Presentation of the topic

The intensification of global migration has paved the way for the current strong political tension and hence confrontation between the European States. At the same time when the European Union is showing its inability to promote a consensus around a more humanist or more liberal strategy, well understood, Member States are tightening the restrictive and repressive laws in an attempt to stem the flow.

Diversity and heterogeneity which characterize migratory phenomena, lead states to multiply migrants’ ruling categories: asylum seekers, refugees, stateless, economic migrants, family reunion seekers, displaced workers, victims of illegal immigration aid or human trafficking crimes. These ruling categories nevertheless face the composite and complex reality that characterizes the singular route each one must take, exacerbating the confusion of legal regimes and migratory status often noticeable from European immigration policies.

In fact, during the last two decades, Europe has received large waves of immigrants from poor countries throughout Asia, Africa and South America which has swelled the ranks of immigrants in either illegality or undocumented. In regularity or irregularity, their presence in national territories causes within the local population, a social reaction of rejection, attempting to support the idea of an invasion out of control; which constitutes a danger for economic, social and cultural cohesion of the receiving country whilst also increasing the risk of criminal intrusion by means of potential terrorists. Moreover, the implementation of restrictive policies itself causes situations of social exclusion that change geography of cities and citizens’ daily lives, and require a States positioning. Added to this, there is an indisputable fact: the active involvement of criminal networks in the mobility of migrants. In the public opinion, as in the rhetoric of governments, immigration is associated with the dangers of a global collapse of belonging and protection systems.

The context is then favorable for a merge between immigration and crime, a feeling which is taking place, raising xenophobic reactions and racist attitudes that settle permanently as negative feelings related to fear. The idea that Europe is experiencing a situation of permanent risk creates social construction conditions favorable to the fear of migrants, bolstered by state rhetoric of 'territorial defense'. Each wave of migration in history has generated a sense of the foreigner’ "criminalization", a negative side of the ideological apparatus that would ensure "assimilation", "integration" and "insertion" of immigrants respectively corresponding to three moments in the history of migration. The oldest one, related to the installation migration, hold the foreigner who persists in its foreignness as a failure of assimilation, with, as a background, the concept of an interior enemy. The assimilation criteria divides migrants into "insiders" and "outsiders", determining categories for social status, and cleaves the belonging affiliations between those who acquire national status and those who remain nailed in a non-national status of limited access to rights and thus prohibitive of access to citizenship.

The second moment, the so-called "circulatory migration" logic involves confrontation at border management issues, followed by the incorporation of economic migrants. If the integration device accepts the interaction and maintains cultural differences subject to respecting the values and rules of the host society, the access to a social and economic status is the pledge, pointing to a negative aspect that the migrant is assigned to precarious work, let alone without papers and without law.

In the present moment, war refugees from Africa and the Middle East are a new phenomenon compared to the episodes that Europe has previously known including the Balkan war and a threat to the consolidation of European construction. Paradoxically, while integration measures are desired to be more welcoming to diversity, the panic of an uncontrollable influx overflowing the borders of Europe threatens to topple any migrant or foreign with a status of objective enemy from the unity and integrity of the community.

The concept of ' crimmigration ' was coined to capture, in its multiple sociological, economic, political and legal aspects, this phenomenon of growing influence of criminal law over migrant populations. Everywhere, this criminal exception legislation, inspired by the law of the enemy, strengthens the socio-penal control of migrants with the perverse effect of massive detention or incarceration of non-nationals.

The objective of this symposium is to promote a debate around these current issues crossing sociological, epistemological points of view with legal, political, theoretical, critical and pragmatic approaches.

Firstly, we will deeply analyze the current characteristics of migrant populations in Europe, with particular attention to the situation of women and children in migrant route, and secondly the meaning and content of European migration strategies and their regional or global characteristics.

Secondly, we will question how the social sciences in Europe have taken up these European migration policies in order to test the relevance of the heuristic concept of crimmigration.

And finally, this symposium will be a place for prospective studies and possible recommendations on the social recognition and promotion of citizenship within the national territory or the respective weight of Europe's securitization logic and the right to privacy and freedom of movement.

All these aspects will to be addressed by the discussants of the symposium from an international and multidisciplinary perspective.

This Symposium is a founding act of the Convention between Sciences Po Toulouse and the Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra, in partnership with the doctorate program ‘Law, Justice and Citizenship in the 21st Century' promoted by the University of Coimbra, Faculty of Economics, Faculty of Law and the Centre for Social Studies.