An illustration of Melilla border fencing. A large watch tower and 2 tall walls made of netting, one behind the other, flank a road. Behind the netting is an arrangement of spikes and no man's land towards Maroc. A map at the bottom left corner marks Ceuta and Melilla on a scale of 100 kilometers.

The Melilla-Ceuta borderSpain Morocco, Internal fence, external fence, no man’s land, roughly 200 meters

2.1 Who Is an International Migrant?

An international migrant is defined as somebody who lives in a different country from that in which they were born, irrespective of their nationality. According to this definition, there are 284 million international migrants in the world (UNDESA Report, 2021), a number which has rapidly grown since the 1990s (120 million). However, there is a far greater number of internal migrants, travelling within national borders, currently standing at 740 million. Whereas “migrants” are defined geographically (mobility across borders for more than 1 year), the “foreigner” is defined legally, as a non-national. There are therefore always more international migrants than there are foreigners, since some migrants are non-nationals in their place of residence, while others have naturalised to become nationals. Irregular migrants are not included in international and internal statistics. International migrants may belong to one of several categories, in a context of blurred categorisations and mixed migration flows. Foreign workers make up the largest group, although in old immigration countries, such as the US and certain European countries, family reunification makes up the largest group. There are increasing numbers of international students, as well as refugees. We can distinguish between voluntary migration (work, family reunification, studies) and forced migration (refugees, environmentally displaced persons), and observe patterns with regard to the gender of migrants (overall, men and women make up 52% and 48% of international migrants respectively), age (senior, economically active, and minor migrants), their degree of qualification (broadly, skilled and unskilled migrants), and their legal or irregular status. However, the increasing globalisation of migration is making it more and more difficult to distinguish between some profiles, especially between voluntary and forced migrants.

The categories of migrants have been blurred (especially workers, refugees, and family members) as the sociological profiles of several categories are now closer than they have been in the past. The categories applied to individual nation states (immigration, emigration, and transit) are also increasingly blurred and complex. Whereas, in the 1960s and 1970s, it was generally easy to distinguish refugees from unqualified migrant workers, they now often have a very similar profile. Many women arriving through family reunification procedures are entering the labour market: should they then be categorised in terms of family reunification or labour migration? Unaccompanied minors are often considered to become “illegal” when they reach the age of 18. Somebody who enters a country as an irregular migrant, but whose level of qualification helps them to gain a legal status may then enter the skilled labour market and perhaps acquire citizenship. To which category should they be assigned? We could point to many other such examples of blurred categories, in this context of increasing divergences between legal categories and sociological or economic realities.

2.1.1 I – Literature Review

Previously, most research on migration was conducted either at the micro-level or with a focus on a specific immigration country. However, more lately a large number of authors have analysed migration at a global level and as an international relations issue. Among these authors, we have chosen a small number whose approach is particularly illustrative of developments in the field.

2.2 Stephen Castles: International Migration as a Global Issue

Stephen Castles was one of the first sociologists of migration to develop an approach to migration at the global level. In so doing, he placed a particular emphasis on Asia and Oceania as new migration regions. His innovative approach to migration studies consists in both multi-disciplinary analysis (with a principle grounding in sociology) and a comparative perspective, in which different regional migration spaces and systems are viewed within a global context. After a long stay in Europe (Frankfurt, the EU Institute in Florence, and Oxford) and Wollongong, Australia, he concluded his academic career at the University of Sydney.

The global perspective on migration that Stephen Castles developed at the end of the twentieth century is now very well-known from his book The Age of Migration, written initially with Mark Miller, formerly chief editor of International Migration Review in New York, and with Hein De Haas from the fifth edition of 2014, a researcher at the University of Oxford and now a professor in the Netherlands (Castles et al., 2014). The book covers the whole world, with a chapter on migration theories and a regional analysis of migration systems. The originality of this book written for students lies in its excellent contributions on Europe, the US, and Asia. It develops a focus on the regionalisation of migration flows in regional migration systems, and also presents an analysis of migration and integration policies at the global scale.

