Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe

Front matter

IMISCOE Research Series

Sarah Spencer Anna Triandatyllidou® Editors

* Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe

Contents

1 Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe: A Multi-faceted Anna Triandafyllidou and Sarah Spencer

Anna Triandafyllidou and Laura Bartolini

Sébastien Chauvin and Blanca Garcés-Mascarefias

Chapter 2 A Understanding Irregularity ges Anna Triandafyllidou and Laura Bartolini

Irregular migration is a multifaceted, dynamic phenomenon that is attracting disproportionate media and political attention since the early 2000s and has been at the forefront of the political debate in most of the European Union’s member states since the outbreak of the so-called ‘migration crisis’ of 2015. Indeed, the political attention paid to migration, and particularly irregular migration, is disproportionate compared to its volume. Migrants represent 3.3% of the world’s population (IOM 2017a from UNDESA 2017)—notably a rather small fraction—with migrants in an irregular situation representing between 15% and 20% of all migrants, according to recent estimates. This would thus mean approximately 1% of the total global population, or some 30—40 million individuals worldwide (UN OHCHR 2014; ILO 2015). Naturally, these are estimates and vary between continents and particularly between countries. As suggested by Koser (2007) and Fargues (2008), irregular migration is pervasive in some sectors and areas of Asia and Africa, reaching and exceeding 50% of the total; it is quite extensive in North America (according to Rosenblum and Ruiz Soto’s 2015 estimate there were 11 million irregular migrants in the United States in 2013) but quite limited in Europe, where the most recent comparable estimates (Kovacheva and Vogel 2009) put the number of irregular migrants between 1.9 and 3.8 million in 2008. Moreover, there are reasons to believe that irregular migration may have slowed during the economic and financial crisis

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).

A. Triandafyllidou (%4) Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: anna.triandafyllidou @ryerson.ca

L. Bartolini International Organization for Migration (IOM), Rome, Italy

© The Author(s) 2020 11 S. Spencer, A. Triandafyllidou (eds.), Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34324-8_2 in Europe and the US, a trend that might have been reversed by the most recent developments (long-lasting conflicts, insecurity, environmental change, lack of employment, and booming young populations) generating new flows of refugees and other migrants (Carling 2018) from both Africa and Asia to Europe.

Discussing irregular migration in Europe entails dealing with different paths towards irregularity—legal entry and irregular stay, entry with fake documents, entry and abuse of the terms of stay, to name only a few. Each of these paths represents a varying percentage of the total phenomenon in each country. There are degrees, so to speak, and types of irregular migration, and dichotomous distinctions ought better to be avoided. We should also not neglect the fact that irregular migrants are people with lives and jobs who make contributions to their immediate and wider social environment: they work (usually without appropriate insurance or pay or both), rent accommodation, have families, and also have health and education needs. Thus, they can actively contribute to their communities despite their irregular status, posing multiple governance, political, and moral challenges at the local, national, and European levels.

While the EU Returns Directive (2008) unequivocally states that people in an irregular situation cannot reside in the European Union—they must either be returned to their country of origin/last country of transit or must regularise their situation—reality is far more complex. This is not only because return often proves too complicated to be implemented, but also because while national or EU laws may dictate the expulsion of a person, this person may have developed ties with the country of residence that cannot be severed so easily. Such ties may include children that go to school and whose lives will be disrupted, employers who value a hardworking and reliable employee, neighbours and friends—both natives and migrants—who do not care about the legal status of their friend. These contradictory situations, where national law comes up against social reality, are often left to the city or regional level to be solved by local authorities that seek to ensure that their communities are welcoming, humane, yet also ‘orderly’ places to live. The challenges here can be political and moral (transforming the violation of migration regulations in criminal offences) but also socio-economic (providing health and welfare to persons who cannot pay taxes because they work without documents; tolerating irregular situations; dealing with people who find themselves homeless because they cannot hold a stable job because of their undocumented status).

This book focuses primarily on irregular residents (and workers) rather than on irregular entrants. In other words, it does not focus on the border but rather on internal controls and related practices and policies, covering different perspectives on irregular stay and work such as the policy and public discourses on irregular migrants’ deservingness (Chauvin and Mascarenas, Chap. 3), or the human rights of all irregular migrants (O’Cinneide, Chap. 4) but also the special case of vulnerable groups (Chimienti and Solomos, Chap. 6). The book also looks at different aspects of irregular migrants’ lives, notably their employment (Triandafyllidou and Bartolini, Chap. 8), their interaction with welfare and other public services (Atac and Schiitze, Chap. 7) or with local authorities (Spencer, Chap. 10). In other words, the book brings together different types and dimensions of irregularity with different perspectives and facets of the lives of migrants in an irregular situation.

