Resurrecting taboo policies? Explaining collective regularisations for unauthorised immigrants during the Covid-19 pandemic in Southern Europe

Abstract

Collective regularisation programmes providing legal status to unauthorised immigrants were frequently used by European countries until the late 2000s, when they fell out of fashion. In 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, some European governments made use of collective regularisations again, breaking this “taboo”, while others did not. Why this variation in response? We compare policy-making in three Southern European countries that have frequently resorted to collective regularisations in the past, but which took divergent paths during the Covid-19 pandemic despite facing similar health and economic-related pressures: a collective regularisation in Portugal, a targeted regularisation in Italy, and no regularisation in Greece. Informed by a theoretical model that builds on existing explanatory frameworks on migration policy, we use expert interviews, legal and policy documents, parliamentary debates, and press coverage to explain variation in policy outputs. Our findings point to the importance of three conditions: (1) the balance of liberalising versus restrictionist pressures, (2) government ideology, and (3) the scope and implementation of pre-existing regularisation mechanisms. We show that the Covid-19 pandemic worked as a catalyst for the return of policies that were previously considered “taboo” only when policy changes were considered to be cost-free. We argue that, despite functional pressures and discursive opportunities created by the pandemic, the regulation of the status of unauthorised migrants is characterised by continuity and incremental change rather than by sudden ruptures.