What happens in institutions like schools or hospitals when local service provision overlaps with the control of national borders? Such overlap is unavoidable if unlawful residents are to be excluded from mainstream public services. With this explicit aim, governments not only modify the rules and established practices of welfare provision, but also encourage the people who administer and deliver these services to incorporate the logic of immigration control into their everyday work.

To identify and better understand the concrete mechanisms that either help or hinder such internalisation of immigration control, this study systematically compares three spheres of service provision – healthcare, education and social assistance – across two distinctive legal-political environments: Barcelona/Spain and London/UK. Looking at official policies as well as their implementation, it primarily draws on a total of almost 90 semi-structured interviews with irregular residents, providers and administrators of local services, and representatives of NGOs and local government. Its innovative analytical framework helps to map and explain the significant variation in how immigration control works within different institutions and how individual actors occupying key positions in these can reproduce, contest, or readjust formal structures of inclusion and exclusion.

While the way in which national – but also sub-national – governments frame and address irregular migration plays an important role, certain sectors of welfare provision and some categories of ‘street-level-bureaucrats’ are generally more likely to internalise immigration control than others. This reflects different degrees of professionalisation and individual discretion, but also attachment to different institutional logics and objectives. Drawing on organisation theory, the study also traces institutional responses to these external demands, which are key to understand the varying degrees of internal resistance.

The thesis offers an original and empirically grounded perspective on the consequences and inherent limitations of internalised control and contributes to general debates on the effectiveness of immigration policy.

Reducing the number of foreigners residing unlawfully within the borders of a state requires either their removal or the legalisation of their presence within the territory. Increasingly, governments also employ measures of internal control and limit irregular migrants’ access to rights and services in order to encourage them to leave autonomously. This article aims to contribute to current debates on how to conceptualise and account for the agency that irregular migrants themselves exercise in such contexts. Within critical migration and citizenship studies, many of their everyday actions have been described as ‘acts of citizenship’ but also as instances of ‘becoming imperceptible’, neither of which captures the whole range of strategies irregular migrants employ to strengthen their fragile position vis-à-vis the state. I argue that conceptualising their agency in terms of (self-)integration allows us to account for both: practices through which they actively become political subjects as well as those that precisely constitute a deliberate refusal to do so. Empirically, this is underpinned by an analysis of recent policy developments in the United Kingdom and a series of semi-structured interviews I conducted during 8 months of fieldwork in London with migrants experiencing different kinds and degrees of irregularity.

This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of local processes of policy implementation in areas that are characterised by a high level of politicisation and where decisions are underpinned by conflicting normative and functional imperatives. Based on original research data collected in London and Barcelona, it compares the formal entitlements and effective access of irregular migrants to publicly funded healthcare services provided at the local level. My analysis suggests that where the political context makes it difficult for national governments to openly justify and formalise the inclusion of unlawful residents, they tend to resort to a contradictory rhetoric and ambiguous legal frameworks. In practice, this means that the underlying conflicts have to be mediated by lower levels of government, as well as those institutions and individuals responsible for implementing this set of complex, frequently changing and often inconsistent rules and regulations.

As one of the predominant means of legal entry into the European Union (EU), family reunification has moved to the centre of public and political debates on immigration. Many Member States’ governments have put in place a net of highly selective policies in order to limit the number of foreigners entering as family migrants. This paper contrasts the underlying normative claim of a fundamental and universal right to family life against the existing evidence of unequal conditions and effects of family reunification policies for different groups and categories of third-country national migrants. Questioning the legitimacy of these differential policies, I build on Habermas’ distinction between pragmatic, ethical and moral modes of justification to develop a framework that helps to distinguish the various logics and arguments underlying this increasingly complex system of differentiated rights. I argue that within European family reunification policy-making the three types of justification, while often used in combination, tend to serve different functions and to inflict distinctive shortcomings in terms of the legitimacy of the selection mechanisms they underpin.