This chapter introduces the multifaceted dimensions of migrants’ irregularity in Europe, with a view to providing the framework within which the other contributions to this volume are framed. The chapter is organised as follows. The next part provides a brief theoretical reflection on the dynamics of irregular migration, on why and how it happens, and presents the main related definitions of the topic. We pay special attention to the pathways into irregularity of residence and the connection between irregular migration and irregular work, since we consider employment an important factor in shaping migration decisions but also in perpetuating conditions of irregularity. We highlight why and how irregular migration needs to be conceptualised not as a black-and-white distinction between legal and illegal status but rather as a continuum of different statuses between regularity and irregularity. While rejecting the dichotomous distinction helps understanding how irregular migrants’ lives are possible and sometimes tolerated in the local contexts, the analysis of EU-sponsored schemes for voluntary returns of migrants at risk of falling into irregularity and of befallen irregular migrants is presented in the third part of the chapter. The ways in which return is conceived and implemented in practice leave doubts as to the sustainability of such schemes—from both a moral and an economic point of view—and contribute to the understanding of the persistence of a certain amount of irregularity even when alternatives are formally available. The fourth part delves into the available data and estimates about the size of irregular migration by residence status in Europe, although the dearth of reliable and comparable sources across countries allows only a rough evaluation in terms of magnitude and trends. The final section summarises the main points, which are then further investigated in subsequent chapters.

2.2 A Dynamic and Multifaceted Account of Irregular Migration

As pointed out recently in a comprehensive study by de Haas et al. (2016), policy changes over the past 20 years have diversified immigration policies, making them more selective and differentiated towards specific groups. This is applied using multiple criteria, differentiating among high- and low-skilled workers, students, refugees, and family members. In this panorama, policies targeted specifically towards family migrants, irregular migrants and on border controls have been tightened, and prospective international migrants seeking better jobs and life opportunities face increasingly higher walls, particularly if they aim to emigrate to high-income countries in Europe, North America, and Australia. Nonetheless, the demand for cheap (irregular) labour in migrant-receiving countries, coupled with the needs generated by ageing populations in Europe and economic pressures of booming young populations in origin countries, create a powerful pull/push mechanism that defies border controls, visa restrictions, and internal control measures.

Restrictive policies produce irregular residence status and irregular work (De Genova 2004; Vickstrom 2014) as they limit legal channels for labour migration, raise the requirements for family reunification or family formation, and make regularisation of status difficult to reach. One might argue that this is precisely the objective: to make the lives of irregular migrants impossible and cut them off from both jobs and welfare so that they leave or are discouraged from coming. However, as we know, migration is a phenomenon that can be governed yet not controlled. It is not a tap that can be opened and closed. There is no single national interest on migration as politicians often argue, but rather the different interests of employers, workers, trade unions, and various sections of the local population that may benefit or suffer from migration. Regularity or irregularity are not two opposites but rather two extremes on an array of intermediate statuses.

Patterns of irregularity are diverse and can include people who crossed a border unlawfully as well as visa over-stayers, children born to undocumented parents, migrants who lost their regular status because of unemployment or non-compliance with certain requirements, and last but not least, rejected asylum seekers. Irregularity is not entirely of the migrant’s making: it may result from red tape or labour market dynamics that privilege irregular stay and irregular work. Researchers have coined the term ‘befallen irregularity’ (Gonzalez Enriquez 2014; Vickstrom 2014) to specifically characterise the cases in which migrants in southern Europe fell to irregular status because of red tape around stay or work requirements that are impossible to fulfil. The term ‘befallen irregularity’ or ‘semi-legality’ (Kubal 2013) is also used to emphasise the fact that migrants, particularly but not exclusively in southern Europe, may alternate periods of regular stay and work with periods of irregular stay and irregular work and may live in conditions of partial regular status, e.g. with the right to stay although not to work or participate in a regularisation programme yet eventually fail to fulfil all the conditions to obtain a durable regular status. Additionally, research has shown that irregularity is functional to labour market conditions in specific sectors such as construction, domestic work, agriculture, and the food industry as irregular migrant workers provide a cheap and plentiful workforce (Jordan and Diivell 2002; Van der Leun and Kloosterman 2006; Cheliotis 2017). By creating conditions of regular stay and work that are impossible to meet, states indirectly support the interests of unscrupulous employers and create ethnic segmentation and hierarchies in the labour market that are functional to the national economy.

