bottom in standards and safeguards of formal enterprises to be competitive with informal ones through more deregulation and liberalization. In the long run, it reduces the quality of work and possibly the overall competitiveness in the global economy.1

The difficulty of referring to irregular employment in a single category, given the variety of possible combinations illustrated, becomes further complicated when the worker is a migrant and may or may not have the right to reside and work in the country.

#### *8.2.2 Irregular Work and Irregular Migrants: Multiple Dimensions*

Triandafyllidou and Bartolini in Chap. 2 of this volume have discussed the different types and degrees of 'irregularity' in relation to the residence status. The step further is to look at the possible ways in which irregular foreign residents and legallyresiding foreign residents are irregularly employed.

Table 8.2 distinguishes between possible citizenship and residence status, entitlement to work, and nature of employment of migrants of working-age within the European Union, seeking to produce a typology to understand where the irregular employment of irregular and regular migrants may arise.

The categories and conditions presented in Table 8.2 need to be understood in conjunction with the available knowledge on where the "most common expressions of undeclared work in the EU" lie (ILO 2013, 15–20), to unveil which are the combination between one's status in terms of residence and of employment that are most likely to be associated with vulnerability to exploitative conditions at the individual level which also create important challenges for the labour market in terms of controls and policy coordination. Indeed, migrants who find themselves in an irregular position both with regards with their residence and their employment condition are more likely to be found in certain specific sectors of the economy, as the next paragraph will further show, reinforcing dynamics of exclusion from the formal sphere of social and economic life migrants whose presence is somewhat known and tolerated from the authorities.2

1See the debated efforts to include estimates of informal and illegal economy into GDP figures at the European level (Merler and Hutl 2015).

2Practical examples of this toleration of irregular migrants by residence and inclusion with various degrees of regularity into local labour market are the case of Greece, which passed a law in 2016 to employ irregular migrants in agriculture to cope with farming needs (EMN 2016), and the case of Malta, in which the construction sector is known to extensively employ sub-Saharan migrants coming from Italy and in possess of an expiring Italian residence permit (see https://www.newsdeeply. com/refugees/articles/2018/08/06/migrants-malta-does-not-want-are-powering-its-economy).

**Table 8.2** Working-age migrants by possible residence and employment status

(continued)

#### **Table 8.2** (continued)

(continued)

**Table 8.2** (continued)

Source: Authors' adaptation from (OECD 2000; Kovacheva and Vogel 2009)

#### **8.3 European Labour Market Dynamics and the (Irregular) Migrant Work**

Adopting a structural approach in looking at European labour markets to understand where most common forms of irregular work arise which involve the migrant workforce, a special attention is placed by a consistent body of work to the role of institutional and context-specific factors, such as labour market structures and regulations, size and pervasiveness of underground economy, welfare regimes or immigration policies, typically adopting comparative research approaches (Piore 1979; Kogan 2006; Reyneri and Fullin 2011).

As initially theorized by Piore (1979), looking at the segmentation of the labour market in the destination country helps explaining how migrants integrate into local labour markets and in which ways migrants can be involved in irregular forms of work. According to a consistent body of research based on Piore's work on "dual labour market", migrants' labour market integration process is influenced by the segmentation level of labour markets at destination, in which a "primary" segments

with relatively high-pay, highly-skilled and stable jobs can thrive and rely on a "secondary" segments with low paid, low-skilled and highly volatile jobs, with low possibility of upward mobility, which are often filled by migrant workforce (Reyneri and Fullin 2011). In many recent official reports at the EU level, labour market segmentation is indeed recognized as a persistent feature that needs targeted interventions across EU countries (EC 2015b, 2017).

Although there is no single definition of segmentation with regards to the specific indicators and measures that needs to be taken into account, various work have looked at the characteristics of the workforce in terms of age structure, age, race, migration status, skills, sectors of specialization, and so on) together with a number of structural features of local labour markets (ageing dynamics of the workforce, levels of female labour participation, the proportion of highly- versus low-skilled occupations, the prevalence of small versus big firms, the proportion of selfemployment and temporary contracts, the prevalence of subcontracting procedures in some sectors) of the economic system as whole, as for example the tax and social contribution wedge (the proportional difference between the worker's cost for the employer and the worker's net wage), of the public administration (the level and quality of public services to support economic activity and family reproduction, the level of efficiency and/or bureaucratization of administrative procedures), of immigration policies (the degree of enforcement and controls), the social acceptance of economic informality (Reyneri 2001; Ambrosini 2013; Düvell 2006), and the economic cycle.

Moreover, social norms are often mentioned in discussions on where and why irregular employment and irregular migration are more likely to be found: scholars often agree that in some southern European countries it is easier to avoid compliance to norms than in countries of central and northern Europe, and especially in sectors like agriculture, construction, small or family firms in the manufacturing sectors, services, and self-employment (see for instance Ambrosini 2015). Indeed, these countries are internationally rated as those with most rigid state regulation of economic activity but with low enforcement levels and widespread free-riding behaviours. Nevertheless, an important share of the estimated irregular employment is also found in central and northern European countries. In each country, depending on the characteristics listed above, the interplay between irregular activities and immigration flows might generate different levels and combinations and create special niches for informal labour of irregular migrants to flourish.

#### *8.3.1 A Steady Demand for Low-Skilled, Precarious and Cheap Workers Within a Restrictive Migration Environment*

Over the last 30 years, tensions between labour market demands and increasingly selective immigration policies have become evident in most industrialized countries. In the EU context, efforts to strengthen controls, curb irregular migration and establish a common migration and asylum system have been on the rise especially since the beginning of the 2000s, reducing regular entry channels and officially promoting only highly-skilled immigration. While many European countries—perhaps with the exception of the UK—seem unable to compete in the global battle for brains (Campanella 2014), their need for immigration is structural and likely to remain at high levels in the medium term. In the words of the European Commission, "The EU is […] facing a series of long-term economic and demographic challenges. Its population is ageing, while its economy is increasingly dependent on highlyskilled jobs. Furthermore, without migration the EU's working age population will decline by 17.5 million in the next decade. Migration will increasingly be an important way to enhance the sustainability of our welfare system and to ensure sustainable growth of the EU economy." (EC 2015a, b: 14).

As for low-skilled jobs, the chronic mismatch between national restrictive policies and economic demand for cheap and flexible labour in many sectors such as construction, cleaning, caring, catering, and tourism has led to the toleration of certain levels of 'physiological' irregular migration (Ruhs and Anderson 2006; Ambrosini 2013).

Already in the mid-1990s some researchers (see for instance Arango and Baldwin-Edwards 1999) were pointing to the structural imbalances in southern European labour markets where a relatively high level of domestic unemployment combined with high levels of immigration. Migrants were indeed taking the jobs that natives were reluctant to fill because of both low pay and low prestige. This was particularly the case in labour-intensive and seasonal sectors, as well as in the caring and cleaning sector, as native women engaged in paid work leaving the care needs of old and young family members uncovered (Reyneri 2004; Ribas-Mateos 2004). The same sectors are typically those where informal work thrives and is tolerated, especially when the workplace is a private space and inspections are virtually non-existent.

Additionally, bureaucratic hurdles to permits' renewal often may lead migrants to periods of undocumented/illegal stay (for example, because of unemployment). Several studies have confirmed that migrants with more precarious and unstable work and residence conditions can fall into vicious circles of irregular stay and informal employment until a regular occupation is found with characteristics that allow them to regain their regular migration status. In this sense, informal employment may be part of such adaptive responses to difficulties posed by migration rules that keep a close connection between legal stay and a registered job (Reyneri 2001).

However, as more recent research on the UK has shown (Anderson 2010), immigration controls that are supposed to protect migrant workers from exploitation and locals from unfair competition can create an environment of informal work as they institutionalise vulnerability and uncertainty. Migrant workers with insecure status or with restricted socio-economic rights—restrictions on family reunification, restricted access to housing benefits or family allowances—live in a status of precariousness that conduces to informal and exploitative work. To avoid the risk of being fired, they are willing to accept to work overtime or in unfavourable night/ weekend shifts with little pay, or to be falsely self-employed. Especially when they

have no family and only short-term prospects of staying at destination, they might prefer some additional cash in hand than the protection of labour and welfare rights which are often non-portable. The dependence of the migrant worker on the employer creates incentives for exploitation and irregular work arrangements.

As outlined earlier, the overall demand for migrant work in Europe has been geared towards sectors where informality is structurally high. Furthermore, after the EU enlargements in 2004 and 2007, citizens of the new member states provided for a legal migrant labour force, competing with third-country nationals as they were freed from the need of permit renewal. EU citizenship has not been sufficient to protect these intra-EU migrants from severe exploitation and irregular work. Studies on agriculture in Italy and Spain, for instance, show that EU migrants, particularly women, work under extreme conditions of vulnerability and have little access to their rights. Issues like having networks, not being isolated at work, or knowing the language are more important or equally important as being an EU citizen, regularly present in the destination-country (Palumbo and Sciurba 2018; Mesa de la Integración 2018).

Asylum seekers with pending applications also experience special vulnerability (Lewis and Waite 2015). They may temporarily reside legally in the country but without the right to work for periods that vary from two months (Italy), to three (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), nine (France), or 12 (United Kingdom). In most of the cases, asylum seekers might look for jobs in construction, agriculture, or other sectors, with a view of earning some income while waiting for the outcome of their request. These legal residents with pending status are particularly alluring for unscrupulous employers as they pose no danger in terms of breaching migration law but offer the possibility of lowering labour costs for jobs that do not require a high degree of specialisation or language skills, or for jobs that are unstable, seasonal, and badly paid.

Semi-compliance involving legal stay and irregular work can be an intentional strategy for employers and (migrant) workers. As already argued, there seems to be an "economically optimal level of illegal migration" (Boswell and Straubhaar 2003) and notion that immigration can "grease the wheels" (Borjas 2001) of labour markets even in its irregular form. Keeping migrants in an irregular employment condition, when they cannot be contained, seems to add particular, though unfair, economic advantages to their presence (Düvell 2006).

Moreover, the employment of irregular migrants does not only involve the convenience of single employers or private households but has economic and social impacts on the whole society. The presence of irregular foreign residents in a country increases the local labour supply and can represent a form of unfair competition against the local workforce, leading to a sort of crowding out or substitution of regular workers for occupations at the very bottom of the skill and wage scales. Nevertheless, the overall economic effect of irregular migrant workers is far from being clear and should be tested case by case depending on the overarching labour market structure. Several empirical studies suggest that immigrants are complements rather than competitors in their host countries' labour market (Venturini and Villosio 2008). Overall, a real competition between migrants and natives in general

has barely been proven as irregular migrants have skills and characteristics different from the local workforce and can hardly replace it at all levels and in all sectors. Interactions between migrants and the host labour markets can determine a strong specialization of (irregular) migrants in sectors not adequately filled by local workforce. In filling these gaps, migrants allow locals—especially in the traditional labour markets of southern Europe—to up-scale and reach higher positions in the labour market (Fullin and Reyneri 2011). Moreover, the overcrowding argument has lost its plausibility for almost all European countries, whose working-age populations are decreasing.

