Irregular Migration

URL study guide

https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2024-2025/R_IrMig

Course Objective

After this course, the student will be able to:
• Map the most important legal sources in international and EU law concerning irregular migration;
• Map the diversity of legal contexts in which states and irregular migrants seek to achieve their aims, including criminal law, private law, international law, human rights law, and maritime law;
• Apply the variety of sources and legal doctrines to concrete cases where states seek to regulate irregular migration and where migrants seek to counter such regulations;
• Analyse how these various fields of law interact at the domestic, the European and the international level in the field of irregular migration; and
• To write a well-structured and argued legal analysis from different perspectives. Eindtermen: 1-7, 9-15.

Course Content

As part of the innovation of European migration law and policy over the past 30 years, the concept of 'irregular' migration has taken centre stage. In the past 25 years, law and policy have increasingly focused on preventing irregular entry, on making irregular presence more difficult, and on return and removal of irregular migrants. Countries in the global South are at the receiving end of this development. In this course, law and irregular migration will be the focus of attention. In this way, a social issue (irregular migration) which is constituted by law (migration can only be irregular if law makes it so) will be analysed through the lens of law. The field has been characterized by conceptual innovations. In addition to the classical administrative law approach to migration, criminal and private law have been added to the arsenal of migration policies. In addition, migration controls do not only take place upon entry but have been delocalized. They now take place at foreign airports during check-in, on the high seas or in the territorial waters of third countries, or by third states (forms of externalization). But they also take place throughout the territory of the state concerned by requiring legal residence for entering into a labour contract, renting a house, opening a bank account, and marriage (forms of internalization). Both internalization and externalization often involve private parties as ‘deputy sheriffs’. In these ways, law has been used as an instrument of states to govern irregular migration. However, law has also been used in order to counter state prohibition of irregular migration. For example, undocumented migrants have campaigned for their basic rights in the USA as well as in Europe. They have sought to regain some of the rights which have been deprived by the conceptual and legal innovations sanctioning irregular migration. They have done so in the fields of immigration detention, pushbacks, shelter, racial profiling, border deaths, and labour rights. In addition, actors in the global South (states, courts, civil society) counter the prohibition approach to irregular migration that is dominant iin the North. This course focuses on the tensions and ambiguities that arise in the process where both states and migrants seek to recruit the law for their purposes. This course will include reading materials containing empirical information about the social realities in which these legal strategies are deployed. These empirical readings give the course an important Empirical legal Studies (ELS) component.

Teaching Methods

The course will be taught in weekly 3 hour classes, wherein obligatory reading will be discussed and in-class assignments will be made. The in-class assignments will reflect real-life situations and dilemmas, emphasising the law in action-orientation of the course. Students should prepare themselves thoroughly for each class by studying the required readings.

Method of Assessment

The course will be assessed on the basis of a final paper.

Literature

To be announced via Canvas.

Target Audience

This course is available for exchange students also. Exchange students should have knowledge of EU and International Law and must have followed 30 ec of law courses. Courses from a master at the faculty can only be taken as a secondary course if you have a diploma that gives access to the relevant master/ specialization and if you are enrolled in a master.

Entry Requirements

The general admission requirements for the IMRL master track apply.