Irregular migrants are often not completely deprived of formal papers that testify to their presence in a given country. Recent studies (Vasta 2008; Chauvin and Garcés-Mascarefias 2014) have shown that irregular migrants may possess legal documents such as social security numbers, work contracts, certificates of enrolment for their children in school, or identity cards issued by municipalities while still not having a regular stay permit. Such documents testify to the de facto inclusion of the migrant in the labour market and social life and are important in illustrating the dynamism and complexity of the irregular migration phenomenon as well as the fragmentation of its governance. A typical example of such fragmentation comes from Spain where municipalities require all migrants to enrol with the local registry (padrón) even if they do not have regular permits of residence, which are issued by the national administration.

While regularisation of one’s status is generally seen as the outcome of the application of the migrant and her/his family, Europe has experienced two large indirect regularisation waves through successive EU enlargements to the east, in 2004 and 2007. Citizens of ‘new’ member states who were irregularly residing and/or working in the ‘old’ member states became EU citizens, thus shifting to a regular stay with full socio-economic and labour rights. This of course has had important implications for all aspects of their lives and socio-economic and political inclusion in the countries of residence, even if it certainly did not automatically mean that they also acquired a job in the formal economy.

In addition, over the past two decades, a number of countries have repeatedly resorted to regularisation programs as a response to the presence of irregular migrants within their territories (Kraler 2009). Southern European countries have regularized the largest number of migrants with amnesty programs, but a sizeable number of migrants has also been regularized by Belgium and France and to a lesser extent Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden (Baldwin-Edwards and Kraler 2009). While some 3.5 million migrants received a regular residence permit within the EU through regularizations (one of the most recent was carried out by Poland in 2013), in more recent years no single measure of that kind has been implemented by EU Member States, and the EU Return Directive explicitly restrains them from such measures if not in ‘exceptional’ circumstances.

2.2.1 Definitions of Irregularity

Although the concept of irregular migration is often treated as self-evident by media and political discourses, it deserves some careful reflection to avoid ambiguities and inconsistencies (Triandafyllidou 2010). A number of different terms and expressions are used for persons who enter a country illegally, overstay their terms of regular residence, live in a country without a residence permit, or break immigration rules in a way that makes them liable for expulsion. At the academic level—but also in the media and public discussion—terms like irregular, undocumented, or unauthorized have been preferred to the more discriminatory ‘clandestine’ or ‘illegal’ immigrants. Indeed, even though no human being is illegal (Ambrosini 2013), specific practices and behaviours in breach of the law can be referred as ‘not legal’ (for example, illegal border crossing).

For a complete and dynamic picture (Kovacheva and Vogel 2009), the distinction is made between irregular residents—foreigners without any legal residence status in the country and those who can be subject, if detected, to an order to leave or to an expulsion order (stocks)—and irregular entrants who cross an international border without the required valid documents (flows).

To clarify the various irregular statuses, below is a list of the different forms of irregular stay that migrants may experience which serves the purpose of illustrating the complexity of intersecting entry, stay and work related status:

e Persons with forged papers or persons with real papers but assuming false identities;

e Persons with seemingly legal temporary residence status. The so-called working tourists (entered on a tourist visa and working irregularly) are assumed to be the majority of irregular migrants in some countries. Migrants with a temporary conditional permit such as seasonal and contract workers may likewise be liable for expulsion if they break their contract terms (for example, because they work for a longer period than permitted);

e Persons who lose their residence status because they no longer satisfy the conditions that initially granted the permit (unemployed, no longer able to demonstrate employment relationship to obtain a work permit, student whose course of study has ended, expiration of family permit for young adults coming of age, etc.);

e Persons who never had a regular status because they entered illegally and couldn’t find a way of regularizing their status;

e Persons entered illegally but are registered with public authorities. They have been denied protection after lodging an asylum application;

e Tolerated persons without a regular status, with or without a document to prove the suspension of their removal and thus their semi-legal residence status. This occurs when removal of the illegally-residing alien or return to the country of origin is not possible because there is no agreement with the country of origin or transit,! or it is not possible to establish the nationality of the migrant;

e Children born to parents who are unlawfully residing and hence without fullydocumented status.

