Undokumentierte Migration in Deutschland und den Vereinigten Staaten

Abstract

The dissertation thesis of Holk Stobbe on undocumented migration in Germany and the United States analyses the effects of internal migration controls on the scope of action of sans papiers (migrants without a valid residency permit). Accordingly, it comparatively looks at internal controls in the fields of surveillance, the labor market, health care, registration and housing as well as schooling and childcare.Empirical sources include interviews with experts in the area of migration control and from support organizations as well as in-depth, semi-structured interviews with forty sans papiers. In each country, a systematic sample of twenty migrants, who were of working age and had been undocumented for at least six months, were chosen according to the criteria of gender, country of origin and job skills. They were asked to relate their experiences with migration and internal controls.In migration studies there is an ongoing discussion over whether global economic, political, and social processes restrict the ability of advanced capitalist countries to control migration. Such economic processes generally fall under the label of globalization : the increasing exchange of goods and services, especially of information and capital; political processes are international agreements on rights and the creation of supra-national structures such as the European Union or the free trade agreement NAFTA; and social processes are the emergence of complex social networks of migrants and transnationalism. Supporters of the loss of control thesis see their assumptions confirmed by a convergence of migration policy and the increase of undocumented migration in the OECD countries since the mid-1980s.This dissertation shows that the convergence of migration policy in the area of internal controls only takes place at the level of policy objectives and legal norms (output level). At the outcome level - the level of implementation and execution -, national differences persist. Internal controls are embedded in the areas of surveillance, the labor market and social policy, which are intertwined in rather different ways and operate with different resources. Also, in the U.S., often there is a conflict of objectives between the institutions involved, whereas in Germany, they are usually congruent. In the United States, the reach of these controls is therefore significantly less than in Germany. The findings of this study show that there is not a loss of control and that the scope of action open to sans papiers depends upon the national context.