European Societies Migration And The Law

Looks at immigration and asylum legislation and polices in Europe to investigate how immigrants are 'othered' by them.

This edited collection investigates where the European Convention on Human Rights as a living instrument stands on migration and the rights of migrants. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of cases brought by migrants in different stages of migration, covering the right to flee, who is entitled to enter and remain in Europe, and what treatment is owed to them when they come within the jurisdiction of a Council of Europe member state. As such, the book evaluates the case law of the European Convention on Human Rights concerning different categories of migrants including asylum seekers, irregular migrants, those who have migrated through domestic lawful routes, and those who are currently second or third generation migrants in Europe. The broad perspective adopted by the book allows for a systematic analysis of how and to what extent the Convention protects non-refoulement, migrant children, family rights of migrants, status rights of migrants, economic and social rights of migrants, as well as cultural and religious rights of migrants.

This book is a reflection of the social reality of mass migration in the EU from a legal perspective. It consists of a collection of essays reflecting on important current issues including the scope of the powers allocated to the EU, the cooperation of the EU with third countries and the emergence of international migration legal norms.

Large-scale migration constitutes an unavoidable social reality within the European Union. A European polity is made possible and tangible by the individual acts of migrants crossing the internal borders, developing a transnational life and integrating into European societies. Consequently, migration has become a special feature of the self-understanding of the European Union: its existence depends upon a continuing flow of persons crossing the borders of the Member States, and also upon the management of the flows of third-country nationals knocking at its doors. To respond to this challenge, the Union has developed common European migration policies. This book is a collection of essays which aim to explore a selected number of issues related to the development of these policies. It presents the current state, and the future of European immigration law discussing the political rationales and legal competences driving the action of the Union in this area. It reflects on the cooperation of the Union with third countries and on the emergence of international migration legal norms. It illustrates the role of the European Courts and the emergence of new actors through the adoption of EU instruments.

This book traces the practices of migration control and its contestation in the European migration regime in times of intense politicization. The collaboratively written work brings together the perspectives of state agents, NGOs, migrants with precarious legal status, and their support networks, collected through multi-sited fieldwork in eight European states: Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland. The book provides knowledge of how European migration law is implemented, used, and challenged by different actors, and of how it lends and constrains power over migrants’ journeys and prospects. An ethnography of law in action, the book contributes to socio-legal scholarship on migration control at the margins of the state. “This book is a major achievement. A remarkable and insightful study that through close analysis of the practices of migration control in 8 European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland) provides powerful new insight into the power of the state at its margins and over those that are marginalised.” - Andrew Geddes, Director, Migration Policy Centre, European University Institute “Migrants Before the Law provides a much-needed account of the dizzying legal labyrinth that migrants navigate as they seek to survive in Europe. Based on multi-sited ethnography in detention centres, migration offices, police stations, and non-governmental organizations as well as on interviews with key government actors, advocates, and migrants themselves, this book explores the systems of control and forms of migrant precarity that operate along Europe’s internal borders, in multiple national and transnational contexts. Readers will come away with a deepened understanding of the perverse workings of power, the ways that the uncertainty and unpredictability of law foster both despair and hope, the degree to which the immigration “crisis” is both manufactured and experienced as real, and the ingenuity of migrants themselves in the face of Kafkaesque state practices.” - Susan Bibler Coutin, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, USA “Migrants Before the Law is an excellent exposition of the dispersed sites of the law and the hinges and junctions through which this apparatus is actualized in the lives of migrants facing deportation, contesting their status as illegal migrants or seeking to regularize their precarious position. Written with great sensitivity and an eye to minute details this book is also an achievement in furthering the method of collaborative ethnography and new ways of staging comparisons.” - Veena Das, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, USA

This book examines the role and impact of EU, international human rights and refugee law on national laws and policies for integration and argues for a broad understanding of the relationship between integration and the law. It analyses the legal foundations of integration at the international and regional levels and examines the interaction of national, EU and international legal spheres, highlighting the significance of these dimensions of the relationship between integration and the law. The book draws together these central themes to enhance our understanding of the connections between integration and the law. It also makes specific recommendations for the development of holistic, human-rights based approaches to integration in EU Member States. The book will be of value to academics and researchers working in the areas of immigration, and refugee law, as well as those interested in cultural diversity both from a legal and sociological perspective.

A critical discussion of EU and ECHR migration and refugee law, this book analyses the law on asylum and immigration of third country-nationals. It focuses on how the EU norms interact with ECHR human rights case law on migration, and the pitfalls of European human rights pluralism.

Migration on the Move offers a critical review of the profound transformations that have taken place in the field of migration and asylum laws and policies in the past 20 years, and their implications for the refugee and migration issues faced by EU states.