2.2.2 Flows of Irregular Migrants

Inflows and outflows of irregular migrants continuously contribute to the stock of irregular residents. Such flows may be demographic (births? and deaths), physical (actual entries or departures) or legal (most notably change of status from regular to irregular or vice versa). Geographical movements in and out the country may take place through unguarded border crossings or undetected unlawful entries at guarded border crossings. Unlawful entries may even take place under the control of the

'See the Regulation 1953 adopted by the European Parliament on 13 October 2016 regarding a uniform European travel document for the return of illegally staying third-country nationals (European travel document for return), _https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ TXT/?urizCELEX %3A32016R1953 (last accessed on 31 March 2019).

? Births into irregularity of children of undocumented migrants.

state in the sense that the irregular migrant may enter, be apprehended, receive a return decision asking her/him to leave the country (usually within 30 days) but still stay in that destination country.

The continuing refugee and migrant crisis, combined with the different and changing practices applied by European countries in terms of entry/transit of these flows, will likely result in an increase in the number of undocumented migrants in Europe as not all new arrivals are able or willing to lodge an asylum application and not all those who fall into irregularity can be effectively returned (EMN 2018).

Status-related flows concern people who fall into irregularity after a period of regular residence. The largest of such inflows is that of visa over-stayers: persons who enter with a tourist or other temporary visa and overstay the allowed period, possibly engaging into paid employment while their visa allows only for tourism/ leisure activities. Status-related flows also include asylum seekers whose application has been definitively rejected or people whose permanent or temporary permit has been withdrawn as a consequence of a criminal offence. On the other hand, there are status-related outflows from irregular residence, ranging from regularization through marriage to collective amnesty programmes (Baldwin-Edwards and Kraler 2009), which are less frequent and smaller in size over the past years compared with the 1990s and early 2000s.

Third-country nationals may repeatedly shift from regular to irregular status and vice versa as, for instance, Vickstrom (2014) has shown for Senegalese migrants in France, Italy, and Spain. Migration policy reforms may create new status options or make established ones available for new groups of people. While widening legal options would represent a functional equivalent to regularisation for them, European migration regimes have become more restrictive and more fragmented over the past years. The increasing migrant and refugee flows between 2011 and 2018 put pressure on the EU system for governing the borders and managing asylum and irregular migration, creating temptations for member states to adopt individual rather than coordinated responses.

2.3 The Close Links Between Irregular Stay and Irregular Work

Irregular migration is to a large extent driven by labour market dynamics. This is an important issue that is often neglected in relevant political and policy discourses. For instance, the availability of jobs in agriculture or construction or the demand for live-in care workers can act as a pole of attraction for migrant workers who may decide to enter a country unlawfully or overstay their visa and violate its conditions because of the availability of work opportunities. The connection between prospective employer and employee takes place through relevant networks (for instance through referral from a migrant that already works in the same employment and recommends her/his friend, cousin, or co-villager) while these same networks may mitigate the costs of (irregular) migration by providing for accommodation and support to the undocumented newcomer. Such a plentiful and disposable labour force can be handy for unscrupulous employers or seasonal and temporary jobs or both, as they incur no additional costs of firing or of paying for welfare or unemployment benefits.

Obtaining and keeping or renewing one’s legal status in the EU often depends upon employment (even for those who hold family related permits, which are linked to the work permit of the main breadwinner), particularly for people on relatively short-term stay permits. Legally residing third-country nationals should be able to have jobs with proper contracts which respect labour laws and include welfare insurance. However, in practice it is often the case that migrant workers are employed in irregular ways, i.e., without being declared or having a proper contract, or with a contract that specified conditions of work and salary that are not respected in reality. This is because migrants are often concentrated in labour market sectors where there is a high incidence of informal work such as construction for men or cleaning and caring work for women, or catering, tourism, and agriculture for either. In addition, those recently arrived have less bargaining power compared to settled migrants or natives as they may have only partial information about their rights, or may not yet speak the local language or may not know where to address themselves if they suffer an injustice. On top of this, they may be in absolute need for a job and a livelihood—even if this does not come with all the required conditions—as they may have no other source of income or any social support networks to rely on. The importance of trade unions and labour market inspectors for protecting all workers, but particularly migrant workers in this case, cannot be overestimated (see also Triandafyllidou and Bartolini, Chap. 8).