Stephen Castles also links the analysis of migration spaces and policies with the question of citizenship. On the subject of citizenship and multiculturalism, he stresses the concept of negotiating citizenship. His main contribution on this issue (Castles & Davidson, 2000) is a large-scale reflection on citizenship as belonging and its connection to migration issues, starting from the Australian case, but then extending to a comparative approach with European countries. He demonstrated the extent to which the content of multicultural citizenship is a matter for negotiation in countries of migration of settlement. In the case of Australia, an initial dream of a “white Australia” made up of populations of British background was eventually replaced owing to the rise of migration from other areas and a focus on Aboriginals’ rights, which brought about a change in the national definition of “who belongs”. Castles and Davidson thus show how multiculturalism was inserted into the Australian Constitution, and how this pragmatic adaptation was gradually transformed into a theoretical model. This process invites comparisons with Canada, which was the first country to formally define a system of multiculturalism, initially as a bi-national state, and later as a country of migration of settlement, taking into account (as in Australia) the existence of autochthonous natives.

2.3 James Hollifield: The Contemporary Contradictions of Economic Liberalism and Security-Based Politics, from a Comparative Perspective

James Hollifield is Professor of Political Science at Southern Methodist University (SMU), in Texas. He is a Global Fellow and Public Policy Scholar at the Wilson Center, and Ora Nixon Arnold Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the John G. Tower Center for Public Policy and International Affairs at SMU. He is a well-known specialist of France and other European countries, and a comparatist of migration policies implemented by European countries and the US. He has published several books, including a collection on Migration Theory with Karolyn Brettell (2014). In his book Immigrants, Markets and States: American Policy and Politics (1992), and in later comparative research on Europe, Hollifield defines what he calls “the liberal paradox” presented by the contradictions between, on the one hand, immigration policies inspired by free markets and economic liberalism in the biggest immigration countries of the Global North, and on the other hand, the growing securitisation and closure of borders in those same countries. He analyses the conflicts of interest between employers and policy decision makers in the American case, but also in most European countries (notably France, Germany, the UK, and Italy), as well as in Japan. But the findings of this analysis are now being challenged by the changing nature of migration.

In the French case, for example, traditional actors such as employers and trade unions played a major role in decision-making processes between 1945 and 1975, but they lost influence between 1980 and 2020, when deindustrialisation and unemployment became prominent factors. Since 1975, decision-makers have been influenced far less by employers than by their fear of the public opinion of voters on the political far right. As the vast majority of legal newcomers are not workers, but asylum seekers, students, and migrants involved in family reunifications, the relevance of the “liberal paradox” (which involves the perspective of employers) is necessarily reduced.

Public opinion is now the most important factor in the decision-making process. For quite a long period (1945–1975), immigration was a depoliticised issue (Wihtol de Wenden, 1988). This was due to the need for immigrant workers to support the booming economy. The rise of the far right in the 1980s, which placed immigration at the core of its political programme, played a major role in making it a prominent political question. In many cases, questions of security now dominate discussions of migration, and symbolic rather than pragmatic policies are used to reassure the right-wing vote.

The role of civil society (NGOs, human rights associations, social solidarity associations, and churches) is relatively small. As a consequence, when immigration is keenly contested in national politics, those institutions have only limited opportunities for discussion, negotiation, and bargaining with decision-makers. Short-term thinking prevails, with an eye on public opinion and electoral agendas. Today, in many immigration countries, the contradiction is not so much between the imperatives of economic liberalism and controlling borders, as it is between social solidarity and security.

Hollifield’s recent research on displacement and the challenge of forced migration (2021) proposes a four-sided typology of migration governance, involving security, rights, markets, and culture.

2.4 Thomas Faist: The Transnational Social Question as an Alternative to Class Struggle at the Global Scale

Thomas Faist is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld, in Germany. He has pursued his work on transnationalism in migration through a large number of comparative studies. In his last book, The Transnational Social Question (2019), he focuses on transnationalism as a global challenge.

