About

I am Professor of European Migration Law and Director of the Centre for Migration Law (CMR) at Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands). I am an interdisciplinary scholar and expert in labour and student migration, migrant and refugee rights and integration. I am fascinated by regulatory infrastructures beyond EU migration law that shape/break peoples’ opportunities. My work engages a gender, ethnic and socio-economic class stratification lens, and is highly relevant to ongoing political discussions and legislative endeavours at EU and national level. My expertise is regularly called on by legal practitioners, politicians and policy makers in the EU and the Netherlands and I find this as an important part of my role.

I was late to academia. In 1994 I started as an immigration lawyer with Everaert Immigration Lawyers in Amsterdam. I was advising on labour migration which aroused my curiosity for the topic. I moved on to a corporate career and became honorary district judge at the Amsterdam Court, hearing mainly asylum cases. These practical experiences with the functioning of migration and asylum law, working as an immigration lawyer, being a corporate advisor, thinking as a judge, are the pillars on which I built my academic career. My curiosity to understand the making of the law had me embark on my PhD project at Radboud University, and defending my PhD in 2007. Later, as assistant professor at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Amsterdam and the Department of Labour Law at Tilburg University I embarked on interdisciplinary research projects theorising decent labour market access for migrant workers and refugees.