Even during the European economic downturn, despite the rhetoric on brain drains from hard-hit countries and replacement of migrants by natives, no largescale movements of native workers to the lowest-ranked jobs and occupations to find employment were observed (Triandafyllidou and Isaakyan 2016). Although data for a systematic analysis of the effect of the economic recession on the composition of workforce by sectors and skill-levels are yet to be analysed comparatively across Europe, the most visible effect is the higher risk of unemployment of migrants than natives and the increase in the number of non-renewals of work permits, especially in the construction and industrial sectors. In some cases, there might have been a displacement effect of third-country nationals by EU migrants (agriculture, domestic, and care work); in others, losing residence and work status might have increased the irregular migrant population (Triandafyllidou 2014).

#### *8.3.2 Irregular Migrant Work: A Sectorial Approach*

Today, as in the early 2000s, the highest concentration of irregular foreign workers is found in agriculture, manufacturing, construction, public works (through public procurement and sub-contractors), and the service sector (tourism, entertainment, hospitality) (ILO 2013). To these, the big return to paid domestic labour worldwide and specifically in Europe, recently described as the "defamilialization of care" (Estévez-Abe and Naldini 2016), has to be added. Agriculture, tourism, and construction are characterized by high competition, a certain degree of seasonal fluctuations and low profit margins, made possible only by squeezing labour costs. In some cases, informal labour arrangements are favoured by the nature of the workplace, which is difficult to control or not visible (construction sites, farms, cleaning companies, and services provided through internet) (Triandafyllidou 2013). In others, employers with or without employees are themselves hardly structured and observable (small family businesses, households, and self-employed service providers).

To delve deeper into those niches where irregular work of irregular migrants are more likely to be found, the following subsections combine a sectorial approach discussing the prevalent dynamics of the irregular work of irregular migrants in the domestic and care sector, agriculture, and the construction sectors—by presenting some country-case examples. The three selected sectors show different labour and migration dynamics and different challenges: the domestic/care work takes place in a very personalised and 'private' domain; agriculture is a domain of temporary and informal work squeezed by large conglomerates in the agri-food business; and construction represents an area where again employment is unstable albeit not seasonal but rather tied to specific building projects and where multiple levels of subcontracting dominate.

*Domestic and Care Work in the Home* According to the ILO (2015), 80% of migrant domestic workers are concentrated in high income countries (9.1 million out of the 11.5 million estimated). The observed increase of paid domestic work since the early 2000s is associated with at least two main trends shared by most of the advanced economies in Europe and elsewhere: population ageing and the increase in labour market participation of (native) women.

Especially in countries where there is low male participation in reproductive roles and household chores, the greater presence of women in the labour market depends, in the abstract, on the provision of private care and domestic services by someone else in the home. Hence, the availability of cheap, irregular work to provide for domestic and care work has played a key role in allowing more women to find paid employment outside the home (Ambrosini 2013) in those countries with more unbalanced gender relations and with poorly-developed social safety nets for both child and elderly care (Estévez-Abe and Naldini 2016).

Different countries have opted for different solutions to ensure financial viability of long-term care provisions for the elderly, coping with generalized welfare cuts, and growing care needs at the same time. Several studies have shown that different welfare and care regimes led to different types of migration, care arrangements, and care markets, with Italy and other southern European countries relying on a specific division of labour among family migrant carers (mostly female), and skilled native workers (Bettio et al. 2006). More specifically, in a recent study on Italy, the UK, and the Netherlands (Van Hooren 2012), the Italian familistic care regime is found to provide cash allowances to families without controls on how they spend the funds, which incentivises the emergence of a 'migrant-in-the-family' model of care, with families becoming employers of migrant care workers. In the British care regime, where care is increasingly transformed into cash payments, a double market emerges with more affluent families that resort to the private market for paid care and less affluent families that use care allowances to cover food or transportation costs and directly provide care to the elderly person, only in few cases with the help of a paid care worker. As the UK government monitors how the allowances are spent, hiring an irregular migrant care worker is not an option. In the Dutch case, care services are provided by the public welfare system and there is thus no private market of care services, with a very low demand for migrant care workers (Van Hooren 2012, 141–42). Also, in a larger study on the care sector, Da Roit and Weicht (2013) find that Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain rely mainly on migrant care workers at home, while the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK tend to rely more on the formal sector and on services provided by public or private entities.

The distinction between familistic and liberal regimes can also partially explain the cases of Austria and Germany with the limited public resources, the public preference for cash programmes, and the segregation of migrants in low skilled jobs (Da Roit and Weicht 2013, 479). The scarcity of cash-for-care programmes is complemented by a high level of informal work arrangements mainly involving migrants (see also León and Pavolini 2014), which together with a strongly segregated labour market leads to a migrant-in-the-family model (Da Roit and Weicht 2013, 481). At the same time, when there are no uncontrolled cash benefits and no large informal economy, a migrant-in-formal-care model can arise, as in the case of the Netherlands, France, Sweden, and Norway. These factors alone are not sufficient though, as in the UK case where there is a strong presence of the private sector and formal care arrangements through private providers.

To summarize, the emergence of informal migrant work in the domestic home care sector is shaped by a combination of factors: total public expenditures on formal care services, the presence or absence of uncontrolled cash-for-care programmes, and the presence or absence of irregular migrants or indeed of migrants who can afford to work without a formal contract (EU citizens, TCNs with permanent permit, with a permit linked to their spouse or naturalized, and all those who do not need to prove to be employed in order to keep/ renew their residence permit).

Moreover, the intrinsic characteristics of domestic and care work in private households may exacerbate the specific barriers to information and understanding of administrative procedures and labour laws that are usually faced by migrants. Live-in migrant domestic workers tend more than others to be isolated from peers, service providers and the host society in general, with limited freedom of movement in the public sphere. Hence, they are hence more at risk of exploitation, abuse, lack of access to fundamental rights (privacy and dignity, freedom). Live-out immigrant workers too may experience the same kind of exclusion and marginalization if they are in irregular resident position (Triandafyllidou 2013). As recently recalled by (Marchetti and Salih 2017), this is a particularly gendered area of employment for migrant workers, attracting both irregular migrant women and regularly-residing migrant women who are nevertheless channelled to care or domestic work.

*Agriculture* When we look at the agricultural sector, the analysis of the labour dynamics intersects with the analysis of how the production of food and the management of natural resources have changed over recent decades, in relation to other sectors of the European economies and to other countries where rural communities still represent a significant share of the total population. Agriculture is still particularly relevant in EU countries of the south—Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and France—where the management of the rural territory is central for agro-industry and the tourism sector. Despite its success in supporting production levels, the Common Agricultural Policy has achieved less satisfactory results on a social and environmental level, with rural populations affected by faster ageing and higher emigration rates than the average. Immigration has consistently filled the growing demand for seasonal, hard and low-paying work, as natives are reluctant to engage in agricultural labour because of its low prestige and profits and because of the general internal migration to urban areas. Regular and irregular migrant workers are now found in many local districts of agro-food production in almost all European countries, with conditions of work and residence that vary depending on the more general country-context of immigration (see among others Cillo and Toffanin 2014 on Italy; Scott et al. 2012 on the UK; Rye 2017 on Norway).

The connection with commercial networks, agro-entrepreneurs, intermediaries, and the final consumers push for lowering the prices of vegetables and fruits at any costs and with difficult traceability of products. The dynamics of irregular employment in agriculture are thus shaped by a number of factors that are not confined to labour migration management but rather have to do with the organisation of production and related sectorial labour market dynamics. The inherent seasonality of agricultural productions requires ultra-flexible mechanisms to regulate the existing workforce; workers should be available on call, be easily dismissed, work under adverse conditions, and have few prospects for upwards mobility. Moreover, international and national competition among large corporations in the retail and agrifood production chains creates pressure for lowering production costs at the lowest level of the chain, especially squeezing labour costs when all other production inputs*—*water, energy, fertilizers, and mechanization of processes*—*are put under control (Palumbo and Sciurba 2018).

In this context, migration policy plays an important role by restricting channels for legal labour migration with the aim of domestic electorates against the threads of a 'migration crisis' (Dines et al. 2018). At the same time though, they have an important side-effect of creating a plentiful young labour force available to work at extreme conditions, vulnerable to exploitation because of its irregular or insecure legal status (Lewis and Waite 2015; Amnesty International 2012).

In Ireland, the UK, Germany and the Nordic countries, the demand for agricultural labour has been largely met through intra-European migration from the newlyaccessed member states. While this migration was linked to seasonal contractual employment, recent research has shown that employment was formally legal but often exploitative, involving sub-standard conditions in terms of working hours, wages, and safety conditions. Potter and Hamilton (2014) document how mushroom pickers coming from the new member states worked initially without papers, either because they were unaware of the necessary documentation or because they trusted the employer's promise of subsequent regularization. In the case of the UK, concerns are growing over what will happen after Brexit, on whether there will be seasonal schemes to cater for a much-needed labour force from EU countries, incentives for native unemployed workers to take up jobs in the sector, or investments in increased automation (McGuinnnes and Garto Grimwood 2017).

In southern Europe, male and female migrants of different nationalities are concentrated in specific regions and local districts. Many of them are seasonal workers whose administrative position makes them more prone to abuses by employers. The quota system applied in Italy is not aligned with the real needs in cultivations which are highly dependent on the season and not always foreseeable, but always higher than what the formal entry quotas permit (Cillo and Toffanin 2014). Moreover, in the last few years there has been an increase in a particular kind of flexible migrant labour force in agriculture—that of migrants who have applied for protection and those with a regular refugee, subsidiary or humanitarian status *—*that has led to what has been defined as "refugeeization" of specific segments of the migrant labour force (Dines and Rigo 2015), which involves young and mostly male migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and southeast Asia in Italy, Greece, Spain (see also Palumbo and Sciurba 2018).

*Construction* Construction is a volatile sector whose dynamics are strongly related to fluctuations of the local and national economic cycle, of energy and raw material prices, on political decisions on the use of land for new buildings or infrastructures, as well as on incentives for private demand/supply of new construction or renovation sites. Construction is a labour-intensive activity that is usually dominated by small firms with limited fixed capital, with the exception of some large companies that can manage entire building projects and often outsource single segments to smaller subcontractors (Bosch 2012). Labour is usually provided through temporary work agencies and specialized subcontractors, thus contributing to the creation of a competitive job market where workers can be summoned at short notice and where employment is certainly not stable (Ibid.). In the case of Europe, the issue of posted workers from southern and eastern European countries competing with local workers of central and northern European countries has gained public attention since the entry into force of the Posting of Workers Directive in 1996.

Hence, construction has evolved into a sector for mostly European migrant employment, especially in the case of Germany, the UK, and other northern European countries. On the other side, in Mediterranean countries like Italy, Greece or Spain, migrants from eastern Europe have traditionally filled the gap for cheap and flexible labour along with migrants from North Africa. In these countries, construction is a highly-segmented sector with a relatively small, highly-regulated force of workers, protected by trade unions and respecting the standards, plus a large peripheral, unregulated labour market that included a large number of irregular migrants. Spain stood out in particular because of the boom in residential construction of the 2000s which attracted a large number of immigrants, both regular and irregular (Fellini et al. 2007) that suffered from high unemployed in recent years. The same recurrent dynamics are found across southern Europe, with Albanians in both Greece and Italy, Georgians, Ukrainians, and Bulgarians in Greece,and Ukrainians, Poles; and Romanians in Italy and Spain. Such dynamics have also been found in the UK (Bloch 2013) and the Netherlands (Snel et al. 2015).