In addition to these socio-economic dynamics attracting unauthorised migrant workers to a country to take up informal work or pushing legally staying third-country nationals to accept irregular employment, it would be important to consider how socio-economic exclusion interacts with symbolic inclusion/exclusion. As Ambrosini (2016) argues, we could conceptualise two levels of authorisation: one is that of regular versus irregular migration status and the other is one of symbolic authorisation in the sense of recognition that the migrant is filling a job vacancy and performing a job that is socially valuable. Ambrosini points out that this distinction is also gendered, as usually the female care workers and cleaners are those represented positively and recognised as valuable, while narratives of ‘clandestine’ migrant workers almost always refer to male migrants. Ambrosini points out that asylum seekers, too, although temporarily authorised in the receiving country’s territory while their application is processed, are stigmatised and excluded as nonsocially valuable.

The realities of irregular residence and irregular work combine in multiple ways, preventing clear-cut definitions and requiring attention to single national practices and legal frameworks even within the European context. We should better speak of a continuum between regularity and irregularity, ranging from situations where one is aregular foreign resident allowed to work and with a formal employment contract to cases in which one is an irregular foreign resident with an undeclared job.

Fig. 2.1 Total resident population by work status, Non-working citizenship, and residence population status. (Source: authors’

compilation)

Working population

Moreover, one’s status is not fixed. Changes in status (of residence, of permission to work, of employment conditions) are frequent and not necessarily in the direction of progressive improvement and stability (EMN 2016a). ‘Spaces of? and ‘pathways to’ illegality (Ruhs and Anderson 2006; Diivell 2011) are thus found within the triangle of migration policies, labour market dynamics, and the individual choices of social actors. Different types and degrees of irregularity can be produced and negotiated among all actors involved and semi-compliance to (some) rules might be a frequent case (Ruhs and Anderson 2006).

Figure 2.1 summarizes the possible intersections of citizenship, residence, and work status: irregular employment can be found among the native labour force (A), foreigners with a regular residence status (B), and foreigners who are irregularly residing in the country (C). This book focuses on irregular foreign residents and delves deeper on the intersection between residence and work for foreigners in Chap. 8.

2.4 The Size of the Irregular Migrant Population in Europe

Figures on irregular migrants are difficult to compile, and most EU countries’ national authorities do not provide any official estimate of the size of irregular foreign population in their territory. The last comprehensive effort for an EU-wide figure reflects numbers that are a decade old: the Clandestino Project (Kovacheva and Vogel 2009) estimated the number of irregular migrants as between 1.9 and 3.8 million, that is, between 7% and 12% of the total migrant presence in the EU-27° in 2008.

3Croatia had not acceded at that time.

Since then, some updated estimates are available for a few countries: irregular migrant residents were estimated at between 180,000 and 520,000 in Germany in 2014 (Vogel 2015); at around 300,000 in Italy in 2013;* at around one million in the UK in 2010;° and at around 33,000 in Sweden in 2017.° In general, most official and independent sources speak of an irregular migrant presence ranging from 6% to 10% of the total foreign resident population in Europe before the eruption of the so-called “migration crisis” in 2014-2015.

While a number of countries repeatedly resorted to regularisation programs until the late 2000s (Kraler 2009), no such measure has been applied in the last five years in Europe. Conversely, EU member states are taking major steps to combat irregular flows and stream-line the asylum-seeking process, even though increased securitization and criminalization coul hardly stop new migration flows (de Haas 2011). In particular, there have been explicit efforts in border securitization, in extending the mandate of the European agencies Frontex and EASO, in enforcing the EURODAC system for coordinated collection of fingerprints of all asylum seekers, in suspending the Schengen Agreement (1985) under certain “emergency” situations, and in discussing amendments to the recently updated Dublin Regulation (1990, 2003, 2013) to boost returns, which the EU Return Directive foresees as the main tool for dealing with irregular migration (see below).

