‘There were many problems even before Covid.’ Recurrent narratives of crisis in policies for migrants’ regularisation

ABSTRACT

Exploring the case of the temporary regularisation for migrants promoted by Portugal in March 2020, this article problematises ‘recurrent narratives of crisis’. Narratives of crisis tend to depict migration as an exception and a violation of a supposed norm. Their recurrent use by politicians and media conveys the idea of a permanent state of emergency, allows the introduction of short-term measures, and drifts attention off the need for systemic changes. Regularisations have been used several times in European countries to manage migration ‘crises’. Yet, many scholars and activists have voiced doubts on their effectiveness, especially when regularisations only granted a temporary permit. In March 2020, Portugal acknowledged to foreign nationals with pending cases at the Foreigners and Frontiers Service (SEF) the possibility to be considered regular residents for the duration of the national state of emergency. The article sheds light on the discrepancy between the way this measure was presented by politicians and how it was received on the ground. Through new and timely evidence collected during this project, I build on the concept of ‘anti-crisis’ to advocate for a shift from crises narratives onto a more open discussion on systemic issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration policies
• regularisation policies
• crisis
• narratives
• COVID-19

1. Introduction

Exploring the case of the temporary regularisation of migrants promoted by Portugal in March 2020, this article problematises what I define as the ‘recurrent narratives of crisis’ and its tangible outcomes. Regularisations have been used several times by European countries to manage situations deemed too exceptional – in one word, ‘critical’ – to be addressed with existing policies. Yet, many scholars, journalists, and activists have voiced doubts on their effectiveness, mainly because a great number of regularisations have only granted access to temporary residence permits, without a long-term perspective (Finotelli and Arango 2011; Kraler 2009; Colucci 2020).

At the beginning of the first wave of Covid-19 infections in Europe, some national governments proposed issuing extraordinary regularisation programmes aimed at irregular migrants already living on their national territory. The debate was for the majority triggered by the insistence of activists, associations, NGOs, and unions (both working with migrants and of migrants themselves), who demanded protection for those who had none. Italy, Spain, and Portugal all adopted extraordinary programmes, but each country’s regularisation followed different procedures and presented different requirements for applications.

For instance, in Italy, the Relaunch Bill (Decreto Rilancio) proposed by the then Agriculture Minister Teresa Bellanova

is linked to a labour reform limited to the agriculture, domestic work, and social care sectors and applicable to both Italian and foreign citizens working informally (Pallarés Pla 2020).

However, the possibility to regularise was bound to a pre-existing work contract. This, together with the exclusion of several other sectors where many undocumented migrants work (such as, for instance, logistics and construction), determined its very limited success. The particular focus on agriculture was triggered by a scare of food scarcity, based in turn on absence of migrant seasonal workers. Pallarés Pla (2020) argues that the government’s decision, far from being an act of good will, implied that ‘migrant workers are mere assets for the market, rather than human beings who deserve dignity and their rights recognised’.

In Spain, migrant workers whose work permit was due to expire during the first state of emergency (14th March to 30th June 2020) and young migrants between 18 and 21 with regular documentation were entitled to receive a new or first work permit, which in some cases was renewable (Pallarés Pla 2020). On 20th May 2020, an additional measure allowed migrant residents already in possession of documents to automatically renew their visa for 6 months – even if people undertaking formative internships in health professions were surprisingly not included (Pallarés Pla 2020). Although different than in Italy, in Spain too the regularisation was very restrictive, both because it gave access to a temporary permit and because it was accessible by a meagre portion of undocumented migrants.

Portugal’s regularisation came faster and had a much broader scope. The Portuguese government issued order 3863-B/2020 on 27th March 2020, just nine days after the declaration of the national state of emergency. According to it, temporary regularisation could be accessed by all migrants with pending applications to the Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (from here onwards SEF), regardless of the sectors they worked in. This decision sparked praise in the international press (Ramiro 2020) because, while other countries were tightening their border regime or discussing the conditions of a potential regularisation, Portugal’s policy had already been approved. Despite the initial clamour both at the political and media level, there is, to date, very little material on the way the Portuguese temporary regularisation was received on the ground by migrants and the associations supporting them. Looking into it can therefore provide us with new and valuable insights on the connection between narratives – especially ‘crises narratives’, policies, and their effects.

When presenting the temporary regularisation in March 2020, Portuguese Interior Minister Eduardo Cabrita justified its introduction on humanitarian grounds. As reported by journalist Joana Gorjão Henriques on the national newspaper Público, he declared,

In a state of emergency, the priority is to defend collective health and safety. It is in these moments that it becomes even more important to guarantee the rights of the most fragile, such as migrants. Ensuring migrant citizens’ access to health, social security, and job and housing stability is a duty of a sympathetic society in times of crisis (Gorjão Henriques 2020).

Through keywords such as ‘threat’, ‘fragile’, and ‘sympathetic society’, the Portuguese government’s narrative located its regularisation policy in a framework of crisis and emergency, following a common topos in the European narratives of migration.

Political debate, public discourse, and media have often narrated migration adopting narratives of crisis (Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou, and Wodak 2018). This concept is much more than a simple descriptor of events, but operates as ‘a device that structures knowledge of migration, and shapes policy decision and governance structures’ (Dinis 2018, 439). In their work on the 2015 so-called refugee crisis, Squire et al. (2021) define narratives of crisis as transformative of the social realities they claim to merely describe.

