Racial Logics of Irregular Migration in Europe. Policy, Perception, and Precarity

Stefano Piemontese, Nando Sigona, Laurence Lessard-Phillips and Emmanuel Achiri

This report examines how race and racism shape the production, governance, and lived experience of migrants’ irregularity across Europe. Drawing on comparative research in Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom, it analyses how racial logics operate within migration, labour, and welfare systems, and in the narratives and perceptions that sustain them. The study forms part of the Horizon Europe and UKRI-funded Improving the Living and Labour Conditions of Irregularised Migrant Households in Europe (I-CLAIM) project.

Across these contexts, racism does not merely operate beneath the surface of law and policy:  it structures how access to rights, belonging, and worth are organised. The report conceptualises racism as systemic: not as a set of individual prejudices, but as a structural logic embedded in legal frameworks, bureaucratic routines, everyday governance, as well as the daily practices and lived experiences of migrants. Visa systems, sponsorship mechanisms, welfare conditionality, and structural exclusion reproduce racial hierarchies despite formal commitments to equality. Bureaucratic discretion weaponise administrative procedures into mechanisms of control, while labour regimes transform dependency into economic value. These processes collectively reproduce a racialised governance of mobility.

The analysis spans three interconnected domains. First, legal and policy infrastructures reveal how race operates through nationality, origin, and perceived cultural or religious proximity to shape access to rights and residence. Second, political, media, and civil society narratives show how moral hierarchies of deservingness—often framed through religion, culture, or gender—legitimise exclusionary and racist policies. Third, comparative evidence from agriculture, domestic work, and food delivery demonstrates how race, gender, and status intersect in structuring recruitment, segmentation, and exploitation. In all sectors, irregularity functions as a tool of racialised labour division and discipline that renders certain groups permanently disposable.

Importantly, the report highlights that racialisation extends beyond non-EU or irregularised migrants. Racialised EU minorities—such as Roma people—are often migrantised and governed with the same control logics as those deemed ‘irregular’, facing racism, intensified surveillance, spatial exclusion, and restricted access to welfare and work. Their experiences demonstrate how racism produces irregularity, collapsing the distinction between nationality, administrative status and de facto exclusion.

Across Europe, irregularity emerges as both a product and an organising principle of racial order. Racialisation legitimises inequality, while migration policies provide the institutional machinery that sustains it. Recognising racism as the driving force of irregularity is essential to understanding and addressing migrant precarity. Confronting irregular migration in Europe therefore requires engaging with the racialised foundations of its border, labour, and welfare regimes.

Despite its commitment to tackling structural racism, the new EU Anti-Racism Strategy 2026–2030 stops short of interrogating migration governance as a racialising infrastructure. While its emphasis on xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment is welcome, the absence of explicit recognition and mechanisms of accountability risks obscuring how immigration law, residence regimes, labour market controls, and welfare–enforcement linkages systematically produce and reproduce racial hierarchies. The findings of this report substantiate this gap: across countries and labour sectors, racialised inequalities are not only experienced as prejudice or exclusion but are actively produced through legal status differentiation, employer-tied permits, bureaucratic discretion and delay, delegated enforcement, and conditional access to social rights—revealing migration governance itself as a central mechanism of racial differentiation.