Improving the living and labour conditions of irregularised migrant households in Europe

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I-CLAIM aims to investigate the living and working conditions of undocumented migrants in six European countries. 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 advance scientific knowledge and theorisation on the production of irregularity with the urgency to contribute to policy and public debates aimed at improving 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 irregularised 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 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 survey experiments to capture public perceptions of irregularity and ethnographies of labour market sectors with high numbers of undocumented migrants and varying degrees of digital platform penetration (agri-food, care and domestic work, and logistics and delivery). The project also utilizes collaborative, multimodal, and art-based research methods.