Over the last 10 years, academia, politics, and the media have connected the world ‘crisis’ to, for instance, the aftermath of the Arab Springs (Horvat 2015), the relationship between the ‘economic crisis’ of 2008 and migrant workers (Pratsinakis et al. 2020), the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 (Amnesty International 2015), Venezuelans seeking asylum in other American countries (Mohor 2021), or the projections of the effects that the Taliban’ takeover in Afghanistan could have on migration flows towards Europe (Sayed, Sadat, and Khan 2021). This narrative reached an all-new peak after Covid-19 hit Europe, coupling the long-standing migration crisis discourse with public health concerns (Stierl 2020). This indiscriminate use of a crisis narrative obfuscates the socio-political implications of and the involvement of different state and non-state actors in the events in question. For instance, systemic issues and violence that have long been part and parcel of the European Union migration management remained the same all throughout the pandemic, but became less visible because side-lined by the attention given to the impact of Covid-19 (Stierl and Dadusc 2022).

Hence, I propose to talk about ‘recurrent narratives of crisis’ to indicate the periodic, interchangeable, and alarming use of ‘crisis’ in politics and media when describing a heterogeneous array of events connected to migration. I argue recurrent narratives of crisis keep a narrow focus on migration and its immediate consequences, de-historicizing the event – that is, failing to account for the wider structure that has led to the situation in question. Employing these narratives can be understood as a way to protect an entangled web of economic or geo-political interests. In the context of EU countries, the academic and political debates alike have long revolved around the benefits and disadvantages of regularisations on migrants and on the receiving state (Doomernik and Bruquetas-Callejo 2016), while failing to address the shortcomings of the job market or the infiltrations of organised crime both in the market itself as into politics. As it stands, this debate also prevents from finding complementary solutions such as easy access to circular migration (see MacMahon and Sigona 2018).

Additionally, I problematise recurrent narratives of crisis because, although they can mobilise huge amounts of funding and generate agreements between states (such as, for instance, the EU-Turkey agreement of 2016 sealed in the aftermath of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’), the measures issued in ‘crisis situations’ are usually costly and short-term, and have more than once resulted in further restrictions to freedom of movement (Stierl and Dadusc 2022). I argue that these measures do not have the capacity to operate the necessary systematic reforms that could address some of the gaps lying behind an issue. On the contrary, they act on the short term, either providing a temporary relief that ends abruptly – reproposing old issues or generating new ones, or renovating ‘emergency measures’ over and over.¹ The former scenario applies very well to Portugal’s actions during the first wave of Covid-19.

In order to explore the effects of recurrent narratives of crisis on the Portuguese temporary regularisation, I borrow from the field of International Political Economy, building on Roitman’s (2013) critique to the concept of ‘crisis’ and connecting it to existing migration research discussing ‘crisis narratives’ (Mainwaring 2012; Cantat 2016; Dines, Montagna, and Vacchelli 2018; Squire et al. 2021). I then move onto the discussion of the perception that some members of Portuguese grassroots associations in support of migrants had concerning the 2020 temporary regularisation. They acknowledged the benefits the regularisation brought about, mainly the possibility for migrants to rely on the national healthcare service without fear of being reported and deported. Yet, they highlighted that such a temporary measure did not tackle the already existing issues within the Portuguese immigration system, causing new problems while sharpening old ones. This is the reason why I advocate for a narrative shift away from the recurrent narratives of crisis and towards an ‘anti-crisis’ approach (Roitman 2013; Squire et al. 2021), which could shed more light on the systemic issues that have led to a policy ‘emergency’. As a clarification, I consider essential to highlight that I do not want in any way to question whether the Covid-19 pandemic was foreseeable or not as this is not my field of expertise. Rather, I aim to show how (1) the repeated use of exceptional regularisation tries to cover malfunctioning policies, and (2) the very nature of exceptional regularisation is moulded on crisis narratives, which do not allow for systemic reforms.

2. Methodology

I conducted the field research at the core of this article in Lisbon and in the Alentejo region in June 2021. This project was funded by the Queen Mary University of London General Research Fund and, as such, was tied to a specific time and budget requirements. Thus, the interviewees’ sample was quite restricted, consisting of 6 people who were members of associations in support of migrants. In addition, I also interviewed 2 journalists writing for national newspapers and mostly working on migration, who helped me understanding the broader context where the regularisation took place. The associations’ status varied: while all were formally registered, some worked at the grassroots level, while others operated in partnership with local government bodies. I consider this diversity as an asset, which could shed light on different perspectives.

However, relying on such a small sample is definitely a limitation of this study, both for reasons of statistical representation and because of the tendency of every group to share their own narrative as a ‘truth’ (Mazzilli 2021). My intention in this article is to bring migrants and activists’ voices to the fore, all the while remaining aware that other groups involved in the rollout of the 2020 temporary regularisation most likely have a different narrative on it. This limitation could be addressed with future broader-encompassing research including more migrants, activists, and journalists, but also policy-makers and government representatives.

Apart from one man, the other participants were all women, and the overall age-range of the sample varied from early thirties to late forties – this was not an a priori decision but rather a self-selection emerged during the investigation. It is worth mentioning that three participants were extra-EU migrants themselves, while one was a refugee. This factor adds depth to this analysis, since these respondents had directly experienced Portuguese migration policies.

Concerning the participants’ identification, I started by contacting a pool of associations supporting migrants located in the area of Lisbon and/or in the Alentejo through their email and social media. At that time, international travel restrictions were still in place for most countries, so establishing an online contact was the only possible option. I had selected these two locations because most associations have an office in the capital, since Lisbon concentrates the largest number of migrants in the country, while the Alentejo is an agricultural region and has the highest percentage of migrants employed in this sector. I then asked those with whom I had established a dialogue if they could suggest other associations’ names, thus relying on snowballing technique.

