I-CLAIM aims to investigate the living and working conditions of irregular migrants in six European countries (Finland, Poland, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom). Its goal is to uncover the spectrum and drivers of migrants’ irregular status, as well as the impact it has on migrant families, through an intersectional and intergenerational lens. The project combines the need to generate critical knowledge of the phenomenon with the urgency to propose policy measures to improve the lives of undocumented migrant households in Europe. Notably, it introduces the concept of “irregularity assemblages” to capture how irregularity is produced by the interplay of immigration and asylum laws, policies, and practice; broader labour market and welfare regimes; and dominant public narratives and perceptions.
This understanding underpins the co-design, assessment, and validation of policy options and public interventions that target place-specific, sectoral, and intersectional criticalities and vulnerabilities experienced by a range of people with uncertain or no legal status in Europe. The project achieves its overarching ambition to inform public and political debates on migration by engaging with relevant European, national, local, and sectoral actors at all stages of the research process. These include labour unions and migrant rights organizations in the six countries. Methodologically, the project applies policy and discourse analysis of the legal and narrative frameworks that produce a complex infrastructure of irregularity in Europe. It also employs surveys, including survey experiments to capture public perceptions of irregularity and ethnographies of labour market sectors with high numbers of undocumented migrants and varying degrees of platformization (agri-food, care and domestic work, and logistics and delivery). The project also utilizes collaborative, multimodal, and art-based research methods.
The I-CLAIM project consists of four closely linked research streams (Work Package 3-6) that make up the “irregularity assemblage”. The first research stream (WP3) examines the politics of irregularity at the intersection of immigration, labour, and welfare regimes and how it has been affected by recent geopolitical events such as Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. The second stream (WP4) analyses political, media, and public narratives and counter-narratives on irregular migrants and irregular migration. It also offers unique insights into how the public perceives the phenomenon. The third research stream (WP5) uses in-depth qualitative and ethnographic methods to focus on key labour sectors where people with irregular or precarious immigration status are employed (agrifood, care and domestic work, and logistics and delivery). It explores how these sectors operate, migrants’ experiences of mobility (social and geographical) within and across sectors, and the tactics used by irregular migrant workers to challenge labour exploitation. The fourth research stream (WP6) brings together the different dimensions and scales of the analysis, comparatively examining critical sectors of the labour market, processes of racialization and how they intersect with the “irregular condition”, and the gendered, intergenerational impact of irregularity on migrant households. Throughout the project, I-CLAIM establishes and sustains dialogue with relevant policymakers, civil society actors, trade unions, and migrants’ rights organizations around ideas, lessons, and actions to improve the conditions of undocumented migrants in Europe (WP7).
