Irregular Migration : A case study of Italy

One of the concerns of the current study is to analyse empirically and theoretically the economic and political causes of irregular migration to Italy in order to proceed with the critical estimation of the national, international and partly supranational migration policies. Since several theories will be applied during the study it will enable me to fully describe the phenomena of the irregular migration and modern enslavement of the irregular immigrants on Italian territory. I will disregard the fact that each theory is criticised on the grounds of being too concentrated on a few aspects of the phenomena and lacking the focus on all of its aspects due to the fact that the joint use of several theories provides a broader outlook. However, one crucial critique will be taken into closer consideration. Thus, the closer study of the phenomenon of modern slavery, strongly interconnected with the irregularity of migration, the duality of the Italian economy and the restrictive migration policies will bring together both the political and economic approaches to migration, whose split appears as the central critique for a great number of IR theories.12 In the normative part of the study I will focus on the critical analysis of the criminal status of the irregular immigrants assigned to them by the Italian migration policies and the Schengen Treaty of the EU in order to prove that instead of a criminal status, a victim status should be given to all immigrants, regardless of whether they were trafficked into Italian territory or crossed the border on their own free will. Additionally, in the normative part of the thesis I will compare and analyse scholars’ previous findings related to the possible amendments to the existing policies and propose my own conclusions and suggestions of how the laws, policies and governmental focuses “ought to be” changed