The match of offer and demand in construction initially takes place through word of mouth and later on through migrants themselves who become formal or informal subcontractors, with their own teams of co-workers providing their services to a native subcontractor. Employment is irregular when workers are irregular. However, upwards mobility to better-paid or more skilled position and/or to the creation of an independent enterprise for subcontracting is possible as workers regularize. Co-ethnic networks are crucial in this respect. Upward mobility has been more readily available to Poles, Bulgarians, and Romanians as they acquired EU citizenship, but the same was true for TCNs regularized through one of the large 'amnesty' programs implemented, for example, in Italy in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Nonetheless, regularizing the residence status did not necessarily mean a fullyregular employment too. More often, migrant construction workers were paid partly off-the-books to top up minimum wages, formally declared to receive social insurance coverage and the renewal of work permits. This has proven to be an important bargaining tool in the hands of subcontractors, both formal and informal, who brokered deals with big construction companies for suppressing the costs of labour.

Different dynamics were observable in northern Europe. Here, subcontracts and employment agencies played a crucial role for opening migrant employment channels. In Germany, posted worker arrangements and a massive entry of foreign workers in the construction sector happened already in the mid-to-late 1990s despite trade union protest (Fellini et al. 2007). In the British construction sector, massive migrant employment became common with the arrival of Polish workers after the 2004. Practices of subcontracting and bogus self-employment have been widespread in the sector (Caro et al. 2015). The role of transnational contractors that had good relations with construction firms in Germany, the Netherlands, or the UK is also crucial: these tend to have a flexible pool of migrant workers which they can tap to satisfy demand. Given the mobile nature of the work and the need to move between construction sites, oftentimes workers depend on their employer not only for work and pay but also for temporary housing and transportation. In her study, Berntsen (2016, 8) documents how such subcontracting arrangements with migrant workers are preferable as workers are there without their families, are housed in groups, and are thus more reliable and ready to work over time. On the other side, a study on Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands (Caro et al. 2015) found that this hyper-flexibility and high mobility reduces incentives for workers to integrate as more permanent migrants, and it is likely to segregate them within mono-national or mono-linguistic co-habiting solutions with colleagues.

Moreover, migrant workers in the construction sector are hardly protected by trade unions as the efforts of the latter to enforce labour standards generally leads to employer retaliation (Berntsen and Lillie 2014), with migrant workers "kicked out, have no job anymore and usually no accommodation, and find themselves, literally, standing in the streets without any protection" (trade union official cited in Berntsen 2016, 10). As in the case of agriculture, contracts are not secure as the job market is very competitive, and wages are still competitive compared to earnings at origin, thus substandard conditions are the rule. The extent to which substandard conditions may amount to irregular work depends on the type of labour market regulation in each country. In Nordic countries where wages are determined predominantly by agreements between unions and firms instead of mandatory minimum wages applicable across the board, this may lead to opening up windows for low-wage competition and sub-standard conditions as typically migrant labourers are not unionized. Thus as Friberg et al. (2014) show, migrant workers may be exposed to such exploitative arrangements in Norway and Denmark. However, it should be noted that such arrangements are characterized more as atypical work rather than as irregular work *tout court*. Irregular work perhaps comes into play mostly in these countries when migrant workers (particularly from EU countries and hence with legal stay status) perform house maintenance tasks for private households.

To sum up, irregular migrant employment is difficult in the construction sector particularly when it comes to large construction sites. However, the concern for substandard conditions that verge on exploitation and illegality is widespread, as migrant workers are generally not sufficiently protected by trade unions or collective because of the highly competitive and inherently unstable nature of the construction job market. In this context, subcontractors and employment agencies can provide both more and housing thus making the overall migration project viable and profitable for migrant workers as wages are still superior to those at home.

Irregular employment in construction is more likely in small sites, in private household maintenance, and also more generally in southern European countries where the deep economic crisis has hit the construction sector particularly hard since 2008, leading to massive unemployment among migrant workers (particularly men). Under such conditions wages have fallen significantly and informal work abounds, while third country nationals previously employed might have been unable to renew their permits and might have decided to return (see Mai 2011 on Italy and Albania).

More comparative and sectoral studies would be needed to see what is happening during the fragile economic recovery of southern European countries particularly hit by the crisis since 2008 on one hand, and how the workers' and contractors' reaction to Brexit are impacting posted workers from eastern Europe in the UK, on the other.

#### **8.4 Concluding Remarks**

This chapter aimed to show that irregular migration has a close interactive relationship with demand for a cheap and flexible labour force in specific sectors of western and southern European labour markets. The first part of this chapter reviews critically the different ways in which irregular stay status and irregular work status intertwine to produce different typologies of irregularity. We point to the role of third actors such as employment agencies or subcontractors in this complex landscape. The chapter thus shows the complex dynamics of demand for irregular work which include both long-term structural factors linked to specific labour market sectors and migration policies that do not properly respond to labour market needs but rather create more precariousness, vulnerability, and irregularity.

The long-term structural factors vary in different employment areas as this chapter shows by reviewing domestic and care work, agriculture and construction. For domestic and care work in the private home, an important role is played by the chronic underfunding of public welfare services and the privatisation of care in western and southern countries. In agriculture, the situation is characterised by the development of an intensive agriculture model in several areas of southern and western Europe for greenhouse productions and a parallel pressure on the market for low prices in vegetables and fruits. The harsh working conditions, the seasonality of jobs, the existence of multiple intermediaries, and the power of big supermarket chains to squeeze prices in order to maximise profits lead to a context where migrant workers are the weakest link in the chain, the one more prone to exploitation. Structural factors in the construction sector to some extent resemble those of agriculture: the sector is not seasonal, but it is volatile, often characterized by long sub-contracting chains and project-based, with frequent changes of employers.

All these factors create conditions of migrant workers' vulnerability in these sectors, as jobs are private (in domestic work) and inherently unstable (in agriculture and construction), and the. There is difficulty for workers to become unionised and hence know their rights and have access to them.

Migrant workers come to this context characterised by exploitation and precarity as well as harsh working conditions (hard manual work, unsocial hours, low pay, low prestige) and offer a flexible and exploitable labour force. This is particularly the case for undocumented migrants, asylum seekers whose cases are still pending, and especially for women migrants with family responsibilities. The lack of legal migration channels in general (for private domestic/care work and construction) or the existence of seasonal schemes that tie the worker to the employer (so as to guarantee to be called again the following year) leave the migrant worker vulnerable to the whims of unscrupulous employers. The difficulty of monitoring private homes as workplaces and remote agricultural areas further exacerbate these phenomena in domestic/care work and agriculture.

Addressing irregular migrant employment depends more upon labour market reforms that would eliminate or reduced the structural factors of demand for such work rather than on migration control to reduce the available, exploitable, and vulnerable workforce. Indeed, the enforcement of employment legislation, controls, inspections, verification of contracts, working conditions, accommodation, actual pay (Scott et al. 2012) are recurrently found in all policy documents at the national and European levels, offering different recommendations depending on the sector and the specific type of intersection between irregular work and irregular migration that we have described in the previous section (Wagner and Berntsen 2016). Within this context of combatting irregular work, there is a need to open up predictable and neat legal migration channels for workers in those sectors where demand for migrant workers is high and where domestic supply is low. Such channels would also safeguard the rights of native workers employed in these sectors as they would reduce the vulnerability of (irregular) migrant workers and would help guarantee labour standards (Ambrosini 2013).

Today there is also a deepening concern that recently arrived migrants and asylum seekers from the 2015–2017 flows might offer a pool of cheap and flexible workers who will be engaged in irregular work as their legal status may be unclear while they will feel the urgent need to make a living and provide for their families. A protracted waiting period for asylum seekers in process, without a formal right to work, may push them inadvertently into irregular employment as housing and inkind allowances while the asylum process is ongoing may not be sufficient for them to make ends meet. In addition such protracted no-work waiting periods may make their insertion into the formal labour market later on, even more difficult (OECD 2016; Martín et al. 2016).

#### **References**

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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## **Chapter 9 Emerging Reception Economies: A View from Southern Europe**

**Laura Bartolini, Regina Mantanika, and Anna Triandafyllidou**

#### **9.1 Introduction**

Irregular migration in Europe and irregular migration flows mainly by sea and by land to Europe are not a recent phenomenon. However, while in the 2000s irregular migration was largely absorbed in fast-growing economies in central and northern as well as southern Europe, the early 2010s were marked by two concomitant dramatic developments: the global and Eurozone economic crisis and, since 2014, a sudden surge of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers moving to Europe from Syria and the Middle East as well as Asia, Western and Eastern Africa. Thus, while addressing irregular migration has been a long-standing concern at both local and national levels in most European countries, the most recent debate and policy developments take place in a context marked by relatively high unemployment, economic austerity, and public spending cutbacks in frontline countries of southern Europe (notably Italy and Greece). The context is also marked by high immigrant (and native) unemployment in Greece (Triandafyllidou 2016, 2017), while in Italy thirdcountry nationals show a relative job retention during the crisis years but also a high segregation in low-skill/low-pay jobs (Fellini 2018). The management of the 'migration crisis' has put additional pressure on already-strained public finances and overburdened public services. Recent research has started to document the difficulties in

L. Bartolini

International Organization for Migration (IOM), Rome, Italy

R. Mantanika Department of Sociology, University of Crete, Crete, Greece

A. Triandafyllidou (\*)

Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
The opinions expressed in this chapter are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

the frontline border areas where payments of salaries of refugee centre workers can be delayed (Casati 2018) and where police and border guard officers feel they do not have the means to adequately fulfil their tasks (Chouliaraki and Georgiou 2017; Rozakou 2017).

Recent research has investigated *the economies of migration control.* One line of research has looked specifically into the border control industry, Claire Rodier (2012) has highlighted the triple function of migration controls—economic, ideological, and geopolitical—arguing that border management serves other interests than those it claims to defend, notably it leads to the development of an economy of security services, provided by specialized multinational firms. Rodier argues that this security industry has paradoxically profited from the introduction of free circulation within the EU. Fotiadis (2015) also shows how multinational companies and EU policies have boosted security concerns thus creating a market for high-tech control equipment. Carrying the argument a step further, Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sorensen (2013) analysed the complex relations between civil society, government, and private actors in migration management. These relations impact on migratory flows as well as on policies and practices that try to regulate migration movement, from the flourishing of transportation and border-crossing smuggling services to deportation practices aimed at control and deterrence for future prospective migrants.

A second line of research has assessed the overall cost-effectiveness of migration control—a question that often escapes public attention. Lunaria (2013) has shown that Italy spent more than 1.67 billion euros on policies aimed at combatting irregular migration in the period 2005–2012, of which three-quarters came from national funds and the rest from EU funds. Most of this funds have been used to ensure control of sea and land borders through surveillance technology systems implemented at border areas, implementing returns, running the administrative detention centres for irregular migrants (CIE, *Centri di Identificazione ed Espulsione* or Centres for Identification and Expulsion1 ), and cooperating with third countries to prevent and combat irregular flows. The study (Lunaria 2013) claims that the adopted measures were largely ineffective in increasing forced repatriation of irregular migrants and in discouraging further irregular migration flows, while they often violated the fundamental rights of migrants. A similar study in Greece (Angeli et al. 2014) has investigated the actual monetary and human resource costs of migration control policies and their effectiveness in achieving their objectives. The indiscriminate enforcement of control policies—notably generalised and racialized random controls in public places, apprehensions at border of migrants including those willing to ask for protection, blanket detention of anyone apprehended as a means of deterrence, and the insufficient availability of alternative schemes for monitored stay and assisted voluntary returns—created unnecessary expenditures and hampered the policies' effectiveness. The study shows how a tailor-made approach

1These have now been transformed into CPR (*Centri di Permanenza per i Rimpatri*, or Centres for Repatriation) with the Legislative Decree N.13/2017, converted into law with Law N. 46 of 13 April 2017.

could have functioned better, significantly reducing both the human and financial costs of migration management in Greece.

