Incorporation and implementation

Newspaper delivery, office cleaning, fruit picking, dishwashing and prostitution are only some of the tasks that illegal immigrants in advanced economies nowadays engage in. The fact that these less attractive and labour-intensive economic activities are frequently taken up by illegal or undocumented immigrants – of whom according to our estimate at least 40,000 lived in the four largest Dutch cities in 1995 – illustrates the limitations of restrictive systems of migration control. Immigration has become much more fragmented and, concomitantly, more difficult to capture with policy measures than in the relatively transparent and, hence, surveyable guest worker era (Brubaker 1994, Böcker, Groenendijk, Havinga and Minderhoud 1998). Immigration policy nowadays largely coincides with keeping unwanted immigration in check. As border controls cannot possibly keep everyone out, policies focus ever more on thwarting the normal daily lives of illegal immigrants who are already present. The past two decades have produced an impressive body of laws and regulations in this respect and ‘fortress Europe’ has become the dominant metaphor. After almost two decades of more or less silently incorporating ‘spontaneous migrants’, the Dutch national government has been aiming at pursuing a systematic ‘discouragement policy’ with respect to illegal immigrants since the beginning of the 1990s. A wide array of legal and administrative measures aiming at systematic exclusion has been introduced since then.

Time and again, however, migration scholars observe a wide gap between the ‘law in the books’ and the ‘law in practice’ (Cornelius et al. 1994, Jahn and Straubhaar 1999). In the Dutch case, this gap received attention in a very sudden manner in 1992 after an El Al Boeing crashed into two high-rise apartment buildings in the Amsterdam Bijlmermeer neighbourhood, even though rumours about large numbers of illegal immigrants who had allegedly resided in the afflicted apartments have never been substantiated. The forces that have a supposedly weakening effect on the powers of national states are a recurrent theme in the recent literature on migration policies. In the two dominant lines of argumentation, the gap between policy and implementation is either seen as the result of pressure groups within the country, or viewed as stemming from largely external pressures due to globalisation and the internationalisation of, for instance, human rights values (Sassen 1996, Jacobson 1996).