The production of irregularity in Europe

Davide Colombi, Ilse van Liempt and Nando Sigona

Migrants’ irregular status in Europe is commonly framed as a border control issue, unauthorised entry or failed return. However, irregularity and legal precarity are structurally produced through the interaction of migration, labour, welfare and family policy regimes at the EU and national levels. 

Legal precarity often occurs due to restrictive residence permit renewal criteria, employer dependency, income thresholds, administrative delays and limited status transitions. These are embedded in segmented labour markets and shaped by racialised and gendered hierarchies, meaning that precarity becomes economically functional and politically normalised.

Comparative research in Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the UK and at the EU level shows that irregularity is a structural feature of contemporary labour regimes. In agriculture, platform-based delivery and domestic and care work, fragmented contracts, subcontracting chains and employer-tied permits convert migration control into labour discipline, exposing migrant workers to exploitation and constrained mobility. Legal precarity is unevenly distributed, disproportionately affecting racialised groups and reshaping family life, caregiving arrangements and intergenerational stability.

Political and media narratives exacerbate these dynamics by reducing irregularity to narratives based around crisis and criminality, obscuring the administrative and labour market mechanisms driving it. Public perception frequently overestimates irregular migrant populations and reproduces hierarchies of deservingness, legitimising deterrence-focused governance and overlooking irregular migrant workers’ realities.

This Policy Brief calls for reducing the structural drivers of irregularisation in residence and migration regimes, mainstreaming fundamental and socio-economic rights and non-discrimination in migration governance, separating labour protection from immigration control and addressing housing conditions as a structural dimension of labour precarity and irregularisation.