Illegally Staying in the EU: An Analysis of Illegality in EU Migration Law

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Principally, this book comprises a conceptual analysis of the illegality of a third-country nationals stay by examining the boundaries of the overarching concept of illegality at the EU level. Having found that the holistic conceptualisation of illegality, constructed through a combination of sources (both EU and national law) falls short of adequacy, the book moves on to consider situations that fall outside the traditional binary of legal and illegal under EU law. The cases of unlawfully staying EU citizens and of non-removable illegally staying third-country nationals are examples of groups of migrants who are categorised as atypical. By looking at these two examples the book reveals not only the fragmentation of legal statuses in EU migration law but also the more general ill-fitting and unsatisfactory categorisation of migrants. The potential conflation of illegality with criminality as a result of the way EU databases regulate the legal regime of illegality of a migrants stay is the first trend identified by the book. Subsequently, the book considers the functions of accessing legality (both instrumental and corrective). In doing so it draws out another trend evident in the EU illegality regime: a two-tier regime which discriminates on the basis of wealth and the instrumentalisation of access to legality by Member States for mostly their own purposes. Finally, the book proposes a corrective rationale for the regulation of illegality through access to legality and provides a number of normative suggestions as a way of remedying current deficiencies that arise out of the present supranational framing of illegality.

Reviews

Illegally Staying in the EU contributes to the migration and criminology of mobility literature by providing a meticulous conceptual and legal analysis of illegality. Queiroz does admirable work in bringing what are often ideological debates about irregular migration in the EU back to the reality of our legal systems. -- Emma Caussil * LSE Review of Books *
From an academic point of view, the conceptual analysis, especially, is very insightful, while the other chapters provide an analysis of topics that will also speak to a broader and more diverse audience. -- Tobias Klarmann * Common Market Law Review *

Author Bio

Benedita Menezes Queiroz is a Teaching Assistant at the School of Transnational Governance of the European University Institute, Florence and Senior Research Fellow at CIDP - Lisbon Centre for Research in Public Law.