This qualitative study grounds on semi-structured interviews, which explored the following topics: recent migration flows to Portugal, pre-pandemic regularisation policies, the 2020 temporary regularisation, and its pros and cons. Three interviews were conducted online, via Skype, Zoom, and Facetime (following the participant’s preference) while the rest were face-to-face. Upon contacting the participants, I had enquired whether they felt comfortable being interviewed in English, and they had agreed. In two cases, however, after beginning the interview in English, the interviewees realised they did not feel as comfortable as they previously thought. Since I had informed them that I am fluent in Spanish, which they knew too, we gradually switched to that.

The project’s consent form gave the participant the choice to be quoted with their real name or with a pseudonym. In case they chose to be quoted with a pseudonym, all details directly connectable to them have been removed in order to protect their privacy. After the transcription, the interviews have been analysed and coded with the qualitative data analysis software NVivo according to the themes reported above. All quoted participants have reviewed the parts of the manuscript including their quotes and given their consent to publish.

3. Recurrent narratives of crisis

In their article ‘Crisis’, Koselleck and Richter (2006) trace the history of this word and of its significance over time. Examining its application, they reveal the shift from the highly specific meaning that ‘crisis’ had in ancient Greece to its current broad usage in virtually any field. Etymologically, ‘crisis’ derives from the Greek verb ‘κρίνω’, which means ‘to judge’ and ‘to separate’, thus indicating ‘an imposed choice between stark alternatives – right or wrong, salvation or damnation, life or death’ (Koselleck and Richter 2006, 358). The term had clear applications in law, medicine, and theology, indicating the verdict reached to put an end to a quarrel or interrogation. Similarly, the notion of crisis was crucial in politics, where it indicated clear-cut decisions taken in response to challenges, such as attacks from other populations.

Over the centuries, the concept of crisis was gradually incorporated in different sectors. For instance, through the metaphor of the community as an organism, in the seventeenth century, the medical application of crisis was translated to the ‘body politic’ and its parts (Koselleck and Richter 2006, 362). Around the same time, ‘crisis’ expanded into the sphere of economics, to then consolidate its importance throughout the eighteenth century. What Koselleck and Richter (2006) observe is that all applications of crisis that sprung out of the original ones bear the meaning of ‘epochal change’. This is the reason why, globally, the period starting from the nineteenth century has been defined ‘the age of crisis’: both because of the widespread and continuous changes in societies all across the world and because of the more and more frequent use of this concept.

Far from being specific to migration, ‘crisis’ is the leitmotiv on which narratives on current society ground. Already in 1984, Luhmann discusses it as an alarming yet fashionable keyword employed to describe society and the events it faces from different angles, while always in negative terms, and, through this, to call people to urgent action (he explains that ‘alarming’ comes from the French ‘à l’arme’ (to arms)). Modern thinkers seem fascinated by ‘crisis-thinking’ or ‘crisis-talking’, and this fascination spans across the board: from ‘climate crisis’ (Pierrehumbert 2019), to ‘crisis in sociology’ (Lopreato and Crippen 2018), to ‘a mental health crisis in higher education’ (Evans et al. 2018), no sector ignores it. However, such a widespread use of this notion might raise some questions on its appropriateness.

In the field of migration, ‘crisis’ (sometimes alternated to its synonym ‘emergency’) appears so frequently that it has become a catchword. Crisis narratives have long been applied to undocumented migration, arrivals in Europe² and deaths at sea (Squire et al. 2021), while Southern European countries have repeatedly used extraordinary regularisations as ‘crisis management tools’ (Finotelli and Arango 2011). Talking about the crisis ‘produces meanings, opens up scenarios, and allows certain questions while foreclosing others’ (Roitman 2013, 56). Like every keyword, ‘crisis’ not only describes a situation but also transmits specific assumptions, which over time become ‘common sense’ (Bourdieu 1977). In ‘The Order of Things’ Foucault (1975) explains that language represents thought and, as such, it is not just mere theory but also political agency. Talking about crisis thus means first buying into the idea that there is one, and, second, that it needs a certain type of action.

Roitman (2013) observes that using the crisis narrative to discuss the 2008 financial crash implies assumptions on how the market should function. Applying this reasoning to migration, Cantat (2016) argues that

a discourse of crisis presents migration as illegitimate and exceptional, and calls for the deployment of emergency measures in order to restore putative order and normality (11).

Talking about migration or refugee crisis or of regularisations as ‘crisis management tools’ (Finotelli and Arango 2011) conveys specific ideas of how migration should be and how it should be managed. For instance, Mainwaring (2012) examines migrants detention in Malta, arguing not only that ‘detention is symbolic of the crisis narrative that the Maltese government has constructed’ (687), but also that the detention policy reinforces an understanding of irregular migration as illegal and dangerous. Squire et al. (2021) also importantly point out that ‘many crisis narratives reproduce a Eurocentric and ultimately violent postcolonial imaginary of ‘us’ and ‘them’’ (p.22), which is seldom taken into account.

Employing crisis narratives conveys the message that, for instance, the ‘North Africa Emergency’ of 2012, the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, or the Covid-19 migration crisis were unforeseeable, sudden, and unexplainable, when in fact they emerged from the very international politics system. Moving away from these recurrent narratives of crisis allows us to see that migration was one of the foreseeable consequences of the Arab Spring uprisings generated in response to corruption and economic stagnation. Likewise, the ‘refugee crisis’ did not emerge in a vacuum, but mainly from the war in Syria, while growing more and more acute as an effect of the Dublin Regulations, which forced individuals to apply for asylum in the first European Union Member state they encountered. Leurs and Ponzanesi (2018) critically observe that only when the migration routes from Syria shifted from Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt onto Europe that politicians, policy-makers, and media started using the term ‘crisis’. Similarly, the public health emergency triggered by Covid-19 has obscured systematic issues and violence against people on the move, which Stierl and Dadusc (2022) have defined as ‘the Covid excuse’.