Transnationalism was introduced as a category of analysis in migration studies by Linda Basch and Nina Glick Schiller (1994) in the early 1990s, in a period when the role of nation states as the main actors in both the national and the international order was being challenged. Some political scientists and sociologists, such as Bertrand Badie and Saskia Sassen, used this concept to speak of the decline of nation states and the increasing role of global cities (Sassen, 1996), the emergence of new actors in the Global South (Badie, 2009), and of the new role of associations as important actors in international arenas. Other observers studied transnationalism using a bottom-up analysis, emphasising that transnational practices were being developed by migrant diasporas and the influence of countries of origin (through “the strength of weak ties”, as Mark Granoveter puts it; 1973) as a way of circumventing the rules imposed by nation states rules or in order to transgress borders (Dufoix, 2003; Soysal, 1994; on transnational citizenship, see Bauböck, 1994).

Thomas Faist’s book The Transnational Social Question analyses migration with a new lens. He does not use the concept of transnationalism in the manner described above: the concept now extends more broadly to transborder mobility, remittances, the transborder migration of work, and the dissemination of ways of life. One of the strongest ideas developed by Thomas Faist lies in his demonstration that class struggles inside one country, particularly those in an industrial context (as conceived by Marx), now generally play a lesser role than social inequalities between countries of the Global North and Global South. The book explores the whole, complex migration system through this transnational approach to social questions.

Thomas Faist has developed two useful concepts for analysing migration from the perspective of social transnationalism:

  • The dominant theoretical paradigm for analysing migration is no longer that of internal class struggle (within countries), but that of social and cultural inequalities between the Global South and the Global North. These inequalities create asymmetric regimes across the world, leading to migration, and “exit” rather than “voice”, according to Alfred Hirschman’s book Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970). Now conflicts are less dominated by internal class struggles than they are by heterogeneities (religious, ethnic, linguistic, etc.) between states viewed through the North-South prism.

  • Location (where you were born and where you are currently living) has become the most important factor in heterogeneity and inequality. The world has passed from a model of class difference to one characterised by differences of place and citizenship. The place where you were born now gives rise to the greatest inequalities, since your future, your right to mobility, and your access to social rights are all linked to your passport. In some cases, you may be perceived as representing a “migration risk”, and consequently you will not be able to travel without a visa. Furthermore, human insecurity and forced migration are linked to the Global South, where there is a far greater prevalence of failed states and civil war. Most migrants are looking for social protection, gender and sexual equality, access to education, health, and water. It is not the poorest people who leave their countries, since such people lack access to transnational networks (family, friends, money, language skills), but rather those who are more educated and informed, and who are thus more aware that they can seek a better future outside their countries of origin. In a turbulent context, they are looking for more security (political, social, economic, health-related). They therefore send large amounts of remittances – a practice that is made possible thanks to migration. They may also build transnational mobilisations focused on addressing social inequalities.

With a transnational and global approach, access to social protection appears as a major divide between the Global North and Global South. Social welfare policies can either include or exclude non-nationals. In reality, many migrants, as a result of their choice of mobility, do not have any formal status in their country of residence, and are therefore excluded from all forms of citizenship and access to social rights. Some of them acquire a few rights, either through humanitarian protection policies or legalisation, but this is often a temporary situation.

At the international level, no international organisation has the ambition to reduce inequalities in the provision of social protection between states. They are active only inside countries, in spite of the very heterogeneous landscape of social protection. There is no coherent global migration regime, and the systems of global migration governance do not deal with international social inequalities and heterogeneities. Border controls exclude some categories from any social protection, leading to further deaths. Diasporas are addressing some of these issues of social care and welfare in such globally inter-connected nations as the US, Canada, and Australia, by creating networks of support and advocacy. Environmental changes could also increase some migration flows in response to inequalities in some parts of the world, mostly by creating differences in vulnerabilities between regions of departure and arrival.

