Strange Castle Walls and Courtyards: Explaining the Political Economy of Undocumented Immigration and Undeclared Employment

Abstract

Anxiety among European states and publics about undocumented migration has been a feature of the political landscape of European countries since at least the early 1990s. That much is clear. What is perhaps less evident is the concern about “undeclared employment”, which is ironically often conflated with undocumented (read “clandestine”, “irregular”, or “illegal”) migration. There is little doubt that undocumented migration¹ and “undeclared employment”² are related, although as a number of scholars have stressed, undocumented migration does not produce undeclared employment (for example, Castells and Portes, 1989; Wilpert, 1998) and the bulk of undeclared employment is performed by citizens and not migrants, legal or otherwise (for example, Williams, 2009; Williams and Windebank, 1998).³ Nonetheless, each facilitates the other (Castells and Portes, 1989; Quassoli, 1999; Reyneri, 1998; Sassen, 1996, 1998; Wilpert, 1998),⁴ and it was widely surmised by European institutions, member states of the EU, and the popular press that undocumented migration increased during the 1990s and the early 2000s, although few if any time-series statistics have been available.⁵ Likewise, undeclared employment is argued to be increasing since the 1970s (see, for example, the data presented by Schneider and Enste, 2000), and its alleged proliferation is now exercising European policy-makers (European Commission, 2006).⁶ If the growth of both phenomena seems less dizzying now for some European governments, the vigilance of the latter has hardly waned. Witness the cavernous range of reports and studies, at the member state and European levels that have explored the implications of these phenomena. News-ready stories of migrants dying at sea or in the back of trucks, along with tales of unscrupulous employers paying extremely low wages, forcing migrants to work in terrible, and sometimes deadly, working conditions while undercutting citizen workers, have reinforced the image of a Europe besieged by illicit movements and criminal activity. If governments and a wide swathe of the European citizenry are so concerned, what explains the apparent growth of these phenomena? Are they simply beyond control in a world marked by more “intensive” and “extensive” flows of goods, people, capital, and ideas (Held et al., 1999), or are they purposely ignored while at the same time manufactured by states. The literature does not necessarily tell us much.