Furthermore, while the European Union and its Member States usually frame their position as the receiving end of events generated elsewhere, they in fact have an active role in shaping political situations which then trigger migration. Perhaps the clearest example is Libya, a major transit point in the journey of many migrants who cross the Mediterranean Sea. Since 2016, the European Union, led by Italy, has been funding, training, and providing equipment to the so-called Libyan coast guard. Yet, journalists and activists have documented how this body is far from a structured coast guard, and is rather linked to several militia groups (Camilli 2021; Nicolosi 2021). Earlier, during the Libyan Civil War of 2011, NATO had direct involvement in the conflict through military operations in the area led by warships and air force.

Assumptions on how a phenomenon should manifest are part of narratives. Narratives are, never neutral as rhetorical devices, but rather vehicles to reach their authors’ ‘desired ends’ (Stokowski 2002, 374). These meaning-making devices provide a template, or framework, to make sense of the world through specific themes and keywords (). Narratives are thus particularly important in the realm of policies: starting from the 1990s, several scholars uncovered the role of ideas and value systems in shaping policies (Goldstein and Keohane 1993). Boswell, Geddes, and Scholten (2011) narrow this analysis down to the realm of migration policy-making by arguing that,

Conceptions of policy problems do not simply flow from the objective ‘facts’ of the situation. […] Instead, both problems and preferred solutions are constructed by different actors (politicians, the media, academics), drawing from available ideational resources or patterns of thought (1, 2).

Boswell, Geddes, and Scholten (2011) focus on ‘the role of empirical claims about the causes and dynamics of the phenomena in question’, or ‘policy narratives’ (2), shedding light on the cognitive element within the narrative. This component, together with coherence, ease of comprehension, and conformation to criteria of scientific validity, determines the strength of narratives. Stokowski (2002) adds that the power of narratives depends on their authors’ social position: the more an author is in a position of authority, the more chances their narratives have to become dominant, while others remain at the ‘oppositional’ level (Jansson 2003).

Going against the dominant narrative in her field, Roitman (2013) asks what the effects of suspending the narrative of crisis could be, warning the reader that ‘what are at stake are not only possible stories about the world, but also worlds’ (p.56). What is at stake in shifting the European narrative around regularisations away from recurrent narratives of crisis is the world of European migration policy as it currently stands. Shifting this narrative onto the systemic issues within the European migration policies contributes to shedding more light onto

the interplays between the vulnerability of interconnected systems and, as a result, the capacity of latent vulnerability to propagate rapidly across systems (Tagliacozzo, Pisacane, and Kilkey 2021).

In the following sections, I provide an overview of regularisation policies through the decades, in connection to the ‘recurrent narrative of crisis’, focusing on Southern Europe and specifically on Portugal.

4. Regularisation policies: space and time

The history of regularisations in Europe is very complex and comprises a broad range of events, thus I am going to focus on some of its most salient moments. Since the 1950s, some European countries such as France had started giving to undocumented migrants the possibility to be regularised on an individual basis, that is, if they had received a job offer (McDonald 1969).³ Germany instead set up the well-known ‘guest workers’ system, which started as a temporary arrangement but, after some years, gave to some migrant workers the possibility to regularise and to bring their families to Germany, in response to the termination of the programme caused by the 1973 oil crisis (Glorius 2008; see also Martin and Miller 1980).

Until that time, most Southern European countries had been a source of emigration (Doomernik and Bruquetas-Callejo 2016), while the ‘unprecedented economic growth and political stability brought about by the end of the dictatorships in Greece, Portugal, and Spain, as well as the accession of these countries to the European Economic Community during the 1980s’ contributed to reverting this tendency (Doomernik and Bruquetas-Callejo 2016, 61).

Population movements in and to Europe could however not be fully understood if not located in the global geo-political framework of the time. Over the 1960s, many ex-colonies gained independence from the old European empires, thus designing new political balances at the world level. Over the following years, migration from the ex-colonies increased, generally towards the ex-colonizing states. The 1970s constituted a particularly interesting moment for Portugal, since the 1974 Carnation Revolution caused the fall of the authoritarian Estado Novo regime, triggering the country’s transition to democracy. In addition, the Revolution marked the end of the Portuguese Colonial War and the consequent independence of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé e Príncipe. The decolonisation process also marked a mass migration of white Portuguese settlers from the ex-colonies to Portugal, for whom the legal category of retornados was created (Kalter 2020). Over the years, colonial connections, together with linguistic and cultural links, have determined the direction of migratory routes from PALOP (Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa⁴) countries to Portugal, demonstrated by the fact that, in 1999, immigration from PALOPs counted for nearly half the immigrant population in Portugal (Baganha, Marques, and Gois 2009)

The mid-1970s economic recession was an important watershed for European policies (Doomernik and Bruquetas-Callejo 2016): if, throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, labour migration – especially the one under the label of ‘guest workers’ – had been considered a mere issue of supply and demand, restrictions imposed in the ‘70s turned it into a socio-political challenge. Doomernik and Bruquetas-Callejo (2016, 59) explain that, on the one hand, even if recruitment through international agreements was brought to a stop after the 1973 oil crisis, the migrant workforce remained sizable (Castles 1986, 765). On the other hand, many ex-guest workers did not go back to their countries of origin – thus, formally turning into migrants. Turning into part of the resident communities, former guest workers also became entitled to a new set of rights. In parallel, migration became a more and more politically charged topic, and immigration controls and integration requirements (as for instance, language proficiency and knowledge of the host country’s law and social norms) were gradually made stricter all across Europe.