In the last 10 years, heterogeneities (ethnic, religious, linguistic) have become stronger between countries of emigration and immigration across the North-South divide. These heterogeneities are transnational in nature, involving transborder migratory patterns, remittances, recruitment, and the dissemination of different ways of life. The modern political world is increasingly characterised by economic and political inequalities. Inequalities between countries are greater than inequalities within nation states. Transborder migration has become externalised with the use of bilateral and multilateral agreements.

Another inequality lies in the rural/urban gap, which is accelerating the rapid transition from a model of class difference to one based on one’s location in the world and access to social protection. Citizenship is linked with location. The weakness of some political regimes in the world leads to a lack of governmental capabilities in those states (which is itself a factor in international migration), human security concerns, and forced migration due to civil wars and the collapse of states. Many sovereign countries are effectively dominated in the international order. Global economic inequalities and asymmetries of power, which are maintained in order to support the rule of law and the legal use of violence, lead to migration. Countries that do not succeed in protecting themselves from inequalities and violence are likely to create flows of refugees. Many migrants are motivated by the search for social protection, and proceed to make up for inequalities with the use of remittances and transfers of information regarding health and care services. Women’s rights, and the search for equality, security, education, and water are all often stronger factors for departure than poverty alone. In these countries we can observe political mobilisations and transnational movements fighting against social inequalities.

Migration reinforces the crucial importance of one’s place of origin and place of residence as the most significant factor for one’s conditions of living and future prospects. In a period when location is more important than one’s place on the human development index, there are paradoxically fewer possibilities for international migration than in earlier periods, owing to the emergence of new inequalities in the right to migrate, linked to visa regimes and border controls. Consequently, a transnationalisation from below is developing, and the unequal right to migrate is becoming an important factor in the hierarchical structuring of heterogeneities. This situation is leading to a situation of selective mobility and massive immobility, in which we can observe a global hierarchy of inequality with many intersectional factors (class, gender, ethnicity, race, religion, citizenship). The transnational social question is now both global and local.

2.5 Aristide Zolberg: “The Main Gate and the Back Door”, “Strange Bedfellows”, and the Influence of External Factors on the Internal Political Order

After growing up in Belgium during the Second World War, Aristide Zolberg decided to migrate to the US. When he acquired American citizenship, he served in the army, which gave him the opportunity to travel to Africa. After completing a PhD on Francophone Africa, he became a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, then at the New School for Social Research in New York. He was one of the first political scientists to analyse migration from an international perspective, through his work on borders, refugees, and comparative immigration policies, mainly between France and the US. In 1985, he analysed the effect of migration on the relation between the national and the international political orders, in terms of influence and intrusion, mostly in connection with transnational diasporas (Zolberg, 1985). In his last book, A Nation by Design (2006), his analysis of the role of immigration in the making of the US led him to develop the concept of “the main gate and the back door”, referring to the choice faced by migrants between legal or irregular migratory routes into an immigration country with strong border controls. He also observed the heterogeneity of actors who support migrant populations, which he describes as “strange bedfellows”. This heterogeneity weakens transnational mobilisations advocating for changes in migration policies: emigration countries, employers, and associations of undocumented migrants are in favour of more open borders, but these groups do not have a tradition of fighting together for a common cause, whereas immigration countries, welfare countries, and nationalists are consistent in their opposition to increased access for immigrants. He also showed very early on the role of refugees in the internationalisation of issues of migration (Zolberg et al., 1989).

Among many other well-known political scientists and sociologists who have addressed migration as an international issue, we could point to the work of Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild on the concepts of the externalisation of borders and the use of buffer zones with control and readmission agreements (2005), Robin Cohen on diasporas as a factor in transnationalisation (2008, 2018), and Stephen Vertovec on transnationalism (2004).

