Complex precarity: towards a reconceptualisation of irregular migration as a reality and a policy category
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates the relationship between broader economic immigration policy frameworks, legal statuses and related terminologies, and the systemic production of (ir)regularity and ultimately precarity among migrants. We begin with a critical review of irregularity and how it is (re)produced between conditions of entry and stay, changing policy requirements and pathways into and out of irregular status. We then take two contrasted cases, Canada and Spain, to illustrate how their diametrically opposed economic immigration management regimes (Canada's highly regulated, proactive approach; Spain's deregulated, retroactive policy) produce similar forms of irregularised, semi-legal and precarious status for migrants. From these reflections, we propose a multi-dimensional perspective on the concept of precarity that includes social, legal and economic aspects, arguing that precarity offers a better analytical palette for understanding irregularity in migration today. Finally, we offer thoughts about the implications of complex precarity for irregular migration realities in European and North American contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".