4.1. Different types of regularisations

Levinson (2005a, 2005b) states that regularisation programmes have become ‘one of the mechanisms States use to account for and manage the undocumented immigrant population in their countries’ (2). Apap, de Bruycker, and Schmitter (2000) identify five types of regularisations, albeit warning that they are by no means exhaustive and that, in reality, policies often look like a combination of two or more of these types. They are defined as: permanent (without time limits) or one-off (concerning a specific time frame of permanence in the country and a window of time for applying), fait accompli or for protection (granting residence to migrants in the country starting from a certain date), individual (depending on a single case) or collective (depending on objective criteria such as the work sector), expedience or obligation (taking place as the result of a court decision or of international relations), and organised or informal (when a migrant launches an individual petition). It is worth stressing that regularisations are political acts that suspend a specific norm, namely, a state’s discretionary power on whom to admit on its territory. As such, such suspension requires an ‘exceptional’ reason to be issued. Connecting this to the focus of the article, the ‘exceptional reason’ under scrutiny is not the pandemic as such, as much as the precarious, vulnerable, and marginalised working and living conditions of undocumented migrants.

More in general, it is necessary to distinguish between procedures set out by governments to establish the time frame and conditions (such as, for instance, income) of regular migration and application for a residence permit, including permanent residence and citizenship, and ex-post, or retroactive, regularisations, that usually are exceptional measures.⁵ With respect to the above list of regularisation types, one-off, fait accompli, collective, and obligation regularisation have been used retroactively. The political discussion on regularisation has been an object of contention for decades, and has disciplined the condition of those that Zolberg (1987) defines as ‘wanted but not welcome’ – from guest-workers in the 1960s to undocumented migrants currently working in agriculture, logistics, care, construction, and the gig economy all over Europe.

The academic debate on regularisation is polarised, and the political one is even more so: on the one hand, its supporters focus on the socio-economic benefits it produces for both migrants and receiving country, while on the other hand, critics identify in regularisations a pull-factor for undocumented migrants confident in future amnesties. It would be short-sighted to view regularisations exclusively as a tension between undocumented migrants and the state: for instance, regularisation often constitutes an economic disadvantage for some employers who can make higher and easier profits exploiting undocumented workforce.

Academic literature tends to converge around the opinion that such initiatives can radically improve migrants’ lives (Brick 2011). Yet, some scholars have voiced doubts about their long-term effectiveness, particularly because, most of the time, regularisations give access to temporary residence only, this resulting in many migrants going back to irregularity after the end of the permit (Kraler et al. 2016; Colucci 2020). Expanding from this, I argue that another reason why the success of regularisations remains uncertain is its failure to tackled the root causes of a dysfunctional system (Finotelli and Arango 2011; Tagliacozzo, Pisacane, and Kilkey 2021), which push migrants into illegality and vulnerability. Actions taken in response to recurrent narratives of crisis have been focused on the short term, thus allowing the same issues to re-emerge time and time again, as the participants in this study complained.

4.2. Regularisations in Southern European States as a crisis management tool

Researchers and policy experts have pointed out that there is a difference between the way regularisation has been implemented over time in Northern and Southern European countries. Although nearly all European countries have issued at least one extraordinary regularisation since the 1980s (De Bruycker and Apap 2000), ‘in Southern European countries, the regularisations of irregular migrants have very frequently been used as ex-post control policy measures’ (Finotelli and Arango 2011, 494). To explain this cleavage between the North and South of Europe, Pastore (2008) identifies several factors:

(a) the deep cultural differences in the conception of the rule of law; (b) the different attitudes of national trade unions towards undocumented foreign labour and; (c) the different roles played by non-governmental actors (including churches) in migration policymaking in each country (116).

Finotelli and Arango (2011) report that Southern European countries, particularly Italy and Spain, have regularised the highest number of migrants in Europe – at the time of their article’s publication, Spain had regularised 1.2 million and Italy 1.4 million migrants – and had done so chiefly through ex-post regularisation programmes. By contrast, regularisations in Northern European countries tended to follow individual cases. Northern European states have more than once criticised the use of ex-post regularisation by Southern European countries, on the grounds that it would allow newly regularised migrants to exploit their movement right within the European Union, in order to relocate in countries with more generous welfare (Doomernik and Bruquetas-Callejo 2016). However, investigations have shown that Italian and Spanish regularisations have not generated mass movements, in fact stabilising many migrants on their territory (Finotelli and Arango 2011).

Portugal too has relied on ex post regularisations several times in its recent history. The percentage of migrants regularly residing in the country in the 1980s was as low as 1%, while around the turn of the millennium it had reached 2% (Baganha et al. 2009). More than showing an influx of new migrants, this increase uncovers the results of the two extraordinary regularisations issued by the Portuguese government in 1992 and 1996⁶, which mostly regularised migrants from other Lusophone countries that had long been living in the country. ‘Permits of stay’ (autorizações de permanência) were instead created by Law n° 4⁄2001 to regularise the presence of irregular migrant workers that had more recently arrived in the country.⁷ These permits were valid for one year and could be renewed up to four times, covering up to five years in total – at the end of which an individual could apply for permanent residence. Most applicants for the permits of stay were Eastern Europeans who had moved to Portugal between the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, responding to a fast increase in the demand of construction workers for big public works in the Lisbon metropolitan area. With neither historical nor linguistic connections to Portugal, and considering the lack of proactive recruitment policies from the government, Ukrainian and Romanian workers were defined as ‘the unforeseen wave’ (Baganha, Marques, and Gois 2009).

