Schengen och illegal immigration : En komparativ fallstudie mellan Spanien och Tyskland

Sammanfattning: The topic of this thesis is immigration policy in the European Union with focus on the Schengen cooperation and illegal immigration. Immigration policies and other policy areas such as asylum and refugee policies have become hot topics on the EU agenda in recent years. Partly because of cooperations like Schengen, but also because a need of a common immigration and asylum policy has emerged. The purpose of the thesis is to give a better understanding of the relations that might be found between illegal immigration to the EU and the Schengen cooperation. Schengen plays an important role in dealing with international migration in the EU and will probably continue to do so in the future. The thesis is a comparative case study with Spain and Germany as the two specific cases. Their national immigration policies are examined and put in relation to the Schengen cooperation. The research questions are: What was the basic problem that was supposed to be avoided when incorporating Schengen into the framework of the European Union? How does Spain and Germany deal with the illegal immigration they have been exposed to and what are the similarities and differences between the two countries? How do the Spanish and German actions relate to the Schengen cooperation? The result of the study is, when it comes to illegal immigration to the EU there are no functioning systems to handle it. Even though there are cooperations like Schengen, that tries to standardize the management of immigration, illegal immigration included, it seems like the individual countries still prefer to deal with it in their own ways.