New Trends in Societal Security research in the Nordic countries 26 - 27 November 2014 in Stockholm

1. INSECURE LIVES:
IRREGULAR MIGRATIONAND
PRECARIOUSLABOUR IN
FINLAND (INSECURE)
LENA NÄRE
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL
RESEARCH/SOCIOLOGY

2. AIMS
• INSECURE (2015-2018, Academy of Finland) provides an
understanding how mobility controls, employment, welfare and
citizenship regimes affect irregular migrants’ social and material
conditions in Finland and produce everyday insecurity of existence and
marginalisation.
• To analyse the ways in which irregular migration is framed as a security
question in state and municipal policies.
• To investigate the effects of marginalisation and irregularity in the
material and social conditions of migrants and to investigate possible
strategies migrants employ to cope with everyday insecurities brought on
by irregular residence and employment in Finland.

3. SOCIETAL SECURITY
• Security is commonly connected to the question of controlling external
state borders, but as Bigo (2002) and Huysmans (2006) have pointed
out, securitization is a wider issue relating to migration and citizenship
regimes. We also connect it to the employment regime.
• INSECURE connects to societal security by offering an analysis of
irregular migration as a security question: discursively constructed as
state security, but especially as a grave human security concern.

4. IRREGULAR MIGRATION
• A constructivist approach: who is an ‘irregular’ depends on time and
place and on particular migration, welfare and employment regimes.
• Not only lack of regular residence status of individual migrants, but
various forms of exclusions from social citizenship rights.
• In the EU context, irregular migration thought as mainly concerning
Mediterranean countries (geography and informal labour markets), and
countries with weaker labour market regulation (e.g. UK), while not a
concern in Nordic countries.
• Empirical studies from other Nordic countries and the previous and on-going
studies by our team members (Enache & Tervonen 2012; Könönen
2012; Vaittinen & Näre 2014) demonstrate that Nordic countries,
including Finland, are not outsiders to the phenomenon.

5. THE TEAM
Phd candidate in
Sociology Anastasia
Diatlova
Postdoc researcher
Jukka Könönen,
PhD defence in
January 2015 in
Social policy.
University
researcher Miika
Tervonen,
Historian
Assistant prof.
in Sociology
Lena Näre

6. 4 SUB-STUDIES
• Heterogenization of borders, multiplication of labour. Non-EU
migrants as deportable labour in low-paid service sector (Doctoral
candidate Jukka Könönen)
• Managing Multiple Marginalization: Russian-speaking Women
Doing Sex Work in Finland (Doctoral candidate Anastasia Diatlova)
• Roma migrants and asylum seekers in Finnish limboscapes:
comparative study of Roma with precarious legal statuses, c.1990-
2014 (Dr. Miika Tervonen)
• Victims or Villains? – The Framing of Irregular Migration in Finnish
Policy Documents (Ass. Prof. Lena Näre)

7. RESULTS AND IMPACT
• There is lack of academic research on the various ways in which foreign
workers, non-EU citizens with irregular juridical statuses and EU-citizens
without social insurances are marginalised from social citizenship and
welfare rights in Finland.
• INSECURE provides in-depth knowledge on what factors induce
irregularity, how migrants cope with insecurities in their lives and what
strategies they have to exercise their agency.
• The project locates and explains unintended and intended
consequences of migration legislation and bureaucratic practices.
• INSECURE produces applicable empirical knowledge to assist policy-making
in order to improve accessibility of welfare services to migrants.

8. THANKYOU
LENA.NARE@HELSINKI.FI