The four Southern European countries (Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal) present not only a similar migration pattern in terms of flows’ composition and work sectors destination – to the point that King, Fielding, and Black (1997) define it as ‘the Mediterranean model of immigration’, but also analogous policy-making approaches. Doomernik and Bruquetas-Callejo (2016, 63) summarise it as such:

The four Southern European countries followed a similar path of policymaking: starting with the lack of an adequate legal framework for the influx of migrants, soon after adopting strict control measures, then establishing measures to manage migrant labour, and subsequently resorting to regularisation to ‘repair’ ex-post the poorly functioning recruitment procedures.

Peixoto (2002) frames Portugal’s use of extraordinary regularisations as ‘strong market, weak state’ and discusses how, on the one hand, the Portuguese labour market offered certain opportunities to foreign workers all throughout the 1990s until the early 2000s (although located at the two extremes of the high- to low-skilled spectrum). For instance, while migrants from PALOPs occupied many roles in agriculture, most Brazilians were occupied in the care and hospitality industry, and Eastern Europeans primarily responded to work demands in the civil construction sector.⁸ On the other hand, the state found it difficult to enforce border controls and migration laws. Thus, regularisations were periodically used by the government to catch up with some changes that had already de facto taken place in the national market (see also Peixoto et al. 2012). The lack of adequate policies to include in the receiving society migrants that respond to economic demands reveals how inappropriate it is to use recurrent narratives of crisis, when in fact the crisis is produced by the very way this policies work.

Both scholars and activists have criticised this approach. For instance, in her analysis of the Italian immigration system, De Rosa (2020, 89) highlights that regularisation policies have been made more and more complex since the 1990s. Yet, not only this restriction has not been sufficient to stop migration influxes, but it has not benefited either the government or the population. Historian Colucci (2020) points out that regularisation alone, even if issued to tackle an economic challenge, is not sufficient. If policies do not focus on the overall system, the same economic situation will reproduce after some time. Alongside regularisations, Colucci (2020) envisions both the rebuilding of conditions for accessible legal migration and the addressing of job and housing precarity, which would benefit the entire population.

5. Findings

5.1. Positive effects of the Portuguese temporary regularisation: short-term relief and access to national healthcare

All representatives of grassroots associations that participated in this study acknowledged to Order 3863-B/2020 the undisputable merit of having contributed to protecting lives, not just migrants’ ones, but of the entire community, during the most acute phase of the pandemic. Moore and Kortsaris (2020) define Portugal’s decision to temporarily regularise migrants with pending applications as ‘consistent with a rights-based approach and logical from a public health perspective’. Right to health is indeed coded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (art. 25) as inalienable and universal – which acquires new and urgent relevance in situations of extreme vulnerability. Representatives of grassroots associations working with migrants welcomed Order 3863-B/2020 because it allowed everyone to rely on national healthcare and receive the same benefits as Portuguese citizens.

Ana Margarida Barrocas, a social worker, considered it as a very good policy and so did Gloria, member of an association raising awareness against racism and discrimination. Ana Margarida also explained that many migrants could turn to organisations such as Caritas or CLAIM centres (Centros Locais de Apoio à Integração de Migrantes⁹) for bureaucratic support in applying for regularisation. However, many people who had the right to apply could not do so, because CLAIMS were overwhelmed. Andrea Oltramari, researcher and part of Diàspora Sem Fronteiras, an association that provides bureaucratic support to migrants, remembered that the temporary regularisation ‘facilitated hospital admissions for those who contracted Covid, who were not afraid of seeing a doctor.’ This fear is well-grounded, since in many countries doctors are required to work in lieu of immigration officials, reporting patients without valid residency documents.

The best-known example is perhaps the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, according to which ‘doctors, landlords, police officers and teachers are tasked with checking immigration status, and often people who look or sound ‘foreign’ are asked to show their papers in order to rent a home or get medical treatment’ (JCWI n.a). Concerning Portugal, this study identified that the main issue regarding undocumented migrants’ access to healthcare lies in the cost rather than in the danger of being reported. Some interviewees explicitly referred that many migrants they regularly come in contact with in their associations fear being reported when seeing a professional, although they are not sure whether this is required by law. I posit that, regardless of their knowledge of the country’s law, the fear of being reported is ever-present in the life of an undocumented migrant, because of the high level of precarity, uncertainty, and structural hostility embedded in their status, and thus I considered essential including it amongst these reflections.

Neves and Rodrigues (2018) report that the bills undocumented migrants are asked for both urgent and non-urgent treatment are just unsustainable in proportion to their income. However, according to national regulations, in high-risk cases, even irregular migrants are exempt from healthcare fees, which definitely includes a pandemic. Stressing that 2020 temporary regularisation noticeably widened migrants’ access to healthcare could therefore sound misleading but it has to be reminded that these results stem from people’s perceptions rather than from the government’s framework.

5.2. Shortcomings: aggravation of long-standing issues and creation of new ones

After the end of the national state of emergency on 30th April 2021, Portugal’s temporary regularisation came to a stop and bureaucracy went back to pre-pandemic mode. The representatives of grassroots associations who participated in this study addressed this as a crucial issue to understand the current situation of migrants in Portugal. They unanimously argued that it is impossible to understand the shortcomings of the policy without observing the reception and integration system as a whole in so-called ‘normal times’, that is, outside the ‘crisis’ framework. By so doing, they implicitly referred to the idea of ‘anti-crisis’ (Roitman 2013): not only migration policies were not adequate way before Covid-19, but were a ‘crisis’ in and of itself, while the pandemic just made this unsustainable situation visible.

