Counselling initiatives for irregular migrants could become a more significant tool for addressing irregular migration in Europe

BRUSSELS — At a time when tackling irregular migration is a pressing EU priority, policymakers and other stakeholders have expressed a willingness to consider strategies beyond returns and the prevention of irregular entry via border management. One area of growing interest has centered on outreach and counselling for irregular migrants living in or transiting EU countries—on everything from available return and reintegration support to raising the visibility of regularization and other legal pathways where they exist.

Yet to date initiatives to connect to this hard-to-reach population have lacked a cohesive strategy and have been characterized by a diverse set of stakeholders targeting different groups with distinct approaches and varied goals, as a new Migration Policy Institute Europe (MPI Europe) issue brief details. Against this patchwork, coverage has been uneven and results inconsistent, with some migrant groups overlooked while others are targeted by multiple, at times overlapping, services.

In No One-Size-Fits-All: Outreach and counselling for irregular migrants, MPI Europe analysts María Belén Zanzuchi and Bertrand Steiner map the current assortment of initiatives. They also offer recommendations to strengthen the evidence base available, so that policymakers, service providers and other stakeholders can ensure that outreach and counselling efforts better reach their goals—whether rooted in migration management, migrant welfare or other objectives.

The analysis draws from interviews with governmental and non-governmental stakeholders in Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, as well as roundtables gathering public officials, local administrators, civil-society actors and nongovernmental organization leaders.

The brief, which is part of the Reaching Undocumented Migrants (RUM) project coordinated by the Return and Reintegration Facility (RRF), identifies a number of promising efforts to scale policy development and programme operations for counselling services.

To move the field forward and strengthen the evidence base, the MPI Europe analysts recommend that policymakers and program designers:

• Gain a better understanding of a target population marked by significant diversity. Improving data collection about irregular migrants, including their socio-demographic characteristics, migration motivations and specific needs could result in more effective tailoring of outreach and counselling services.
• Document the impact of existing outreach and counselling initiatives. Establishing clear program goals and success metrics as well as tracking costs could help policymakers fine-tune strategies and inform scalable practices.
• Map the diversity of outreach and counselling mechanisms. Comprehensive mapping could help determine what works best, for whom, under what conditions and with which goals in mind.

"To move the field forward, it will be crucial to strengthen the evidence base," Zanzuchi and Steiner note. "Policymakers and program designers need reliable information to make smart decisions about the models they adopt and how they allocate (often limited) resources, and to potentially convince more national authorities and other stakeholders to engage in these efforts."

Read the No One-Size-Fits-All brief here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/outreach-counselling-irregular-migrants.

ABOUT THE RUM PROJECT

Funded by the European Commission Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs, the Reaching Undocumented Migrants (RUM) project is carried out by the Return and Reintegration Facility (RRF), an EU-funded entity that supports EU Member States and other Schengen countries as they seek to increase the effectiveness of their return and reintegration programming. The RUM project aims to develop and promote evidence-based tools, datasets and processes that can be used by a wide European community of practice to improve outreach to irregular migrants within the European Union.

For more on the project, visit: https://reintegrationfacility.eu/rrf_projects/reaching-undocumented-migrants/.