Taking stock of the literature on the economies of migration control, this chapter focuses on a complementary and interlinked aspect that can be conceived as the economies of reception: notably, how national and local stakeholders manage the arrival of asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants; how they distribute new arrivals in different territories; and how they build material and human resource infrastructures. In the last decade, the term 'reception' increasingly is used with reference to the arrival at EU land and maritime borders of migrants who in principle are not authorised to enter until they manifest the intention to ask for asylum. Reception refers to their initial first-assistance upon arrival, registration, legal and administrative processing, and often involves access to international protection procedures. Hence, national reception mechanisms become an administrative tool that distinguishes those who are considered irregular upon arrival and those who can access the asylum procedure and be entitled, at least temporarily, to stay. It may actually be argued that the way reception takes place may create (or not) regularity and irregularity. The reception systems at the borders of southern Europe actually has a mixed character as it differs from country to country, and it covers care and protection practices as well as repressive ones. The whole 'industry' around reception thus serves to restore the orderly management and control of arrivals through irregular migration channels.

Estimating the impact of the migrants' presence on tax and welfare systems and the net fiscal consequences of immigration for public administration and the economy as whole, while also considering trends in unemployment and wages, is not an easy task and needs to consider also emergency funds and special instruments developed in Europe since mid-2015. Indeed, it is one of the most debated branches of the economic literature on migration, with regard to both national (macro) and local (micro) economies (Dustmann and Frattini 2014; Ruhs and Vargas-Silva 2015; Peri 2017). While acknowledging concerns about inadequate funding and poor services (Amnesty International 2017; D'Angelo et al. 2017; Ministry of Interior of Italy 2015) as well as human rights violations, especially concerning the impact of the EU-Turkey statement (Tunaboylu and Alpes 2017), this chapter seeks to cast light on the economic aspects of reception.

Hence, the chapter delves deeper into the impact of significant funding in a relatively short period of time, in response to an emergency which has protracted for several years and looking specifically at the cases of Italy and Greece. It has an exploratory character: it seeks mainly to sketch the contours of an emerging reception economy and its possible effect on receiving countries and their local residents. The analysis we propose is not based on empirical material, and the few case studies presented in the text have an introductive character as they present what constitutes an interesting field for ongoing or further research. Our aim here is to explore the qualitative features of the reception economy: we investigate the emergence of significant reception infrastructures; the emergence of new professions; and the impact in terms of real and potential employment of reception beneficiaries in local labour markets, particularly in relation to informal work in specific sectors (see the sectoral analysis proposed in Chap. 8).

The chapter proceeds with a brief overview of the national and EU funding given to local and regional authorities to face the 'migration crisis' in 2015-2016 and seeks to assess the management of these funds between different levels of governance. We then turn to consider how the development of camps to host refugees and asylum seekers in Greece and of multiple reception facilities in Italy has affected civil society sector employment. Last but not least, we briefly consider the participation of migrants and refugees in reception in local labour markets, often in the informal economy. The chapter concludes with some remarks on the character and features of local economies of reception as well as pointing to further avenues for research.

#### **9.2 EU Emergency Funding and Multi-level Governance: Introductory Remarks**

Scholars have suggested since the early 2000s the inherent contrast between the public announcement of strong control and security measures and the shadow politics in which migrants' rights are extended, between the need to offer a symbolic reassurance to the electorate and that of attending to the pragmatic needs of security and social wellbeing of a polity (Guiraudon 2000, Massey 2009). The "vertical" and "horizontal" relationships between the EU and national governments and between multiple tiers of national governments leaves room for multiple overlaps in both policy framing and policy implementation, with a specific role for non-governmental actors and private actors (Scholten and Penninx 2016; Hepburn and Zapata-Barrero 2014). The local governments' geographical proximity to their populations makes them immediately responsible, as well as the most visible and exposed level of migration governance. Local and regional governments' portfolios include the implementation of several social and economic policies closely related to reception such as education, health services, training, and integration measures for active labour market participation of those in reception towards autonomy, eventually. This fact—together with the overlapping roles of European, central and local governments for the provision of public services in the field of migration management (control, reception, integration)—has strong implications on the multi-level governance of migration-related issues (Spencer 2018). In this context, this section sketches the size of the funding mobilised to respond to the 2015–2016 'migration crisis' by the EU with a view to providing some insights as to the incidence of this funding at the local and regional level.

Two European funds are assigned to migration and security for the period 2014–2020, providing member states with a policy and budgetary framework for national and local implementation of programs and actions. At the same time, efforts

at the EU level to establish a more coherent and mandatory system for all member states are ongoing while approaches and implementation of the tools already available vary across countries.2 The Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF, EUR 3.1 billion, according to Regulation 516/2014) promotes actions towards a common approach to asylum and immigration with specific focus on strengthening the Common European Asylum System (CEAS); on legal migration and integration of third-country nationals; on returns as means to combat irregular migration; and on solidarity towards member states most affected by recent asylum flows. Of these initial funds, 88% was to be implemented through shared management with member states under the framework of their multiannual National Programmes, and the remaining 12% was to be managed by the European Commission focusing on Union Actions, Emergency Assistance, and the European Migration Network. This budget was nearly doubled in 2015 and 2016 compared to the initial allocation, through top-ups as a result of unforeseen needs and to foster some solidarity mechanisms and decrease the burden of the 'migration crisis' on the most affected member states. Thus, the total foreseen funding reached 6,894 million euros for the period 2014–20203 to support relocation and resettlement, Union Actions, and most notably the Emergency Assistance (EMAS) to the most affected member states like Greece and Italy.

The Internal Security Fund (ISF, EUR 3.8 billion) aims at improving border management, visa regimes, and travel within the EU and combatting cross-border crimes, terrorism, and other threats to internal security. Moreover, the European Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (1.8 billion euros) and the Refugee Facility for Turkey (3 billion euros) were set up. Moreover, in June 2016, the European Commission also proposed allocating, through the AMIF, 10,000 euros per person resettled (from a third-country of first asylum), 6,000 euros per person relocated from Italy and Greece (and 500 euros for the two relocating countries to cover travel expenses).

Looking more specifically at Greece and Italy, the European Commission's financial support has been allocated as follows. Approximately 189 million euros in emergency assistance has been given to the Italian authorities and to international organizations and NGOs active in the country on top of the 626.4 million euros allocated to Italy under the 2014–2020 national plans (61% from AMIF and 39% from ISF) (EC 2017). Approximately 393 million euros have been allocated to Greece as emergency assistance to support Greek authorities on top of the 561 million euros allocated through the 2014–2020 national programmes (57% from AMIF and 43% from ISF). These emergency instruments are deemed to provide a targeted

2At the time of closing this Chapter (March 2019), negotiations on the EU multi-annual financial framework for the period 2021–2017 are ongoing, while EU Parliament proposals for a revision of the Dublin Regulation are on hold before EU elections to be hold in May 2019 and there is no significative progress in EU cooperation for what concerns operations of search and rescue in the Mediterranean and agreed disembarkation mechanisms.

3Based on total AMIF funding reported in the Financial Programming dataset.

**Fig. 9.1** Top 5 OECD countries by share of net ODA for refugees' expenditures (%), 2017. (Source: OECD 2018)

response to specific shocks while also channelling humanitarian funding to UN agencies and NGOs in close coordination with member states involved (EC 2018). Moreover, it is worth noting how expenditures related to refugee assistance are increasingly included in the official development assistance (ODA) of most European countries. According to the latest OECD data, Italy and Greece respectively devoted 31% and 23% of their official development funds to refugee-related expenditure in 2017, which means approximately 1.8 billion USD for Italy and 70.3 million USD for Greece (see Fig. 9.1).4

It is hence important to disentangle the inter-relationship between national and sub-national levels of government in the way all these funds, channelled to the two countries from the EU or budgeted at the country level, are utilised. While such distribution varies in relation to the overall level of state (de)centralization and to the country-specific structure of the reception system for asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants, OECD estimates that the share of subnational government spending in this field—after receiving fiscal transfers from the central states—is between 35% and 45% (OECD 2017). Usually, local and regional governments are asked to co-fund housing, language tuition and skills training, labour market and integration programmes as well as social benefit payments. In this respect, local entities frequently complain about late reimbursement of funds and additional fiscal costs generated from having a larger population on their territories to assist.

In order to assess the size and dynamics of the regional reception economies emerging over the last decade in Italy and Greece we would need a breakdown of

4See the OECD's DAC Temporary Working Group on Refugees and Migration page for the methods adopted to report in-donor refugee costs within ODA: http://www.oecd.org/dac/refugeesmigration-working-group.htm

national and EU funds per region (or province or municipality) and per sector (e.g. maritime border control, first reception housing or camps, catering and provision of basic services, security of camps or accommodation, asylum processing, and so on). Such information, however, is not publicly available—not least because in both Greece and Italy most reception centres' management and related services were given through direct assignment, under emergency procedures, from the local prefectures to associations or private entities in Italy, and from the Ministry of Migration Policy—founded in 2016—again to both private entities and non-governmental organisations in Greece. Thus, data are scattered and there is as yet no assessment of how these resources were spent. The recent ECRE (2018) report points to the lack of transparency in how some of the funds are allocated and both the EP Budgetary affairs department (2018: 23–24) and laments the lack of available data and the changing sectors of allocation between national and European funds responding to both structural and emergency needs (2018: 27–31). Therefore, the detailed allocation and use of the funds is neither complete nor clear so as to fully assess their implementation and—for the purposes of our study—their impact on local economies and local labour markets.

#### **9.3 Local Frameworks of Reception: Infrastructures, Professions, Labour Markets**

The sheltering of newly-arrived migrants while they are being registered and in relation to their application for asylum (where relevant), has had an impact on the creation of new jobs in the reception system writ-large. The large irregular migration flows via the central and the eastern Mediterranean routes have produced a domino effect for the creation of services that did not previously exist and the expansion of services in new areas and places to cope with the needs of migrants from their first humanitarian relief onwards. This reception economy has grown mostly in the countries of first-arrival—Italy and Greece above all—but also in all other European countries which receive not only migrants arriving by land but also those redistributed through relocation and resettlement programmes.

Looking at the wide range of services and activities enhanced or created from scratch to cope with recent arrivals by sea and by land in Europe allows to show the breadth of the areas of intervention for public and private actors, which changes depending on each specific local context but that invariably requires professional staffing and expertise. The next sections discuss the reception system structures in Greece and Italy, the emergence of new professions and related needs for training of social workers and other professionals, and the 'refugeeization" of local labour markets.