National authorities have not released any new estimate of irregular migrants in their respective countries in recent years. Eurostat provides harmonized data on enforcement of migration legislation for EU member states and some other European countries (Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland). These figures are illustrative of irregular migration flows rather than stocks of total presence at one point in time. However, they might be informative on the degree of law enforcement and crosscountry differences in migration management, offering an overview on trends in the number of migrants found irregularly present in an EU country.

Third-country nationals who are irregularly present within the territory of a member state include those who entered avoiding controls or with false documents and those over-staying their authorized period: Germany, France, Greece, the UK, Spain and Italy registered three quarters (76%) of all detections of irregular migrants in the EU in 2017, but the phenomenon is found in most of Europe (see Fig. 2.2). Differences across countries are a mix of geographical and contextual circumstances with the disparate efforts and resources put into controls. Detections are always above 400,000 individuals between 2010 and 2013, but the descending trend reversed in 2014, with 625,000 individuals detected and the peak in 2015 with more than two million detections (911,000, or nearly half, in Greece). The issue of double-counting individuals who engage in multiple cross-border movements in figures

*See ISMU Foundation: http://www.ismu.org/irregolari-e-sbarchi-presenze/ >See Migration Watch UK: https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/key-topics/illegal-immigration ĉThe Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket) estimated that around 33,000 migrants who have been denied a residence permit will remain irregularly in Sweden between 2017 and 2019.

Fig. 2.2 Third country nationals found to be illegally present, % in top 6 EU countries and total EU-28, 2008-2017. (Source: Eurostat [migr_eipre], last checked on 31 March 2019)

released by Eurostat or Frontex has been underlined by many researchers.’ This was particularly evident between 2015 and 2016, when thousands of migrants passed from Turkey to Greece and then to central and northern Europe via the so-called Balkan Route, and were detected more than once by authorities. Regarding refusals of entry at borders, the biggest share is registered by Spain for all of the past ten years. Figure 2.3 shows the differences between detections, refusals of entry, orders to leave, and the share of individuals effectively returned from the EU as a whole. Some migrants might have changed their legal status, lodging a protection request after being detected as irregularly present or crossing. Of the roughly 500,000 annually ordered to leave since 2008, between 40% and 50% have returned to the origin country, while the rest is not registered as returned even though the return of irregular migrants—including rejected asylum seekers who no longer have the right to stay in the EU (see below) —is one pillar of the EU’s current policy on migration and asylum (EMN 2016b).? These figures demonstrate the difficulties in law

1 Frontex (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency) provides monthly series of detections of irregular border-crossing rather than the number of individuals; as the same person may cross an external border several times, it is not possible to obtain from these figures a precise number of persons entering the Schengen area irregularly.

8See https://migrantsatsea.org/2015/10/14/clarification-of-frontex-data-on-persons-detected-at-euexternal-borders-includes-significant-double-counting/

*In line with the Return Directive, member states are asked to first encourage rejected asylum seekers to return voluntarily, also through assistance programmes, before using forced return that includes coercive methods.

20,00,000 + 20,00,000

16,00,000 - 16,00,000

TCNs found to be irregular TCNs refused entry at borders

© TCNs not returned after an order to leave E TCNs returned after an order to leave

Fig. 2.3 Enforcement of migration legislation, EU-28 (current composition), 2008-2017. (Source: Eurostat [migr_eirfs, migr_eipre, migr_eiord, migr_eirtn], last checked 31 March 2019)

enforcement at national level and the existence of a certain degree of tolerance of irregular foreign residents even in countries where irregular residence is considered a crime.'°

As the nature of new inflows is changing with the unstable contours of conflicts and crises in the Middle East, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, data on detections of irregular migrants must be read in parallel with data on asylum applications, given that a large number of migrants entering the Schengen area irregularly since 2013-2014 have then applied for asylum within the EU.

First-time applications registered a surge in 2015 and 2016, when migrants could transit along the so-called Balkan route towards northern Europe with almost no impediment. at the same time, first-instance decisions on asylum applications have increased sensibly over the last few years. The share of rejections in first-instance decisions declined between 2011 and 2016 from 75% to 39%, to then recover at 55% in 2017 and 63% in 2018. The absolute number of rejections at first-instance has increased between 2014 and 2017, dropping in 2018 (Fig. 2.4). These migrants might appeal the first-instance decisions and still have the right to remain in the EU for the time of the judgement, but for all those whose application will be unsuccessful, the processing time of the asylum applications merely postpones a situation of irregularity.