2.5.1 II – Historical Overview

The history of mass migration began in the nineteenth century, when revolutions across Europe, poverty, the exclusion of minorities, labour shortages, and demands for the settlement of populations in empty territories or places of colonisation led to the movement of millions of people to new destinations. Most countries of departure were powerful (the “Great Empires”) while most countries of destination were weak and colonised (the US, Canada, Australia, Algeria). The land itself was attractive, offering the prospect of the construction of a New World (in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand). The modernisation of sea transportation in the mid-nineteenth century, with the transition from boats driven by the wind to steam boats capable of carrying large numbers of passengers, is another technical and powerful factor of mass migration. Migrants left for settlement or for work, even though most people leaving for settlement eventually returned home (such as the 20 million Italian migrants to the Americas who later returned to Italy), while some who moved for work ultimately decided to stay (mostly in Europe).

Unlike other migration destinations, Europe never considered itself as an immigration continent of settlement, since, during the nineteenth century, most migrants were European, and owing to its large population Europe was overall an emigration continent. The only exception was France, which began its demographic decline at the end of the eighteenth century and became an immigration country (in order to compensate for labour shortages). Meanwhile, other European countries remained emigration countries, including migration to France, but also to other destination. For example, Germans, Poles, Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese travelled both to France and to the Americas.

During the twentieth century, the First and Second World wars created new demands for labour for reconstruction, while the collapse of Great Empires (the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Austria-Hungary) led to new flows of refugees and minorities to Europe (including exchanges of populations, such as those between Greece and Turkey) and to North and South America. After the Second World War, the creation of new borders in Eastern Europe led to the movement of 12 million people, mostly ethnic Germans leaving lands that had become Poland or the Czech Republic to travel to destinations within the new borders of Germany. In the following years, a period of economic growth (1945–1974) transformed former emigration countries in Europe into immigration countries (the UK, Germany, Switzerland, the Benelux states). At the start of the 1980s, Southern European countries also became immigration countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece), having formerly been emigration countries. In the 1990s, the fall of the Iron Curtain gave rise to new flows of migration: these included ethnic movements of population from the former USSR to Germany (2 million “Aussiedler”), and the disentanglement of populations in Eastern and Central Europe (such as those between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and between Romania and Hungary, and the movement of Greeks from the north of the Black Sea to Greece, and of Bulgarians of Muslim culture to Turkey). The enlargement of the EU in 2004 with the entry of ten new countries led to these populations – formerly enclosed within strong borders – becoming commuters between EU Member States: many workers adopted mobility as a way of life, facilitated by the relatively short distances between countries of work and of origin. We can therefore identify four main periods of major migration movements in European countries during the twentieth century: first, immigration to France, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century; next, immigration to Germany, the UK, Benelux, and the Nordic countries after the Second World War (and throughout the mid-twentieth century); from the 1980s, Southern Europe became an immigration region; and Eastern Europe became involved in large-scale migration from the early 1990s.

In the twenty-first century, a new era of mobility and migration between the Global North and the Global South was initiated by several factors: the transformation of some Southern countries into immigration countries owing to their dependence on migrant workers (notably the Gulf states, since the rise in oil prices from 1973 onwards), the growing divide between richer and poorer countries in the Global South, and South-South movements of refugees. 75% of refugees from countries in the Global South (notably Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Sudanese, and Sub-Saharans from the Great Lakes region) travelled to other Southern countries (Iran and Pakistan for Afghans, Lebanon for refugees from Middle Eastern countries, Turkey for Syrians, and Egypt and Uganda for Sudanese). Environmentally displaced persons were also involved in South-South migration, mostly at the internal level, but partly (roughly a third) at the international level, to neighbouring countries. Some countries in the Global South, such as Lebanon, Turkey, and those on the southern rim of the Mediterranean Sea (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Libya), also became transit countries, owing to their geographical position between North and South.

