| 8 mins read
Across Europe, politicians promise to “stop irregular migration” as if it were a problem that comes from the outside — a flow of people trying to evade the rules. The proposed solution is always the same: tougher enforcement, higher visa fees, shorter permits, and stricter border controls.
But what if irregular migration is not something that happens despite the system, but because of it? What if the very policies designed to prevent irregularity are the ones that keep producing it?
That is the argument at the heart of the new report we published drawing on research on immigration policy and their consequences on migrants in Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and the UK. We show how irregularity is created through the interaction of different regulatory regimes governing immigration, labour and welfare as well as media and political narratives which problematise specific individuals and communities as undeserving, dangerous, law breaking, and illegal.
From border control to everyday bordering
Borders today stretch far beyond the geographical edges of a country. They run through train stations and airports but also through schools, hospitals, banks, workplaces and homes. You meet them when you rent a flat, register with a GP, open a bank account or apply for a job.
Nira Yuval-Davis and colleagues call this “everyday bordering” — the multiplication and diffusion of border checks into all areas of daily life. Lecturers, doctors, landlords and employers have been turned into border guards, required to verify people’s immigration status before providing services or employment.
Governments justify this as necessary to catch irregular migrants, as if these migrants existed somewhere outside the system. Yet, as Nicholas De Genova pointed out more than twenty years ago, migrant illegality is not a pre-existing fact: it is the product of the migration regime itself.
By embedding more checks and linking more rights to immigration status, states do not reduce irregularity — they create it. Each new checkpoint generates fresh risks: a landlord refuses to rent for fear of fines; a worker loses their visa when they lose their job; a student cannot renew a permit because their college loses its licence. Rather than detecting people who were already irregular, the system pushes regular migrants into irregularity, turning bureaucratic lapses into long-term precarity.
Policies that produce the problem they claim to solve
This dynamic extends far beyond everyday interactions. Across Europe, a growing range of administrative restrictions — all framed as measures to “tighten control” — are, in practice, factories of irregularity. Immigration and visa fees have risen sharply, pricing out low-income families from maintaining lawful status. Visa durations have shortened, while renewal processes have become more complex, increasing the risk of falling out of legality through delays or errors. Rules for family reunion have tightened, separating partners and children and pushing some families toward informal or overstayed arrangements. Meanwhile, the spread of employer-sponsorship systems, which tie residence rights to a single job, exposes workers to abuse and makes legality dependent on continued subordination to one employer.
These measures are presented as efforts to “catch” irregular migrants generate a population that is deportable, exploitable and politically useful — proof, paradoxically, that the border is working. The more checks and restrictions are introduced, the more irregularity the system generates.
The irregularity assemblage: how systems converge
The assemblage approach we developed in our study helps explain why. Migration control does not operate in isolation; it intersects with labour law, welfare eligibility, housing regulation and local administration, each guided by different priorities. Immigration authorities seek removability; labour ministries value flexibility; welfare systems enforce conditionality; local councils struggle to manage limited resources.
Their interactions are rarely coordinated. Instead, they form transient alignments of divergent logics that together produce what we call the irregularity assemblage — a constantly shifting configuration of laws, bureaucracies, technologies and narratives that make certain lives precarious. When work permits are tied to employers and labour inspection is weak, both systems combine to sustain a cheap and easily disposable workforce. When welfare access depends on residence registration but registration requires proof of income, migrants fall into circular exclusion. These overlapping regimes do not create a coherent policy but a governable disorder, in which irregularity becomes both a symptom and a tool of governance.
The assemblage is also gendered and racialised. Labour and migration rules often privilege the male “breadwinner” while rendering care and domestic work invisible. Welfare systems embed heteronormative assumptions about dependency, while public discourse racialises certain groups as threats. These intersections produce distinct and uneven forms of irregularity — the “tolerated” worker, the “illegalised” mother, the “irregular” carer.
Adding narratives and perceptions to the picture
What distinguishes the I-CLAIM approach from earlier perspectives is that it also integrates narratives, perceptions and moral economies into the analysis.
Our findings show that political, media and public discourses play a central role in shaping how irregularity is understood, governed and experienced by those labelled as “illegal migrants”. Talk of “queue-jumpers,” “bogus asylum seekers” or “visa overstayers” does not simply describe reality — it produces it, legitimising restrictive laws and normalising everyday controls.
These narratives serve multiple agendas. They sustain the fiction of control and feed the spectacle of enforcement, while diverting attention from the structural dependence of European economies on precarious, low-wage labour. By incorporating this discursive dimension, the assemblage approach exposes how irregularity is not only a legal or administrative construct but also a narrative project, sustained by emotions, fears and political calculations.
Spaces of resistance and adaptation
Because the irregularity assemblage is heterogeneous and unstable, it also contains contradictions that can be mobilised for change. Local authorities and civil-society organisations across Europe are experimenting with firewalls that separate public services from immigration enforcement, city-level ID cards that recognise all residents, and pragmatic regularisation schemes. Migrants themselves adapt and resist: they navigate bureaucracy, form support networks, and use digital tools to share information and solidarity. These everyday acts reveal that the same interconnections that produce irregularity can also be harnessed for inclusion.
When governments call for “joined-up enforcement,” they already acknowledge that migration control depends on coordination across systems. The challenge is to redirect that coordination toward protection rather than criminalisation — to build migration, labour and welfare systems that prevent people from falling into irregularity instead of pushing them into it.
Reframing irregularity through the assemblage lens allows us to see migrants not as outsiders but as participants in complex governance systems. It makes clear that what has been assembled in one way could be assembled differently. Irregularity is not an accident of migration; it is the predictable outcome of how we currently govern mobility, labour and belonging. Understanding it as an assemblage of laws, institutions and narratives gives us the tools not only to describe that process but to imagine how it might be unmade — and reassembled in fairer, more humane ways.
