LEGAL TRAJECTORIES

To achieve the goals of this Research Area, a combination of methodological tools have been adopted, including:

– Policy analysis

– Quantitative analysis of several existing database, such as Eurostat, the Schengen visa, the MAFE Survey, the Immigrant Citizens Survey and specific surveys considering legal trajectories in France (ELIPA), Spain and the United Kingdom

– Quantitative analysis of data produced by other teams of the TEMPER Project, on the legal trajectories of seasonal workers

– Qualitative interviews with Ukrainian migrants in Italy and in Spain, who became visa over-stayers after their arrival to the country

– Qualitative interviews academics in France and the UK, who arrived to the country with a student visa

For the fieldwork with visa over-stayers, interviews include questions on:

– The situation before the departure from the home country

– The circumstances of the departure from the home country

– Migration from Ukraine to Spain

– The legal trajectories in the receiving country

– The role of networks and family ties

Fieldwork on visa over-stayers, through the case of Ukrainian migrants in Italy and in Spain

The delimitation of the fieldwork required to define in a very precise way the period during which migrants had arrived, to facilitate the comparison between both national cases.

– The first condition was to conduct interviews with Ukrainian migrants who had become visa over-stayers after their arrival in Spain or in Italy.

– To analyse their legal trajectories from a temporary to a long-term resident status, it was necessary to select immigrants who had arrived in the receiving society at least 10 years before so, at least, they could become regular migrants and pass through several renewal procedures.

– To those legal conditions, two sociodemographic characteristics were added: gender and age.

In Italy, informants were contacted through the snowball system, activating different networks, such as grassroots associations, political organizations and the domestic workers’ organization, in order to access to different groups of people. In Spain, Ukrainian shops became another way to contact with informants.

In Spain, interviews were conducted in Madrid. In Italy, they were conducted in three cities (Padua, Venice and Vicenza) of the Veneto Region.

Working Paper 6: Inventory of visa policies and agreements: Italy, Spain, France and the United Kingdom

by MariaCaterina La Barbera, Joaquín Arango and Claudia Finotelli

Abstract: Visa policy is one of the most successful harmonized EU policy field. This report shows that European legislation regulates for which countries nationals, for how long, and for which reasons MSs can issue a short-stay visa. Besides this general framework, the analysis of national legislation shows that MSs retain certain capacity to shape visa policy beyond the existing European harmonized framework. The margin of appreciation granted allows establishing different national pattern of entry refusal that need to be analysed in detail through an inventory of visa legislation in the selected country. The inventory shows that, although EU has succeeded in harmonizing a relevant immigration policy field such as short-stay visa, discretionary implementation and procedures at the state level cannot be neglected. This report finally points out that the challenge of overstaying mainly remains a question of weak internal controls, rather than of efficient entry controls.