Many of these flows are mixed, in terms of the economic and political profiles of individual migrants. The reasons for this are historical. In most immigration countries in the Global North, migration policies moved from an orientation towards the socio-economic management of workers to a security-based approach to the management of borders. In the mid-1950s, the main categories of migrants were workers (who made up the majority), followed by families and refugees. Migration policies in Western Europe were mainly determined by the economic need to compensate for labour shortages, rather than in response to families and refugees, who made up a minority of migrants. Migrant workers were not seen as future settlers, and those who arrived by irregular channels were rapidly legalised in their status, since they were required as legal workers. There was no confusion between workers and refugees. At this time, refugees were welcomed, since they strengthened the image of Europe, the US, and Canada as Western countries of democracy and freedom, providing a safe haven to those who had been persecuted and threatened in countries in the Communist Bloc. The situation is now very different. Western European countries largely closed their borders to workers from around 1973–1974. Some migrants acquired European citizenship (through the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 on European Citizenship, article 8), with the right to free circulation that this entails (among the largest populations: Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Greeks, and later Poles and Romanians), while migrants from non-EU states were granted access using visas through the Schengen Agreement of 1985. These migrants were expected to return to their countries of origin, but in most cases this did not occur, and these migrant workers who had formerly been “required” increasingly became “undesirable” in their countries of destination. Meanwhile, the influence of Gulf countries on Muslim emigration countries led to changes in the practice of Islam at home and abroad, which were also affected by the international context (wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, flows of Palestinian refugees, the collapse of Libya after the “Arab Springs” of 2011, the civil war in Syria, and terrorism in both emigration and immigration countries).

For young people in the Global South, the possibility of migrating through irregular channels by means of human smugglers, and the portrayal in the media of Europe, the US, and Canada as an Eldorado, are contributing to a desire to emigrate. For those who undertake these often dangerous journeys, without any passport or visa, the only prospect for obtaining a legal status is by claiming asylum. They therefore politicise their identities, even if they are not in reality persecuted in their country of origin. This leads to “mixed flows”, blurring the boundaries between those who travel for work and those who require asylum because, for example, civil war is destroying their country. However, the likelihood of such migrants being recognised as refugees is much lower than it was during the Cold War. Many of them, having been refused refugee status, join the flow of irregular migrants, seeking and finding work on the black market. In the past, 90% of those who sought refugee status were successful in their claims (notably in the 1950s and, for Vietnamese and Chileans, in the 1980s), but now 60% of claims for asylum are refused. The same phenomenon of blurred profiles is found in the case of family reunification: most migrants in this category travel to join a family member already working in Europe, but then also themselves enter the labour market. The difference between migration of settlement and labour migration is therefore blurred, as well as that between forced and voluntary migration. The same phenomenon can be observed once again with regard to students, who enter a country of destination to study, but subsequently enter the labour force.

In the past, most migrants found themselves housed in slums, or in collective housing for workers (“foyers” in France), or named “Gastarbeiter” (Germany, Benelux), who were explicitly expected to work but not to remain for settlement. The closure of borders to labour migration in the mid-1970s led to an increase in settlement through family reunification. Whereas European migrants could come and go freely, borders were increasingly closed to non-EU nationals, and their perceived illegitimacy increased as unemployment grew in European countries.

In the early 1980s, following the rise in oil prices, Gulf countries began to have enough money to subsidise Muslim associations, building prayer rooms in migrants’ countries of origin, and in Europe influencing the landscape of migrant districts, where headscarves, libraries, halal butchers, and Muslim clothes were increasingly visible. At a time when the opposition between the West and the Communist Bloc had ceased to represent the greatest division in the global order, Muslims became the new enemies (Huntington, 1993).

Migration gradually came to be perceived and treated as a security issue. In Brussels, with the Treaty of Amsterdam of 1997, migration passed from being a socio-economic concern to being a question of justice and internal affairs. In EU Member States, migration was no longer the concern of ministries in charge of work and social issues, but rather ministries of the interior, or even of defence or justice (as in the Nordic countries). In the 1990s and 2000s, migration came to be seen as a military confrontation in the Mediterranean, to be addressed using the tools of the Schengen Information System (created in 2000) and Frontex (created in 2004). Other changes in attitudes towards migration can be observed in the change in the use of language, such as the shift from terms of “assimilation”, to “integration”, and then to questions of “living together”. Various models have been adopted across Europe, including forms of “multiculturalism” in the UK, Germany, and Benelux, and a debate in France between principles of social cohesion (as espoused by Jacques Chirac in 1995) or separatism (a term promoted by Emmanuel Macron in 2020). Southern European countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece) have not defined a clear philosophy, as they more recently became immigration countries, with the attendant questions of legalising irregular migrants and managing increasingly stratified labour markets.

