Policy, Regulatory Frameworks and Migrants’ Rights

Abstract

This panels addresses the intersection between attempts to regulate migration and migrants' rights. Attempts to regulate migration occur at various levels - local, national, regional and international - leading to a multitude of solutions designed to harness mobility into specific frameworks. The impact of such policy and regulatory frameworks on migrants' rights, lives and experiences need more attention. This includes an understanding of whether and how they structure experiences of mobility, influence migrant agency, their propensity to generate mobility regimes that reproduce global inequalities as well as attempts to overcome such framings. The panel seeks to understand what role migrants' rights and migrant activism play in the design of regulatory frameworks, including EU's circular and temporary migration programmes and seasonal worker programmes. The panel welcomes papers that problematize the manner in which EU citizenship and EU migration frameworks deal with questions of equal rights and discrimination in order to understand the effect of policies on migrant integration within their local communities. We are equally interested in how migrants’ participation and activism interrupts, challenges or overcomes the policy and regulatory activity undertaken at various levels.