Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic are two recent crises whose combined effects exacerbated the exclusion of irregular migrants in Europe. In this thesis, I will explore the structure-agency linkages that shaped the everyday survival strategies of irregular Filipino migrants (IFMs) in navigating a post-Brexit, mid-pandemic UK. Using Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s frameworks of political-civil society, differential inclusion, and internal borders, I examine how IFMs exercised their agency against the “formal” rules of the state as well as the “informal” rules set by fellow social actors. The themes that emerged from the analysis underscored the long-debated sociological tensions between structure and agency. Among these, the most recurring one is that IFMs’ agency were expanded or delimited by their positionality vis-à-vis various social actors such as employers, landlords, co-tenants, “benevolent” individuals, and immigration middlemen. This necessitates further studies that could link these micro-level structurations to the broader epistemic shifts within Europe’s migration governance framework.

The UN Migrant Workers Convention (CMW) that provides for fundamental human rights for migrant workers and members of their families has been adopted in 1990. Until today, none of the EU Member States has signed or ratified it. The EU Member States argue that there is no need for them to accede to the CMW, as, inter alia, the rights contained in it are already secured by other international human rights instruments and in the EU legal instruments. Additionally to the claim of the CMW redundancy for the current EU legal framework, the Member States have several times repeated the fear that the ratification of the CMW could give irregular migrants more rights and increase irregular migration to the EU. Inspired by these two in fact contradictory arguments, this research aims to explore the scope of irregular migrants related human rights protection under international and European law and verify the basis of the EU Member states claims by comparing the scope of rights of irregular migrant workers in the EU with the standards embedded in the CMW. The main research questions posed are What human rights are the irregular migrants entitled to in the EU, based on international and European legal instruments? Is the CMW indeed redundant and unnecessary in the legislative framework of the European Union or is it...

Centrée sur le droit pénal face à la migration transfrontière, la présente étude prend le parti d’intégrer en son sein deux formes de migration spécifiques : la migration irrégulière et la migration pour motif terroriste. Elle choisit également de faire du droit pénal son objet central. Ce choix conduit naturellement à renverser les perspectives initiales et à envisager, non les effets du droit pénal sur la migration transfrontière, mais l’inverse : les incidences de la migration transfrontière sur le droit pénal. À cet égard, migration irrégulière et migration pour motif terroriste ont en commun d’ébranler le droit pénal. Face à la migration irrégulière, le droit pénal subit une instrumentalisation : sa mobilisation n’est effectuée que dans une finalité administrative d’éloignement de la migration présente à la frontière (particulièrement dans les zones d’attente et frontalières). Plus encore, la politique de prévention contre l’immigration irrégulière développée à l’échelle de l’Union européenne a entraîné un véritable enchevêtrement de normes pénales, agissant dans de multiples espaces géographiques, dont certaines sont détournées afin d’entraver la migration en mer, et d’autres créées pour l’empêcher de se former sur terre, au sein des États tiers de départ. À l’inverse, le droit pénal apparaît absent face à la migration pour motif terroriste. Alors qu’il pourrait se saisir de ce phénomène, il semble au contraire dépassé par la montée en puissance de mesures de police administrative. De nature à anticiper d’une manière quasiment prédictive le risque terroriste porté par la migration transfrontière, ces mesures entraînent l’obsolescence du droit pénal. Penser le droit pénal face à la migration transfrontière permet enfin de révéler que la migration irrégulière et la migration pour motif terroriste sont liées par le droit, en étant envisagées sous le prisme du risque qu’elles portent en elle. / This study focuses on the link between criminal law and crossborder migration and will address two specific forms of migration : irregular migration and migration with a terrorist purpose. The main focus of this study is criminal law. This choice has resulted in a reversal of the original focus ; that is to say the effects of crossborder migration on criminal law as opposed to the effects of criminal law on crossborder migration. Both irregular migration and migration with a terrorist purpose undermine criminal law. With respect to irregular migration, criminal law is used as an administrative instrument to repel migrants from national borders particularly those in waiting zones and crossborder zones. Prevention policies against irregular migration implemented at the EU level have resulted in an entanglement of criminal norms, in various geographic areas, some of them were diverted to prevent migration by sea and other were created to stop migrants trying to enter by land via third countries. On the contrary, criminal law seems absent with regards to migration with a terrorist purpose. While it could effectively tackle this phenomenon, it seems overwhelmed by the rise of administrative police measures. These measures are able to anticipate in a quasi-predictive manner the risk of terrorism via crossborder migration and they in fact render criminal law ineffective. Thinking criminal law in the face of crossborder migration has allowed to reveal that irregular migration and migration with a terrorist purpose are legally contected, when they are considered through the prism of the risk conveyed.