#### *9.3.1 Reception Infrastructure in Greece and Italy*

Upon arrival, procedures related to immediate first aid, first identification and registration, emergency shelter, and possibly referral to the national asylum procedure, typically pertain to central government actors, whose composition and competences varies by country but which generally involves maritime authorities, police forces, immigration forces, and, in some cases, defence forces. Moreover, European agencies (EASO and Frontex), UN agencies (UNHCR, IOM, UNICEF) and international and national NGOs do play a role in these phases, particularly after the implementation of the hotspot approach (D'Angelo 2018).

Depending on the level of state decentralization and how the national asylum system is designed, the central government and the sub-national authorities (regions, provinces, municipalities) are responsible for the management of first- and secondtier reception centres and the provision of a variable set of services. Literature has treated the proliferation of camps in different regions including Europe as a result of policies that address migration (Agier 2014). More recent literature investigates the transformation of European reception systems for asylum seekers, refugees, and irregular migrants since the beginning of the European migrant crisis. According to Kreichauf (2018), since 2015 a generalized tightening of national laws on asylum and local practices has been observed with regards to accommodation, duration of obligatory accommodation in first-reception camps, enlargement and increase in numbers of big centres either in remote areas or at the margins of big cities, changes in administrative detention practices, and the adoption of legal exceptions to normal standards of reception services provided.

In this sense, the term 'refugee camp' previously associated with situations in the global South is more and more common in Europe, and does not only refer to makeshift, irregular gatherings such as those in Idomeni (Greece) or Calais (France). These camp-like settings—or the "campization" (Kreichauf 2018) of the response in some EU member states—involve different living standards, management structures and responsibility chains, labelling spaces, and different guests and staff. Moreover, conditions that were initially meant to be exceptional and temporary become more and more permanent or frozen. Recent literature has shown how these changes have exacerbated the exclusion and marginalization of migrant subjects for whom a (re)integration into the society is more and more difficult as transiting periods last longer or indefinitely.

While 'campization' and confinement is used in some countries and under certain conditions (the Greek islands as well as Lampedusa island in Italy, but also in mainland regions of Greece and Italy), in other contexts (even in the same countries) there has been an explicit shift of paradigm—at least on paper—to more dispersed and urban reception solutions that have created multiple and smaller urban realities where migrants are physically closer to local communities. This has been adopted as global policy by (UNHCR 2014), and some measures have been implemented in Italy in this direction so as to provide better and faster inclusion of asylum seekers and refugees in local communities (SPRAR 2015) and formulas for the redistribution of new arrivals across the country with consideration for the economic development and population density of each region (Ministry of Interior of Italy 2016).

The administrative management of camps and accommodation of migrants arriving by sea in Greece has changed over time since the beginning of the crisis and is quite complex. Since 2013, with the implementation of EU laws, more Ministries are involved in the management of housing. Sometimes, camps are directly managed by Ministry of Labour, or by the Army. In other cases, the management is given to NGOs funded through European funds, or to UN agencies (both IOM and UNHCR) in support of Greek authorities. Also, the situation of the islands is different from that on mainland, in Athens, Thessaloniki, or other areas. The permanent campization of the islands facing the Turkish coast has been the consequence of the implementation of the EU-Turkey statement and the requirement that migrants or asylum seekers arriving after 18 March 2016 stay there and are processed under a special asylum procedure (Triandafyllidou 2017).

On the Greek mainland a number of temporary—emergency—camps has proliferated since mid-2015. As the so-called Balkan Route was interrupted by the border closure of North Macedonia and other countries further north of Greece, temporary camps emerged in a short period of time to accommodate those 'trapped' in mainland Greece. These sites have included the Reception and Identification Centres (RICs), the open Temporary Reception Facilities for Asylum Seekers (*Δομές Προσωρινής Υποδοχής Αιτούντων Διεθνή Προστασία)*, as well as open Temporary Accommodation Facilities (*Δομές Προσωρινής Φιλοξενίας)* for persons subject to return procedures or whose return has been suspended (Greek Council of Refugees 2018). The overall capacity and occupancy by type of facilities has changed from mid-2015 onwards. UNHCR for example provides accommodation to refugees and asylum seekers in apartments, hotels, and other buildings all over Greece, in collaboration with municipalities as well as central governmental institutions (Leclerc 2017). Moreover, information on the location, maximum capacity, and actual occupancy of existing shelters is scattered among different sources and hardly consistent over time. Table 9.1 presents data from UNHCR and IOM on the number of hosted migrants and refugees in 2016, 2017, and 2018 in the mainland and on the islands. The type and distribution of shelters have changed since mid-2016, when UNHCR started running an accommodation scheme. In short, two types of accommodation

**Table 9.1** Migrants hosted in reception facilities in Greece, by type and location, 2016–2018

Sources: a Data from UNHCR (2016, 2017); b Data from IOM (2018, 18): mainland's figure includes Open Accommodation Facilities, EKKA shelters for adults, EKKA shelters for UASC, Reception and Identification Centres, Detention Centres

**Table 9.2** Hotspots reception capacity in Italy and Greece as of May 2018

Source: EPRS (2018)

a Lampedusa and Taranto were temporarily closed for renovation works, re-opening by mid-2018. The center in Trapani has been converted into a CPR (detention centre) in the summer of 2018

emerge: reception centres run by NGOs alongside state's facilities and centres run by UN agencies (UNHCR and IOM).

Moreover, in Italy as well as in Greece, the EU prompted the opening of hotspots: places of first reception and transit which are spatially-defined areas near harbours and which have been hosting large numbers of individuals (often beyond the official capacity, see EPRS, 2018) and where standards of reception fall below the average of ordinary reception centres. In Greece, the Reception and Identification Centres constitute these hotspots, where registration and identification take place and the screening "selects between those seeking asylum and those to be returned*"* (ECRE, CIR, and GCR 2016) (Table 9.2).

Besides hotspots and the so-called CPR (Detention Centres for Repatriation), Italy hosts different types of first- and second-tier reception systems for asylum seekers, refugees, and other vulnerable migrants (unaccompanied children, victims of trafficking and torture etc.), with different standards, numbers of hosted migrants, and responsibility chains. This makes the Italian landscape a mix of large hubs for hundreds of migrants in isolated areas or at the borders of big cities and of small and medium reception centres distributed throughout the country in line with a matching of offer and demand managed by the National Association of Italian Municipalities (ANCI), which has been lastly reformed with new legislative changes adopted at the end of 2018.5 The 'ordinary' centres, formerly known as SPRAR and now SIPROIMI (*Sistema di protezione per titolari di protezione internazionale e per minori stranieri non accompagnati*), benefit from a comprehensive approach aimed at the socio-economic integration of migrants who have obtained a recognized protection status. They are normally small reception places (apartments or

5The Legislative Decree No. 113 (the so-called Immigration and Security Decree), converted into ordinary law by Law 132 of 1 December 2018, introduced several innovations concerning immigration and security issues in Italy, including the abrogation of the humanitarian protection permit and the creation of new "special cases" protection permits; the transformation of the ordinary reception system "for asylum seekers and refugees" (the so-called SPRAR) into the protection system "for international protection holders and unaccompanied migrant children" (the so-called SIPROIMI) with criteria to access it and other non-ordinary, first-aid reception centres; an extended duration up to 180 days of stay in centres for repatriation of irregular migrants; new administrative rules for the registration into the municipal registers of asylum seekers. Additional ministerial communications issued by the Italian Ministry of Interior between December 2018 and February 2019 also included more specific indications on changes in the approach and guidelines for local authorities with regards to public tenders and the management of reception centres of various type.

centres), involving the local authorities for integration (including language learning and training) and employment services.

The second sub-system, initiated to face the sharp increase of arrivals in 2014, includes CAS (*Centri di Accoglienza Straordinaria*, Centres for Extraordinary Reception), CPA (*Centri di Prima Accoglienza*, Centres for First Reception), and ex-CARA (*Centri di Accoglienza per Richiedenti Asilo*, Centres for Asylum Seekers). These centres are managed by the local prefectures through NGOs and private actors and can be large in terms of their capacity, hosting even several hundreds of migrants each. They are often in isolated areas of each municipality so as to be 'hidden' from local residents. These centres do not offer a full range of support and integration services like the SIPROIMI does.

Although the capacity of the ordinary reception centres has increased over the years, they are still insufficient to respond to all reception needs for all types of adult and child migrants in the process of asking asylum or who have been granted a protection status. Thus, the 'extra-ordinary' centres hosted approximately 78% of all hosted migrants in mid-2018. At the same time, the total number of beneficiaries in reception of all types started to decrease in parallel with the decrease in arrivals by sea in Italy, being about 160,500 in July 2018 compared to 205,000 in July 2017 (Italian Ministry of Interior 2018) (Table 9.3).

The extensive reception infrastructure presented above already hints to the importance of reception as an economic factor for local and regional economies. In Greece in particular, where there was no official geographical dispersion system the creation of camps and reception centres either on the islands or the mainland aside from border areas, this was a new phenomenon. In Italy, the increase in arrivals by sea since mid-2017 has led to a growing number of people hosted temporarily at reception centres across the country. In both countries, reception infrastructure in geographically peripheral areas near the borders is more visible and its impact on regional economies and labour markets likely more pronounced. The maps presented in Figs. 9.2 and 9.3 help understand how some specific regions—like Sicily, Lombardy, Campania and Latium in Italy and the Aegean islands and metropolitan Athens in Greece—host a significant number of reception centres and camps of different types. The whole list of services and professions that developed around these structures are the focus of the next section.

**Table 9.3** Migrants hosted in reception facilities in Italy by type, 2016–2018

Source: Italian Ministry of Interior,http://www.libertaciviliimmigrazione.dlci.interno.gov.it/it/ documentazione/statistica/cruscotto-statistico-giornaliero

a It includes hotspots, CAS, ex-CARA, CPA. It does not include detention centres

**Fig. 9.2** Capacity and occupancy of reception centres in Greece, as of April 2017. (Source: UNHCR 2017)

#### *9.3.2 Reception Services and Migration-Related Professions*

Upon newcomers' arrival and accommodation, whether in camps or dispersed accommodation schemes and centres, the relevant reception localities and towns were confronted with the need to provide them with services. These include basic accommodation, food and healthcare, and language training, legal and administrative support for those in the asylum process (legal counselling and assistance to help with completing forms and administrative work, for example, to access the national healthcare system). Additional services concerned access to primary and secondary education for children, mentoring services in tertiary education, social welfare support for finding independent housing (and moving out of the centres or camps), and assistance to seek and find employment. These services have been supported by the national and European funds presented earlier in this chapter, and involved a wide variety of stakeholders, from local cooperatives and third-sector organizations to national and international NGOs as well as international and UN organizations and European agencies.

The new local demand has fostered fresh training courses and education paths that provide regional or national certificates aimed at qualifying and possibly "reordering" migration-related professions such as university courses on cultural mediation and interpreters; Masters and lifelong training courses and diplomas for social workers or immigration lawyers were the most visible among all new professional and training paths available. These new "locally-produced" professions competed

**Fig. 9.3** Share of migrants hosted in reception facilities in Italy by region (%), July 2018. (Source: IOM 2018)

with the expansion at the international level of prestigious universities offering intensive migration courses and curricula that produce a pool of international experts hired by UN and European agencies. These external experts are in some cases perceived as intruding the local equilibrium, trying to replace, coordinate or support local municipalities and actors. According to Howden and Fotiadis (2017), "international UNHCR staff earn three times more than their local counterparts". The two authors quote a Greek UN employee who describes how "local staff were side-lined and 'treated like secretaries' by the newly arrived international staff".