As Amadou Diallo, president of the association in support of migrants and refugees APIRP, incisively argued,

It is important that we don’t just talk about Covid, because there were many problems even before that. […] If there were no problems, we could quite easily get through Covid. But before Covid, we already had many issues.

Gloria was of the same opinion. She explained that these chronic delays are in general very heavy on migrant workers, who, prior to the pandemic, used to wait on average more than one year¹⁰ to be able to process an application for a residence permit, thus putting their lives on hold and having no guarantee their application was going to be successful, while paying for social security all throughout that time.

Delays and obstacles do not just stem out of poor policy design in and of itself: both my data collection and existing literature point at the institutional racism embedded in Portugal’s immigration and integration policies, which has been criticised by some scholars (Maeso and Araújo 2010; Araújo 2016). Maeso and Araújo (2010) uncover the depoliticisation of racism in Portugal, which has its roots in the myth of a soft colonialism and a tolerant nation. Racism in Portugal has long been framed as individual prejudice, while stereotypes are views as ‘biases from accurate representations’ (Maeso and Araújo 2010, 17) – making the problem of racism ‘a problem of specific, irrational individuals’ (Maeso and Araújo 2010, 17). In contrast with the emphasis on various ‘ideal types’ of racism deemed as bound to the past, such as ‘flagrant and subtle racism, modern, or aversive racism’ (Maeso and Araújo 2010, 23), institutional and everyday racism are not part of the political discussion, although their effects on non-white Portuguese and migrants are unmistakeable.

In her work on Roma pupils’ segregation in education, Araújo (2016:, 300) argues that ethnically marked populations in Portugal have for centuries been framed as ‘culturally inadequate’ and ‘ill-equipped to fit modern institutions and values’, while inequalities are narrated as ‘difficulties in integration […] requiring cultural change’ (Araújo 2016, 308). This picture in turn downplays racism describing it as a naturally occurring distrust, and completely obscuring the impact of power differential. Araújo (2016:, 308) masterfully summarises this dynamic by stating, ‘integration operates by alluding to discrimination while making the victims of racism suspect¹¹ of the ‘reactions’ they face.’ The high level of discretionary enacted by SEF employees in performing their functions, the malfunctioning of the system, together with the abuse and violence on migrants reported by activists and journalists, strongly resonate with Araújo’s research. And in fact, one of the quotes by the Gypsy grassroots activist Pedro that Araújo reports as a closing of her 2016 article is shockingly similar to Amadou’s account. It reads ‘Many problems could be solved if there was a completely different policy’ (318).

One interviewee reported that some people believe the system’s shortcomings are caused by lack of manpower within the SEF, coupled with an old approach, which is not able to respond to current migration challenges. Another interviewee stated that another opinion many people share is that the Portuguese reception system was designed in the 1990s to receive migrants from Eastern Europe, and has not adapted to the changes in terms of migrant flow composition or languages spoken. Although this statement is not formally correct, it is true that most migration policy reforms took place around the turn of the millennium, as discussed in Section 4.2, while the composition of the migrant population and their needs have changed noticeably since then. Alexia Shellard, part of Diáspora Sem Fronteiras, points out that although the SEF is one of the services with the largest number of employees, its members say they cannot cope with the amount of work they have to process and ask for new recruits. She and Andrea narrated how SEF has been under the spotlight for a long time not only for its delays, but also for some officers’ abusive behaviour towards migrants.

Yet, only after the violent death of Ihor Homeniuk – a Ukrainian migrant beaten to death in 2020 by some officers of the detention centre in Lisbon airport, the Ministry of Interior decided on SEF’s extinction and transformation (Demony 2021). Commenting on this, Gloria welcomed the government’s decision to reform SEF and its (still speculative) separation between an administrative and a criminal section. In her opinion, this would be an important symbolic statement that ‘migrant’ is different from ‘criminal’. However, both her and other participants resented that the government took this decision without involving either representatives of the associations and organisations working with migrants or migrants themselves. These actors’ dissatisfaction with this lack of dialogue has been reported in the national press too (see Gorjão Henriques 2021).

The policy reversion to the usual course has generated two issues: one the one hand, those who apply for regularisation at this moment have to wait an even longer time than usual to obtain an appointment at SEF. During the state of emergency, most SEF employees worked remotely and at a reduced regime, thus accumulating delays and applications to process. Gloria explained it takes ‘more than one year for you be at the SEF’s table to show all your documents and make your request official.’

On the other hand, the end of the state of emergency meant that a high number of regularisation processes were interrupted half way through. This has had an impact on migrants’ access to benefits, particularly those concerning healthcare. Andrea and Alexia narrated the effect the end of regularisation is having on the anti-Covid-19 vaccination campaign, shedding light on the systemic issues that the temporary regularisation did not manage to tackle.

Andrea:

For example, a problem that is becoming a big issue now is the user number, the number of the Sistema Nacional de Saùde (SNS); it’s like the NHS. To have that number I have to have the NIF, the Tax Information Number.

Interviewer:

And are they different?

Alexia:

Segurança Social, NIF, SNS, they are all different … .!

Andrea:

… and they are all interlinked, and to have the SNS number you have to have a fiscal number. If you are not regularised, you don't have a tax number, so you don't have a SNS user number, so people are not being vaccinated. […] It's not that they are denying the vaccine. But they are putting the people who don't have a user number at the end of the queue and prioritising those who do have a user number, which are mostly Portuguese.