In Germany, the use of the term “Leitkultur” (a supposedly shared culture of modern, essentially liberal-democratic values) implied that migrants did not possess such values from their own cultural background. Meanwhile anti-migrant movements were rising across Europe, centred on a number of themes and narratives: those of the supposed Islamisation of Europe (AfD in Germany), the demographic shift from (white) Europeans to non-Europeans (referred to in French as the “grand remplacement”), the perceived failures of integration or of “multikulti” (as declared by Angela Merkel), the need to defend national identities, and perceived threats to security and borders (the far right Lega party in Italy). Far right political parties draw most of their arguments from these themes. Another stage in the development of such anti-migrant sentiment was reached in 2015, with the so-called “refugee crisis”, when the claimed values of Europe (human rights, social solidarity, hospitality) came to be manifestly undermined by the sovereignism asserted by many nation states, and the refusal to welcome refugees in some European countries.

Since the 1980s, immigration policies have become politically symbolic, and have more often been orientated towards public opinion and the rise of the far right than towards effective migration management. In France, the National Front (now “Rassemblement National”, or National Rally) made the issue of immigration control into its main topic for political campaigning. Many laws and policy discussions, such as the recurring debate around the granting of citizenship based on either jus soli (based on place of birth) or jus sanguinis (based on ancestry), have been brought about by the far right. As for entry laws, despite the increasing securitisation of borders, these measures have not succeeded in their aims of reducing flows of irregular migration, encouraging return to countries of origin, or promoting resettlement, although these three targets are present in almost all recent immigration laws and international summits. Most of these policies were highly mediatised, with a focus on demonstrating that they took into account some of the demands of the far right, rather than asserting that they would have effective outcomes.

The role of some counterbalances and pressure groups, such as high courts of justice and civic associations, can also undermine the war against migrants waged by the governments of some immigration countries. Some associations, such as the RESF (Réseau Education sans Frontières) since 2007, have been very successful in fighting against repatriations of families with children at school, while anti-discrimination associations have managed to increase diversity in public institutions and politics at the European scale. Many high courts, such as the Conseil Constitutionnel and Conseil d’État in France (ruling on constitutional and administrative matters respectively), the European Court for Human Rights in Strasburg, and the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxemburg show how judges and EU institutions can challenge the power of nation states. While national governments attempt to reassure public opinion that they maintain sovereignty over their borders, in some respects decision are taken elsewhere, either in Brussels or in Luxemburg. The result of such a highly mediatised policy-making process, turned towards public opinion, is that decisions are also determined by short-term electoral decision-making. Thus, after a long period in which migration policies were led by the economic need to compensate for labour shortages, they came to be dominated by public opinion and security issues, which are rarely conducive to a rational approach to migration management.

Historically, Europe was a continent of intense emigration, sending millions of its natives all over the world through labour emigration, colonisation, trade, missions, wars, and cooperation. In the 1960s Europe became a land of immigration, but both perceptions and politics related to migration seem to lag behind statistical and demographic facts.

In Europe, cooperation on migration management led to the harmonisation of migration policies – notably the externalisation of European border control – through the Schengen visa system from 1985 and bilateral and multilateral agreements with countries of origin. This led in turn to a reduction of opportunities for entry and the strengthening of military forms of border control and closure. This focus on closure in a world on the move can appear paradoxical. Waging a war on migration has produced a wide range of adverse effects, such as the creation of new criminal actors (human smugglers and traffickers), new migration routes (the Balkan route and the southern route through Niger and Libya), and abuses of human rights (particularly in the so-called “Libyan Hell”).