Tensions between different actors in the same areas—especially in emergency settings and in the first reception of new arrivals—might frequently arise because of differences in the organizational culture, the knowledge of the local context, the spoken language (local versus English), and salaries and benefits (ranging from the EU agencies' officers to the short-term contracts of local staff of municipalities and NGOs). Whether directly funded by public resources (European, national, or local) or through private fundraising, the presence of these actors too has an impact on the "normal" local economy in terms of providing market services (food, housing, clothing) and activating or increasing available local services. Coordination issues also arise from different agendas and priorities.

In addition, there were cases of corruption when public procurement contracts were issued through non-transparent procedures bypassing open calls and evaluation mechanisms (Howden and Fotiadis 2017; ECRE 2018: 9). Such instances of corruption impacted negatively on the cost-efficiency and effectiveness of implemented programmes for baseline service provision (see for example Pianezzi and Grossi 2018 on a recent corruption case in the management of Mineo's ex-CARA in Sicily, which hosted some 3000 migrants at that time) and the overall public credibility of the reception system.

On the other hand, in some cases policymakers have tried to steer these new funds and investments to stimulate economic activity in previously depressed and depopulated areas. In Italy in particular, there are examples of municipalities in peripheral areas that have explicitly tried to combat geographical isolation and population ageing through the reception and integration of new, young generations of citizens (see for example the cases of Riace in Calabria6 and Belluno in Veneto). At the same time, larger municipalities have joined EU-wide networks of cities for the exchange of good practices and expertise on a wide range of aspects (see for example EUROCITIES7 or some networks of inclusive universities8 ).

In Greece the proliferation of the different camp-like settings also constitutes an opportunity for the creation of small contract jobs which contributed to curb—even if temporarily—unemployment. The Hellenic Manpower Employment Organization

6See Marrazzo (2018).

7See 'Integrating cities, common solutions for shared challenges' project, available from: http:// www.integratingcities.eu/

8See 'In here, higher education supporting refugees in Europe' project, available at: https://www. inhereproject.eu/homepage or 'Tandem partnership project on migrant and refugee integration on Southern Europe', available at: https://iomintandem.com/

(OAED) offers small-scale contract employment programs for staff working inside the various reception and accommodation facilities in order to meet the different needs of these facilities. According to representatives of the First Reception Service, since OAED runs this program through different municipalities, most of the personnel employed are locals.

The different commitments of the Greek Administration in the recession era where successive bailout agreements have proscribed new permanent hiring in the public sector—has led to the proliferation of such solutions for labour force absorption to counter unemployment, especially among younger generations. At the same time, such solution met the needs of the administration, in terms of new tasks emerged with the management of different reception facilities. Similar to the above is the absorption of a significant number of staff employed by the municipal police that lost its mandate during 2013.9 According to First Reception representatives, many of the personnel hired in this service—in the headquarters, as well as in the different RICs—has been re-assigned from municipal police staff.

The different funds available represented an opportunity for already-established organizations and NGOs to grow in number and expand their work in more migration- and protection-related areas. This is the case of Generation 2—a wellestablished national NGO in Greece with an important role mainly in the integration of second-generation migrants. From 2016 onwards, the organization showed considerable growth in order to address the needs of newly-arrived migrants and asylum seekers. As recent arrivals in Greece became more and more permanent stayers in Greece, rather than transiting towards northern Europe, NGOs such as Generation 2, specialized in long-term integration intervention, come to meet the needs of larger shares of the migrant population.

Migration and refugee UN agencies also have increased their presence in Italy and Greece over the past years. IOM and UNHCR offices have expanded their operations with multiple projects to support national authorities in the management of new arrivals, such as assistance and protection activities for the most vulnerable, cultural mediation services, health and movement assistance (for example with regards to the EU-funded Relocation Scheme), on-site assistance in camps, and distribution of Non-Food Items (NFI), depending on the context. At the same time, the EU agencies Frontex and EASO also expanded their operations and presence in these countries. In particular, as stated by EASO's operational plans for Greece and Italy in 2018, the staff deployed to support national authorities with regards to the asylum procedures (registration and assessment) and capacity-building reached more than 200 individuals in Italy and more than 300 individuals in Greece at the end of the year (EASO 2017a, b).

Finally, the recent legislative changes to the overall reception system in Italy which aimed, among other things, at reducing public expenditures for integration services, started to produce effects at the beginning of 2019 locally also in economic

9The municipal police constitutes a branch of the Greek administration separated from police forces. In 2013, as a result of the economic crisis, the tasks of this department had been abolished. The municipal police was re-established in 2015.

terms, with closures of facilities and loss of jobs.10 All these experiences show the economic relevance of the described local reception systems. Even in a political and public debate which is hostile to more migration, the role of local entities and cities as policymakers, service providers, employers, and buyers of goods and services in all cross-cutting activities pertaining to migrant integration are increasingly recognized.

#### *9.3.3 The 'Refugeeization' of Some Local Labour Market Sectors*

The arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers and other migrants and their territorial distribution in centres and camps has had a tangible impact on local labour markets, particularly as first reception and asylum processing were prolonged and those in reception started seeking employment—even if in the informal economy with a view to making some money and covering their needs or to plan secondary movements within Europe. The latter, for example, is the case of many beneficiaries of open reception centres in the Attiki region, such as Schisto. According to representatives of the reception and identification service interviewed in spring 2018, many asylum seekers residing there are employed in seasonal agricultural occupations (often informally) in nearby districts or more distant ones.11 The employment of asylum seekers within the reception system in itself is also quite widespread: this is the case of many translators and cultural mediators employed under short-term contracts in different reception facilities. There is no detailed data on the number of asylum seekers absorbed in this sector, and this could be an interesting field for further investigation.

As Chap. 8 in this book has shown, irregular migrants are typically concentrated in sectors and occupations such as agriculture, tourism, construction or care services that are not intrinsically outsourceable to other low-wage countries. Among all possible combinations of stay and work statuses, the one of asylum seekers in the process and of protection holders seem to be particularly conducive to specific types of irregular employment as migrants in reception can be ready to accept to work for lower wages than both natives and regular migrants as they receive, temporarily, accommodation and food at least. Even when they are not or no more entitled to reception, migrants with pending applications or granted protection status are nondeportable although might lack proper housing and, hence, official residence. Hence, various degrees of regularity of residence status are paired with employment

10As reported by main trade unions, see for example: https://www.rassegna.it/articoli/ cgil-cisl-uil-licenziamento-per-351-addetti-servizi-immigrazione

11 Interviews with representatives of the Reception and Identification Service conducted at the headquarters on 04/05/2018 and at the Schisto camp on 18/05/2018. This is only a pilot phase for a larger study under development in both Greece and Italy seeking to collect both qualitative and quantitative information on the local/regional reception economies in Greece and Italy.

in irregular forms and even under exploitative conditions, especially in agriculture but also in construction, where substitution is observed in some specific market niches and locations (Ottaviano and Peri 2012; Peri 2017). This is the case of the agricultural sector (see also Triandafyllidou and Bartolini, Chap. 8) of southern European countries—and Italy and Greece in particular—where newly-arrived African and Asian migrants are extensively employed alongside eastern European ones in conditions where the stratification of different legal statuses of residence and work produces various forms of informal settlements (camps established close to official reception centres) and of labour exploitation (Perrotta and Sacchetto 2014; Palumbo and Sciurba 2018; Papadopoulos et al. 2018; Corrado 2018). This allows producers to squeeze labour market costs and try to be competitive in an overall framework of low prices for agri-food products. Some scholars have called this phenomenon a "refugeeization" of a specific segment of the migrant workforce (Dines and Rigo 2015). Given the humanitarian approach of most European countries over the past years, migrants might prefer to keep their protection status or might be unable to convert their documents into work permits, which usually have stricter requirements of residence and work. Keeping migrants in a non-regular position in employment seems to add particular, though unfair, economic advantages to their presence (Düvell 2006). If this is the case, the overall humanitarian structure in which newly-arrived migrants are inserted—while, in parallel, legal channels for labour migrations are precluded to most—works in a way that privileges informal and usually exploitative insertion in local labour markets at the expense of both migrant and native workers (D'Angelo 2018).

#### **9.4 Concluding Remarks**

The local/regional dimension in migration studies has so far focused mostly on legal migrants and their integration, pointing to divergence between city-level and national policies (Caponio and Borkert 2010; Ambrosini 2013; Scholten and Penninx 2016; Bellabas and Gerrits 2017). These studies have often focused on large cities rather than smaller municipalities to explain different patterns in terms of ethnic mobilization, relative political openness or closure in a specific territory, and broader pragmatism to solve locally perceived hot issues of inclusion and coexistence (see Spencer 2018 for a broad review). Recent research however has focused on rural areas that constitute 'New Immigration Destinations' (NID), and the important transformations that smaller localities are going through in – and out – migration (McAreavey 2018). This branch of research has mainly focus on the mobility of migrant workers, their different processes of incorporation in NID, the transformations they induce in the rural landscape and the emerging inter-group relationships. More specifically on southern Europe, research on rural migration has focused on the harsh conditions and exploitation of labour migrants in the strawberry fields of Manolada in Greece (Papadopoulos et al. 2018) and of crop-pickers in Italy's southern regions of Sicily, Calabria and Apulia (Corrado 2018). While presenting the precarious and harshliving working conditions of migrants involved, these studies also point to how these conditions are contested through migrant agency and mobilisations.

Migrant inflows from the central and eastern Mediterranean routes in the last few years have increased the visibility of small and marginal locations and municipalities in many countries and their grappling with massive irregular arrivals of mixed migration inflows. The Greek islands, the areas surrounding the green borders across all western Balkan countries, coastal areas of southern Italy as well as green borders within the EU and the Schengen space are the most visibly and routinely affected by the arrival and transit of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. The role of small and large municipalities as first arrival points, transit hubs, and final destinations is only gradually being acknowledged in academic research (Manara and Piazza 2018) and policy debates. Rozakou (2017) in a recent paper presents the way different procedures that take place in the Greek islands create a kind of irregular bureaucracy. Casati's (2018) analysis of the everyday and noninstitutional contexts that the different encounters of migrants in irregular situation with locals take place in Italy sheds light on the role that the local communities play on the reshaping of the deservingness of asylum seekers. The debate on their role in providing services and coordinating policy, coherence, and proper funding from higher government levels has often pitted security and control against solidarity at the local and national levels, disregarding the emerging economy of reception in local and regional contexts.

This chapter is a first effort to fill this gap by focusing on the emerging local/ regional economies of reception, underlining that while putting pressure on scarce regional resources, the reception of newly-arrived migrants through irregular means in Italy and Greece comes together with the development of a whole reception infrastructure (centres and camps of different types) and a whole set of occupations and professions (such as certified social worker in the field of migration) that increase or transform the economic activity and particularly employment for both locals and settled migrants. While a full analysis of the issue and of the economic impact of the reception infrastructure on a given region or city goes beyond the scope of this chapter, here we have identified the main components of reception economies. These include a reception infrastructure, notably the emergence of centres and camps for reception and first accommodation of the new arrivals in local societies; and a socio-professional infrastructure, notably the emergence of new professions, new economic activities and even new education and training modules for the reception workers. We have documented the emergence of a range of new services and professions that respond to the funding and cater for the needs of the newcomers, thus creating a whole local ecosystem. Furthermore, the economy of reception includes the insertion of beneficiaries into local labour markets, sometimes at the expense of low-skilled local inhabitants and for the benefit of local employers, particularly in agriculture.