Recently, the Brazilian community has publicly uncovered the difficulties in accessing the vaccine that many migrants have faced (Miranda 2021). The official text of Order 3863-B/2020 explicitly stated that an ongoing regularisation process was sufficient to obtain a SNS user number but, in practice, the issuing of these numbers is processed by local health centres, which first check the applicants’ documents. In the absence of a uniform procedure between the national and the local level, many migrants have found themselves ‘trapped in a bureaucratic maze’ (Miranda 2021) and have been unable to obtain a user number, without which they cannot book the anti-Covid-19 vaccine.

In March 2021, the government launched an emergency measure to fix this glitch, consisting in the creation of an online platform where migrants without a SNS user number can register and get vaccinated. Since many migrants either are not reached by governments’ decisions or do not trust authorities, the government has turned to grassroots associations for support in inviting migrants to register. However, several associations reported that many migrants have registered online, but they are not being called in. All these shortcomings are by-products not only of the temporary regularisation policy, but also of the crisis narrative on which it grounds, that ignores long-standing systemic flaws. Adopting an ‘anti-crisis’ stance would instead allow to see this issue for what they are, that is the result of inadequate policies.

6. Conclusion

In this article, I analysed the temporary regularisation of migrants issued by the Portuguese government in 2020 to shed light on the ‘recurrent narratives of crisis’ that politicians and governments employ to justify the introduction of short-term migration policies and on how damaging these measures are for the life of migrants. In March 2020, the Portuguese government acknowledged to all migrants with pending applications at SEF a temporary residence permit, lasted until the end of the national state of emergency in April 2021. Portugal justified this decision on a humanitarian rationale, describing the situation as a ‘crisis’, an ‘emergency’, and a ‘threat’, during which a ‘sympathetic society’ had the duty to protect the most ‘fragile’ ones (Gorjão Henriques 2020).

This article does not aim at quibbling over whether or not the pandemic could be expected. Rather, my objective is pointing out how damaging ‘recurrent narratives of crisis’ can be when issuing migration policies and advocating for ditching this term altogether, adopting an ‘anti-crisis’ approach (Roitman 2013). Framing regularisation policies as a ‘crisis management tool’ (Finotelli and Arango 2011) justifies the adoption of short-term and selective measures, which cannot afford to tackle deeper systemic issues such as poverty, inequality, poor housing, irregular and exploitative work, and public health concerns but, most importantly, does not uncover the inadequacy of current migration policies. Over the years, research has shown that the more temporary regularisations are, the less efficient they are (Kraler et al. 2016; Colucci 2020). Yet, they have been used time and again in response to a broad array of political events, all equally framed as ‘crisis’.

During this project, research participants discussed long-standing systemic issues within the Portuguese immigration system, such as bureaucratic delays and services overload, which have put in perspective the Covid-19 pandemic. They argued that Covid-19 alone cannot justify the shortcoming of the temporary regularisation. The bureaucratic chaos they complained about, together with the delays in processing their applications, the mismatch between migrants’ contribution to social security and the services they receive, as the abuse many migrants are subject to, all stem from a malfunctioning deeply ingrained in the national system – not from a ‘crisis’. After a temporary relief, the end of the temporary regularisation de facto sharpened these issues while creating new ones, such as for instance making access to the Covid-19 vaccine very complex for migrants.

Through the new and timely material presented in the article, I advocate for an ‘anti-crisis’ change in migration policies (Roitman 2013; Squire et al. 2021), consisting in a shift of the dominant narrative on migration policy away from a scenario of periodic emergency and a simultaneous uncovering of the systemic issues at the core of European migration policies (Tagliacozzo, Pisacane, and Kilkey 2021). Like Roitman (2013), I ask what the effects of suspending the narratives of crisis would be: in this new scenario, regularisations would be, at minimum, supported and complemented by legal migration channels and wide-encompassing social policies.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank all participants in this study for their precious insights, Queen Mary University of London’s School of Politics and International Relations for supporting this research, and Dr. Holly Eva Ryan for her guidance and mentorship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Queen Mary University of London’s School of Politics and International Relations’ General Research Funding [April 2021].

Notes

1 The adoption of crisis narratives does not always result in clear-cut consequences, as it is not always the expression of powerful actors’ interests. There are in fact many instances where the relation between narratives and policies are ambiguous, multidimensional and often even counter intentional. However, these cases are not the focus of this article.

2 This narrative is employed in several areas of the world, but in this article, I focus on Europe for coherence with my case study.

3 It has to be noted that, in the period between 1946 and 1965, migrant workers in France were mostly Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, as well as Algerians who could move freely between the two countries (McDonald 1969).

4 African Countries of Portuguese Official Language

5 ‘Regularisation policy’, ‘procedure’, and ‘amnesty’ are used throughout the article as synonyms of ex-post regularisation, unless otherwise specified.

6 39,166 migrants were regularised with the 1992 amnesty, and 35,082 with the one issued in 1996 (Baganha 1998, 370). In addition, Law 244/98 gave the possibility to obtain a residence permit for exceptional national interest and/or for humanitarian reasons (Baganha, Marques, and Gois 2009).

7 The total number of individuals granted a permit of stay under the 2001 law was 126,901. 56% of them were from Easter Europe and, within this group, 36% were Ukrainians (Baganha, Marques, and Gois 2009).

8 Several women, mainly from Brazil and the PALOPs but also from Eastern Europe, ended up in the sex industry. This topic would require an in-depth discussion, which I am not able to include in this paper due to space concerns. In addition, it is necessary to clarify that the distribution of migrant workers across the sectors has changed over the years. More information on the current picture is reported in the empirical sections.

9 Local Centres for the Support of Migrants’ Integration. They are an official government body distributed on the entire national territory.

10 There have been cases when the waiting time reached three years.

11 Italics in the source.