The LIMA project started in the fall 2015 et runs for a period of 5 years. It is an ARC project (Concerted Research Actions) bringing together different research centres of the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) and aiming at confronting the normative environment with the concrete realities of immigration.
This project examines how the Belgian and European legal frameworks correlate with third country national migrants’ agency. It aims to study the ways in which the existing legal framework impacts migrants’ family and professional trajectories and to what extent it affords them the ‘capability’ (Sen, 1993) to develop their lives according to their personal aspirations. To do so, it analyses the relationship between legal norms and migrants’ life-course through both a top-down and a bottom-up approach: from the norms to the migrants and then from the migrants to the norms with a view to proposing means to enhance migrants’ decisional autonomy.
By conducting a comparative analysis of the opportunities and constraints offered by various legal statuses on migrant’ families, mobility rights, professional trajectories, and the strategies these actors develop to deal with the legal framework, this project reveals the unequal constraints exerted by legal norms on individual choices and the subsisting margins of autonomy, depending on a series of factors including not only legal statuses, but also ethnicity, gender, level of education, and socio-economic status.
The scientific aim is twofold : understand how legal frameworks shape migrants' professional, family and migratory trajectories and life projects; and analyse if, and which strategies migrants develop to bend the rules and circumvent obstacles, and/or use the opportunities offered by legal systems to fulfil their professional and family aspirations. This leads us to address two questions that lie at the core of social sciences: the relationship between structure and agency, and social inequalities. The project also furthers our understanding of the inadequacy of normative constructions of 'the' family underlying migration policies, and the reality of migrants' family structures and dynamics.
Our project triangulates the contributions of law, demography and sociology, and combines two perspectives. The understanding of migrants’ agency within the European and Belgian legal framework must be confronted to quantitative, demographic studies as well as qualitative, sociological analysis of the trajectories of a selection of migrants. This is done by using two closely inter-related perspectives: a ‘top-down’ and a ‘bottom-up’ approach of the phenomenon under study.
By adopting a ‘top-down approach’, this project examines how the legal framework composed by EU and Belgian norms and jurisprudence regulate migrants’ mode of entry in the national territory, and their access to labour markets, education and family life, through employing a legal analytical method and interviews with expert practitioners. The legal analytical method exposes the content of the legal framework whereas interviews with expert practitioners clarify the administrative practices regarding its concrete application.
This ‘top-down’ approach is articulated to a ‘bottom-up’ approach that combines quantitative and qualitative methods drawn from demography and sociology in order to investigate the impact of the legal framework on migrants’ professional and family trajectories and the strategies that they put in place to cope with these legal constrains and opportunities and organize their family and professional lives both nationally and transnationally.
This research focuses on the migration of third-country nationals to Belgium. The legal analytic approach as well as the analyses of register data cover migrations from third countries as a whole. Three groups of migrants are then more specifically studied through qualitative and quantitative approaches: migrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo, from India and from the United States of America. Several factors have motivated the choice of these three nationalities of origin.
First, this project pays attention to the diversity of the immigrant population by including immigrants originating from both the Global North and the Global South in the analysis.
Then, the three retained nationalities correspond to migrant groups of roughly similar sizes in Belgium. In recent years, international migrations of each of these three nationalities have indeed accounted for between 4 and 6% of all entries to Belgium from third countries. With Morocco (13%) and Turkey (5%), these three nationalities are also among the five nationalities (outside the EU) sending the largest number of migrants in our country. However, despite being currently of the same order of magnitude in terms of numbers of immigrants, there are considerable differences as far as trends over time are concerned. Congolese migrations to Belgium have a long history and they have been largely shaped by periods of crisis and conflict in the country over the past three decades. Migrations of US citizens to Belgium have been relatively constant over the last decades, which is in contrast with the average increase observed for most of other immigrations from third countries. Finally, the rise of Indian migration in Belgium is relatively recent and started in the late 2000s.
The profiles of these migrants are also quite diverse. The legal reasons that lead Congolese in Belgium are mostly family reunification (over 65%) and humanitarian reasons (about 20%). Migrations from India and the US are characterized instead by work-related reasons (between 30 and 40%) and family reunification (between 40 and 50%). These three flows also differ in terms of sex ratios of migrations: women constitute a short majority of immigrations from Congolese and American citizens (respectively 52 and 53% of women), while men are more frequent among Indian immigrants (60% of men).
Source : Rapport statistique et démographique 2013 – Migrations et populations issues de l’immigration en Belgique
(DEMO et Centre pour l’égalité des chances et la lutte contre le racisme)
Finally, the different legal frameworks to which they are subjected justifies the choice of those three nationalities. The statuses at entry and the facilities for access to some services and public benefits for Congolese, Indian and US citizens are indeed very different.
Research Areas :
international migrations, migration law, private international law, human rights law, interdisciplinary approach, Cooperation European Union – Africa in migration law
Geographical Area :
Belgium, European Union
Research Areas :
measuring international migration, migration between Africa and Europe, economic insertion of migrants, demographic changes in Africa, data collection and analysis methods
Geographical Area :
Sub-Saharian Africa (DR Congo, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Sénégal), Europe
Research Areas :
international migrations, border studies, asylum, governance, governmentality, sociology of everyday life, maritime sociology, qualitative methods.
Geographical Area :
Mediterranean Europe (Italy and Spain), North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia and Libya), Belgium
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