While this chapter does not offer a quantitative assessment of the impact of these reception economies on the economic situation of specific provinces or regions, it points to important developments and avenues for further research with a view to

providing a comprehensive and critical understanding of the systems that developed in response to the recent and protracted irregular arrivals of refugees and other migrants in southern Europe.

It would not be an exaggeration to argue that the 'migration crisis' of the last few years has led to the emergence of a whole *reception industry*. It is our contention that this emerging economy of reception is turning into a strategy for survival and development in certain peripheric areas of Europe, and of Italy and Greece in particular.

#### **References**

Agier, M. (2014). *Un Monde de Camps*. Paris: La découverte.

Roma: Servizio Protezione Richiedenti Asilo e Rifugiati. http://www.sprar.it/wp-content/ uploads/2016/06/SPRAR\_-\_Manuale\_operativo\_2015.pdf.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## **Chapter 10 Cities Breaking the Mould? Municipal Inclusion of Irregular Migrants in Europe**

**Sarah Spencer**

#### **10.1 Introduction**

Throughout this book we are exploring the conceptual challenges posed by the presence of irregular migrants in Europe and evolving policy responses from the international to the local level. This chapter focuses on municipal responses to irregular migrants and in particular the significance of inclusive responses to restrictive national welfare provisions. The chapter questions whether inclusive responses run counter to national immigration control objectives or whether they may, counterintuitively, contribute to them. It further considers the implications of local responses for national social and economic policy goals.

Management of irregular migration regularly includes legal restrictions on access to welfare services as a means to deter irregular arrival and stay. While there is a variable geography of permitted access and restrictions, the norm is one of exclusion. Thus irregular migrants are regularly denied access by law from services such as shelter, primary and secondary health care, pre- and post-school education and welfare support (FRA 2011; Spencer and Hughes 2015b; Delvino 2017).

At the local level, while some cities and smaller municipalities are notably resistant to any further inclusion of these residents within welfare provision (Ambrosini 2018), others have responded with provision of a wider range of services than national policy requires or in some cases allows. As sub-state tiers of government have pushed the boundaries and insisted on the right to provide the services they consider necessary, there have been tensions with national governments—a collision course that has led to litigation in a number of countries and the near fall of the Dutch coalition government in 2015 (Spencer 2018; Oomen and Baumgärtel 2018).

Some of Europe's larger cities are now seeking recognition for the front-line role they play in managing the presence of irregular migrants and a voice at the policy-

S. Spencer (\*)

Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2020 187

S. Spencer, A. Triandafyllidou (eds.), *Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe*, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34324-8\_10

making table, using their umbrella bodies to voice that demand. That call has been heard and has secured some international recognition. That support may however not be welcome to those national governments in dispute with sub-state tiers on the extent to which they are inclusive of irregular migrants; migrants who are the potential subjects of enforcement action and removal. Yet there is some evidence that suggests that, far from running counter to national immigration control objectives, local provision to irregular migrants can contribute to them. This chapter explores that apparent contradiction. It asks whether we are indeed witnessing fragmented policy outcomes in the divergence between national and local approaches on welfare provision to this section of the migrant population (Burchianti 2016) or whether these apparently divergent approaches are in fact more coherent than the tensions between them suggest.

#### **10.2 Context for Municipal Service Provision to Irregular Migrants**

While the most recent, officially accepted, estimate of the number of migrants with irregular status may be considered low, up to just 0.8% of the population of the then-EU27 (Clandestino 2009; European Commission 2010) migrants are concentrated in urban areas and those with irregular status are no exception (Gebhardt 2010; GLA Economics 2009), not least because it is easier to avoid detection and to earn a living in large cities with significant informal economies (Genҫ 2018: 2). The Clandestino estimate is from a decade ago and precedes recent arrivals from the 'refugee crisis.' With more than one million people expected to be told to leave once their asylum claim has been processed, but an overall return rate in the EU of less than 50%, many who are refused permission to stay will nevertheless remain (European Commission 2017; EMN 2016). The impact on and policy response from the cities and smaller municipalities in which they live, and the significance of those responses for migration control objectives, are thus important research and policy questions.

National governments have primary responsibility for immigration control, determining policy and taking the lead on implementation while delegating certain tasks to regional and local authorities. National governments also lead on economic and social policies, setting objectives and legal frameworks for access to services, but here regional and local authorities have greater delegated powers and direct responsibility for service delivery. There is thus an overlapping responsibility for policy fields ranging from economic development and public health to social cohesion, education, policing, shelter and social care that impact upon, and are impacted by, the migrant population. Thus, while national governments have lead responsibility for policies on irregular *migration*, there is a shared responsibility with sub-state tiers for policies on irregular *migrants*, albeit one in which there is a clear hierarchy in the governance structure.

Municipalities across Europe have differing mandates, ranging from cities that are also federal states, such as Berlin and Vienna, to small authorities with a more limited remit (CEMR 2011). Cities also enjoy differing levels of autonomy from national governments (European Commission 2015a) so that their scope for policy responses that differ from national approaches vary. Cities in north-west Europe have been found to be subject to firmer policy compliance on migration matters than those in southern Europe where cities have greater scope for policy divergence (Penninx et al. 2014).

#### **10.3 Municipal Provision**

A shift in the balance of responsibility on migration-related issues in recent years to sub-state tiers, and of the economic and social policies impacted by migration, has widened the scope for policy divergence at the local level. Neoliberalism has decentred the state. The resulting scope for action at sub-state level has led in some areas to nativist responses that reinforce or can exceed the level of exclusion intended by national policymakers (Guiraudon and Lahav 2000; Varsanyi 2011; Ambrosini 2018). In relation to irregular migrants in particular, municipalities may adopt a 'security frame' in which their priority is restrictive measures and reassuring their public that these are in place (Caponio 2014: 5). Inclusion may nevertheless be fostered by intermediaries including civil society organisations, co-ethnics, and municipal street bureaucrats, but here the latter are exercising their discretion in ways that run counter to the official policy of the local authority for which they work (Van der Leun 2006.; Ambrosini 2018).

Scholars have also documented the ways in which a level of municipal autonomy has facilitated an inclusive 'local turn' in policies towards migrants (Caponio and Borkert 2010), municipalities taking advantage of the devolution of responsibilities to overcome some of the constraints in national policy measures. They have become increasingly entrepreneurial in developing their own distinct approaches, moving away from historically-rooted national integration models. As a consequence, local policies can diverge not only from national policy but from that of other municipalities within the same country (Scholten and Penninx 2016; De Graauw and Vermeulen 2016).

In relation to irregular migrants, municipalities are confronted daily with the consequences of irregular status when individuals cannot access the ordinary services of everyday life. They face the challenge of managing the individual, social and economic impacts of migrants' exclusion from work and welfare provisions exclusion affecting not only the individuals concerned but the wellbeing of other local residents (Wilmes 2011; Spencer and Delvino 2019). As a result, there are municipalities that adopt an inclusive approach towards irregular migrants or do so in relation to one or more services.

Inclusive provision can still be overtly in line with national policy, for instance where education law requires schooling to be inclusive of all children of school age,

or the law permits the issuing of birth certificates regardless of status. However, municipalities also provide services or civic documentation that go beyond what national policy requires, stretching the limits of local authorities' competences (Genҫ 2018: 10; Spencer 2018). Services variously provided to irregular migrants include accommodation, food banks, healthcare, legal advice and representation, preschool and school education, apprenticeships, language tuition and skills training, outreach services to street prostitutes, safe reporting of crime for victims and witnesses, subsistence support, and assistance in return to the migrant's country of origin. Services are provided by the authority itself or through collaboration with other public and non-profit organisations that become partners in policy making and implementation in this field (Burchianti 2016; Delvino 2017).

#### *10.3.1 Tensions in Multi-level Governance*

Inclusive local responses, driven by local factors to address municipal policy objectives (Scholten 2013) in the case of irregular migrants have largely been considered by scholars to run counter to national immigration and welfare policies. Their inclusive intent contrasts with the restrictive and exclusive policies favoured at the national level and "constitute a serious challenge to the established centralist approach to irregular migration management" (Genҫ 2018: 10).

That interpretation is supported by the tensions that have arisen in the multi-level governance of this issue. As municipal policy responses towards irregular migrants have diverged from national legal and policy frameworks, national governments have (as in relation to municipal integration policies for legal migrants, Scholten 2013: 234), attempted to limit local policy choices but faced claims from local tiers for autonomy to address the issue in the way they deem necessary (Spencer 2018). The resulting tensions have led to political disputes, to instances of non-compliance by the lower tier, and at times to litigation in the courts. Dutch cities, for instance, successfully challenged the exclusion of young people from apprenticeships in 2012 (winning the argument that apprenticeships are 'education' not 'work') and in the courts resisted the government's opposition to their 'Bed, Bath and Bread' provision—a litigious dispute that has only recently been resolved (Spencer 2018; Rosenberger and Koppes 2018). Similar conflicts have been seen at the regional level. Some German Länder refused to provide the Federal immigration authorities with data on pupils with irregular status, contributing to the pressure for that requirement to be withdrawn (Laubenthal 2011). When Italian regions used their legislative powers to extend irregular migrants' entitlements to healthcare, they were challenged by the national government but their right to do so was supported by the Constitutional Court (Delvino and Spencer 2014).

This conflict, where one part of the state is in open dispute with another, is an instance of 'de-coupling' in multi-level governance in the migration field. De-coupling occurs where there is a level of shared responsibility for an issue but a lack of shared framing of the problem (Schön and Rein 1994) and hence of proposed solutions if there are no effective means through which differences can be resolved (Scholten 2013). Such tensions come at a cost to municipalities and there is evidence that some seek to avoid conflict by choosing a means of low-visibility provision; whether by funding NGOs to provide a service at arm's length, avoiding asking service users for evidence of immigration status, bending rules that require them to report service users to the immigration authorities, or having no paper trail relating to the beneficiaries of the service (Wilmes 2011: 128; Spencer 2018).

Those tensions, and the steps some authorities take to avoid them, suggest that the local authorities and governments concerned do themselves consider that the inclusion of irregular migrants in these services at the local level runs counter to national policy objectives. Yet there is reason to think that may not, or not always, be the case. In the next section I draw on relevant areas of the migration literature to consider whether, despite policy divergence, municipal responses may nevertheless contribute at least in part to national policy goals.

#### **10.4 Limits of Enforcement**

It is first of all helpful to recognise that irregular migration and the local presence of migrants with irregular status is a structural phenomenon not a temporary problem that can be addressed through enforcement alone. Rather, it is temporarily "'repaired' by state organisations oscillating between means of repression, silent toleration and resigned acceptance" (Bommes and Sciortino 2011: 17). Demographic pressures, global economic disparities, segmented and informal labour markets, sectoral demand for cheap labour and geo-political conflicts are among the causes of irregular migration and of legal migrants choosing to remain without authorisation (Koser 2010). Scholars have exposed the contradictions in enforcement policies that criminalise irregular migrants while tolerating exploitative labour market policies (as in London); and suggested that this need for workers is effectively acknowledged in the tolerance by national governments of their presence (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2014; Ambrosini 2018: 19).

