Moving away from state categorizations on irregular migration, this Research Handbook critically examines processes and dynamics that generate and reproduce irregularity, and discusses who may count as an irregular migrant. Acknowledging that irregular migration is not just a South-North issue, chapters investigate the many different pathways into irregularity, demonstrating the benefits of understanding dynamics behind irregular migration over statistics. Organised into six thematic parts covering key issues such as approaches and perspectives for research, informal labour and the challenges faced by migrant families, global contributors from a variety of disciplines provide an expert review of geographical and historical paths into irregular migration. Offering their background knowledge and highlighting tools to better understand how irregular migration is linked to geopolitics and migration policies, the Research Handbook on Irregular Migration guides readers through the complex issues facing migrants worldwide. Written in a comprehensive yet accessible style, this Research Handbook will be an excellent resource for undergraduate and graduate students as well researchers and academics interested in migration, policy, law, security, border crossing, informal labour, crime and civil support to migrants.

This book concentrates on the role of commercialized intermediary actors in migration. It seeks to understand how these actors shape migration and mobility patterns through the services they offer. In addressing the role that migration industries play in migration, the book uses diverse examples such as labour market brokers and recruitment agencies from Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom; Latvian migration to Norway; super-rich lifestyle brokers; international students agents; the Global Mobility Industry for corporate expatriates; skilled migrant intermediaries; and those providing services to West African migrants coming to Europe or Indonesians leaving for Malaysia. Through these examples, the contributors examine the actors in migration industries, showing how they respond to and shape migration trends. They also consider how migration industries operate, manoeuvre and interact with government policy on migration management. Finally, the book looks at how migration industries enable certain forms of migration through enticement, facilitation and control, translating into specific migration trajectories and im/mobility. Providing examples from across the world, this book analyses how charities, businesses, sub-contractors, informal recruitment agencies, and other actors help to shape migration processes, and it will be of interest to those studying not only the causes of migration, but also the migration process itself. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

This book concentrates on the role of commercialized intermediary actors in migration. It seeks to understand how these actors shape migration and mobility patterns through the services they offer. In addressing the role that migration industries play in migration, the book uses diverse examples such as labour market brokers and recruitment agencies from Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom; Latvian migration to Norway; super-rich lifestyle brokers; international students agents; the Global Mobility Industry for corporate expatriates; skilled migrant intermediaries; and those providing services to West African migrants coming to Europe or Indonesians leaving for Malaysia. Through these examples, the contributors examine the actors in migration industries, showing how they respond to and shape migration trends. They also consider how migration industries operate, manoeuvre and interact with government policy on migration management. Finally, the book looks at how migration industries enable certain forms of migration through enticement, facilitation and control, translating into specific migration trajectories and im/mobility. Providing examples from across the world, this book analyses how charities, businesses, sub-contractors, informal recruitment agencies, and other actors help to shape migration processes, and it will be of interest to those studying not only the causes of migration, but also the migration process itself. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Studying the im/mobility trajectories of West Africans in the EU, this book presents a new approach to West African migrants in Europe. It argues that a migration lens is not necessarily the best starting point to understand these dynamic im/mobility processes. Rather than seeing migrancy as the primary marker of their lives, this book positions these trajectories in a wider social script of mobility and discusses how African migrants are confronted with rigid mobility regimes, but also how they manage to transgress and circumvent them.

The recent containment policies aimed at regulating immigration flows towards Europe have profoundly altered the dynamics of migration in Africa. The impact of these policies is apparent in the redefinitions of the routes, itineraries and actors of migration. But their effect can also be felt in migrant categories and identities and in the perceptions of migrants in the societies through which they transit or the communities which they have left behind. By placing the problem of border control at the very heart of the migration issue, the policies aimed at the restriction of migration flows have changed the meaning and significance of migration. More than ever before, both migrants and institutions in charge of border control construe migration mostly around the challenge of border-crossing. In the Global South, the transit situation in which would-be border jumpers are retained blurs the distinction between temporary migration and settlement. This contributes to change, in various ways, the relationship to strangers, from renewed forms of solidarities to the reactivation of latent xenophobic sentiment, whether around the Mediterranean or en route towards South Africa, the other migration hub on the continent. The editors of this volume have decided to work on the notion of "threshold" as an operative concept for addressing the multiple dimensions of the issue: the discursive and conceptual frameworks that constitute the backbone of threshold policies aiming to keep undesirables beyond borders; the constitution of stopping places, intermediate areas and relay towns, which all represent threshold spaces that challenge local urban equilibria; and the experience of liminality, in which individuals caught for a time between two states (as migrant on the road and as immigrant, the state to which they aspire), experience the typically ambiguous situations characteristic of 'threshold people' (Turner). While ambitioning to innovate theoretically and methodologically, the volume is above all