Thus, while enforcement is regularly considered a priority at the national level and identified in comparative research as an area of national policy convergence, it is not notably effective, leading to pressure for ever more restrictive policies (Koser 2010; Hollifield et al. 2014: 4). Many factors are cited as contributing to the widening gap between enforcement goals and outcomes in industrialised receiving states including employer demand for workers regardless of legal status; the huge costs of implementing more effective policies; a lack of cooperation by sending and transit countries, and liberal domestic human rights norms that constrain the extent to which punitive measures can be used (Guiraudon and Lahav 2000; Hollifield et al. 2014: 4; EMN 2016; Andersson 2016; Ambrosini 2018: 35). Enforcement measures can also prove counterproductive, leading irregular migrants to shift from formal to informal work, from legitimate to criminal behaviour, and from being identifiable to unidentifiable (Engberson and Broeders 2011). The consequence is the continuing presence of irregular migrants in Europe and their residence within local communities. As Genҫ argues, "The persistence of irregular migration shows that despite all the efforts at national, international and regional levels, this type of human mobility cannot be managed as previously conceived by national governments. It demands efforts that transcend mere 'control' and 'prevention'" (2018: 1).

#### **10.5 Competing Policy Imperatives**

Governments have responded to the enforcement gap by using restrictions on welfare provision to enhance immigration control, aiming to remove any incentive to migrate without authorisation or to remain once a temporary right to stay has expired (Bommes and Geddes 2000). Welfare restrictions, however, have negative consequences that impact on other government commitments such as international human rights standards, and on social and economic policy objectives such as public health and meeting the sectoral need for migrant labour. It is an instance of the competing policy imperatives and contradictory pressures well recognised in the migration literature where pursuit of one policy objective is constrained by the need simultaneously to pursue other goals (Guiraudon 2006; Ruhs 2013: 33).

Negative impacts have to be mitigated by inclusive measures, as in a level of access to essential services provided by national law, so that, as Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas write in this volume (Chap. 3), formal exclusion is paradoxically coupled with formal inclusion beyond any informal inclusion by street bureaucrats (see also Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012). The resulting, varying geography of national entitlements to healthcare and school education has been mapped across the EU28 (Spencer and Hughes 2015a) and in relation to a wider range of services in earlier work by the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA 2011). Children have been the greatest beneficiary, their perceived lack of responsibility for their immigration status and their level of need ensuring that in many states they are granted more liberal access to essential services while still facing significant levels of exclusion (Spencer 2016a).

Notwithstanding that governments are themselves implementing these mitigating welfare measures, an analysis that they are the outcome of competing policy imperatives suggests that liberalisation of access to welfare services is in tension with, rather than contributing to, immigration control objectives. That tension is indeed evident in debates leading to national policy reforms, as between the UK Home Office and Department of Health in relation to access to HIV treatment, on which the rules were changed on public health grounds to allow access in 2012; and in the debates which led to law reform in Sweden to allow greater access to health care on the grounds, inter alia, that the voluntary clinics that had emerged to treat irregular migrants could not match Swedish standards of healthcare and administration (Social Affairs Department 2011; Spencer 2018).

#### **10.6 Interpreting Inclusion at the Local Level**

Scholars have recently interpreted diverging local policies on irregular migrants as similarly reflecting competing policy objectives. Here the tension is played out between the national and sub-state tiers where there are shared policy competencies but the economic, political or cultural interests of the authorities diverge (Hepburn and Zapata-Barrero 2014; Spencer 2016b). Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas note in Chap. 3 that tension between national and local levels is particularly evident in relation to healthcare, with local authorities showing greater concern for public health than their national counterparts. In relation to provision of shelter by Dutch municipalities, Oomen & Baumgärtel likewise pose local authorities as in conflict with national policy. Highlighting the municipalities' reliance on judgements of the European Committee of Social Rights as justification for provision of services, the authors frame municipal measures as the realisation of human rights for irregular migrants where those rights have been negated at the national level. A consequence of municipal actors' willingness to take on the role of duty bearer, they write, is that "local authorities invoke responsibilities derived from international human rights law to 'decouple' their policies from those adopted nationally" (2018: 614). Carrera and Parkin similarly see municipalities as active players in delivering human rights for irregular migrants in face of the exclusionary consequences of security-oriented national policies (2011: 17).

#### *10.6.1 The Local State*

It would be a mistake, however, to see local authorities as anything other than a part of the state, notwithstanding the semi-autonomous way in which they may appear to act. As a matter of international law, the state is a single entity regardless of its internal governance divisions, bound, for instance, by the state's international human rights obligations regardless of the degree of autonomy they may have (UNHRC 2015: 17).

Whereas the state is often perceived as responding to a pluralist collection of competing external and internal interests, in which the policies that emerge reflect the most powerful among them, Lahav argued in the context of immigration control that we should rather understand the state as 'neo-corporatist', managing different actors instrumentally, reconciling competing interests to achieve its own optimal outcomes (1998). She saw European states addressing the challenge of managing migration by devolving responsibility to a proliferation of new public and private actors (such as airline carriers and NGOs) in order to open up new opportunities for regulation, reinventing forms of state control.

Among those engaged to monitor and implement migration control functions is the local state. Far from representing a loss of control by the national state, incorporating local actors into the management of migration opens up new opportunities for control, enhancing its capacity and flexibility to manage migration while diminishing the political fallout at the national level for potentially unpopular measures (1998: 689). That trend, she argues, has led to some conflict between tiers and led to more diverse local outcomes that can give the semblance of policy incoherence. As Lahav later wrote with Guiraudon, reporting on a study of developments in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, national governments shift decision-making up to intergovernmental fora, down to local authorities, and out to non-state actors that, having different capacities and subject to fewer constraints, are more likely to achieve its policy goals:

This multifaceted devolution of migration policy has not resulted in states losing control over migration. Rather, it shows the adaptiveness of agencies within the central state apparatus in charge of migration control and their political allies. By sharing competence, states may have ceded exclusive autonomy yet they have done so to meet national policy goals, regaining sovereignty in another sense: capabilities to rule (Guiraudon and Lahav 2000:164).

Guiraudon and Lahav nevertheless found variation in local responses, from municipalities that followed the spirit of national policies to those resistant to it. A recent study of access to welfare support conditional on cooperation in the return procedure found that delegation of responsibility for implementation across tiers of government had weakened the impact of the policy tool. Moreover, shared responsibility across policy fields with differing views and interpretations of what is required welfare agencies in particular perceiving their primary role as inclusion—was a further limiting factor (Rosenberger and Koppes 2018: 11).

We thus need not assume that the national state is always successful in controlling the role played by its sub-state tiers. Rather, we saw that there are varying degrees of autonomy accorded to them in states across Europe, and that there is strong evidence of de-coupling where there are open disagreements on the steps that sub-state tiers have taken. Lahav and Guiraudon's analysis does, however, raise the question whether some of the measures that local tiers are taking, while appearing to conflict with national immigration control objectives, are in fact contributing to their regulatory effect. Moreover, going beyond a focus on migration control, it raises the prospect that local actions, if not contributing to the regulation of migration, may nevertheless contribute to national social and economic policy objectives that are being pursued by other parts of the national state.

#### *10.6.2 Contributing to or Undermining National Policy Objectives***?**

It is also helpful to recall that national policy measures that selectively grant access to services have been shown to serve the dual purpose of helping to manage the presence of migrants and increase rates of return. Morris highlights the way in which the stratification of labour and social rights attached to the ever-expanding range of immigration statuses has brought with it an element of control. The process of granting and delivery of rights provides a means of monitoring migrants' behaviour in order to assess eligibility, in turn requiring the sharing of information on them between public agencies, most notably by those involved in providing welfare support (2001: 388). Access to housing and social allowances for rejected asylum seekers are in some states made conditional on cooperation in the return procedure so that "Migration control is carried out with the help of conditional access to basic social rights. The tool combines a duty with a right, if a person cooperates with return processes, then he/she may be granted stay and welfare support" (Rosenberger and Koppes 2018: 2). Access to a temporary toleration status, such as Duldung in Germany, can bring with it a requirement to remain within a defined territorial area. In these cases, we can say that providing a level of access to welfare support is not in tension with immigration control objectives but is contributing to them.

In relation to shelter and support for irregular migrants in the Netherlands, Leerkes finds parallels with the historical social control function of poor relief. Just as poor relief served to mitigate the external effects of poverty such as threats to public health and public safety arising from the proximity of the poor to other residents, so the semi-inclusion of irregular migrants mitigates the effects of their exclusion and facilitates removal. In the Dutch case, poor relief for irregular migrants was initiated by civil society and municipalities and only later conjoined, under pressure, by the national government. While the latter nevertheless fears that inclusion may reduce migrants' incentive to cooperate with immigration control, Leerkes argues that this poor relief is nevertheless an element of it, facilitating locating potential deportees and thus their removal while also functioning to keep those who are not deportable off the streets and out of sight (2016: 148).

Provision of basic accommodation and subsistence operates alongside detention of those considered to pose an actual risk of anti-social behaviour. "Apparently", Leerkes argues, "providing accommodation and elementary allowances without full incapacitation is only considered a sufficient solution to control the perceived negative external effects of poverty among the 'docile' poor, that is, when there are only potential public health issues and minor types of nuisance". Allocation to accommodation or detention also depends on the extent to which individuals create a credible impression that they are prepared to 'work on return'. Those who do not are likely to find themselves excluded from the more inclusionary arrangements (Leerkes 2016: 147).

If nationally approved welfare measures are contributing to immigration control, we might equally expect to find that relationship where inclusive local measures are implementing national laws. In the UK, local authorities that have a statutory duty to support destitute migrant families excluded from mainstream welfare benefits are indeed required by law to pass on the details of the families to the national immigration service, thus facilitating resolution of their immigration status and, if no right to remain, their removal (Price and Spencer 2015: 23).

The question then is whether inclusive measures that municipalities adopt on their *own* initiative may also contribute to immigration control. The evidence suggests that this can be the case. Legal advice, for instance, attached to provision of shelter or independently, is regularly offered by municipalities in order to help irregular migrants resolve their immigration status, either by facilitating regularisation or voluntary return. The City of Utrecht claims a success rate of over 90% (some 900 people over ten years) for its 'problem-solving' approach to resolving immigration status; provision of shelter offering a means of access to the migrants and a sufficient basis for trust to provide advice and representation with the national authorities and, if status is not resolved, to facilitate voluntary return.

The City of Munich extends small grants to facilitate voluntary return, while Ghent provides advice on regularisation and return alongside information on other services, ensuring confidentiality so that individuals can seek advice without automatic referral to the immigration authorities. Shelter is provided in a reception centre to those who agree to cooperate in their return. Barcelona funds 55 non-profit 'social entities' to provide free legal support on how to obtain a regular status or renewal of expiring residence permits and to make representations on the migrants' behalf. The whole thrust of Barcelona's published strategy on irregular migrants is to promote regularisation and prevent lapsing into irregularity (Adjuntament de Barcelona 2017; CMISE 2019).