In the wake of some terrorist murders committed by Islamic extremists, debates on sharing the burden of receiving refugees from Syria, Iraq, and the Horn of Africa have led to contradictory and confused claims about European borders. In particular, while refugees have sometimes been presented in a positive light as people to be saved, migrants have usually been viewed overall as people to be stopped, even though, in the new international context, refugees are a category of migrants.

Faced with the crisis of managing growing numbers of refugees, a gap appeared between, on the one hand, EU institutions, which insisted on principles of human rights (such as asylum and solidarity), and on the other hand, nation states, who focused their discourses and policies on the challenge that the new arrivals posed to the integrity of their national identities, notably in Eastern Europe. Central and Eastern European countries refused the proposal of the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker in 2015 to share the burden of resettlement. The member states of the Visegrad group (Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland) closed their national borders to newcomers, while in Germany Angela Merkel declared on September 2015 that Germany would welcome 800,000 refugees from Syria. Western European countries accepted the proposal by the European Commission to institute quotas for the resettlement of asylum seekers, but these countries did not in practice receive large numbers of refugees for resettlement.

2.6 The Italian Crisis as a Case Study

Southern Italy has received large numbers of migrants rescued from the sea since the early 1990s. It has now become the third immigration country in Europe, after Germany and the UK, whereas France ranks fifth in terms of the number of foreigners on its territory. Just after the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1991, the boats arriving in Puglia carried mainly Albanians. Ten years later, the arrivals were mostly from Africa, travelling via Libya and Tunisia. These included Sub-Saharans who had been smuggled across borders, and later some asylum seekers from the “Arab Springs” of 2011. Italy had previously concluded agreements with Libya for the repatriation of these migrants in exchange for the construction of infrastructure projects (such as a road from Egypt to Tunisia), but the political chaos that followed the fall of Gadhafi increased the numbers of human smugglers. Many Sub-Saharans arrived in Italy from Niger, via Libya. The most well-known episode from this period was the decision of the Italian Government of Enrico Letta, following the refusal of Frontex in October 2013 to lead a search and rescue operation after the wreckage of a boat with 400 people on board, to lead the operation “Mare Nostrum” to save victims lost at sea. 146,000 people were saved in 1 year from October 2013 to October 2014. Italy then entrusted this task to Triton, one of the operations of Frontex in the Mediterranean Sea. In spite of an undertaking to publicly manage the reception of migrants, which transferred many tasks to private NGOs and Catholic associations, such as Caritas in the south of the country, Italy had the feeling of being abandoned by Europe, owing to the indifference and selfishness of most other European countries.

After March 2016, the EU-Turkish agreement, which had mainly been concluded by Angela Merkel and individual EU Member States rather than by the EU, brought an end to the large numbers of arrivals from Syria through Greece, but this had the effect of further increasing arrivals in Europe through Italy. The Dublin 2 agreements on asylum (the “one-stop shop” system), according to which asylum seekers must register in the first European country in which they arrive, and then be examined as applicants in that country, increased the burden of arrivals in all southern European countries, and above all Italy, owing to its proximity to Tunisia and Libya, from which human smugglers operate sea crossings. A report of the Department of Human Rights of the United Nations in autumn 2017 focused attention on the “Libyan Hell” in particular, highlighting practices of slavery, human rights violations, prostitution, and extra-judicial imprisonment. The electoral success of the far right Lega party in May 2018, which allowed it to create a national government in coalition with another populist party, created a French-Italian crisis around the reception and rescuing of migrant boats. The episodes in which the Aquarius and other boats were prevented from landing on Mediterranean coasts in June 2018, together with the closure of the French-Italian border at Ventimiglia (near the French city of Nice) to newcomers from Africa arriving via Italy, revealed once again the lack of solidarity between European countries, both in terms of North-South and East-West relations, and the lack of trust of these countries towards EU proposals to relocate newcomers to all European countries. A break between Eastern and Western Europe continues to undermine European values of solidarity and human rights, and these values are being further challenged by the arguments of far right parties in all countries, including Hungary, Poland, and Austria.

2.6.1 III – 2015: The Challenge of Asylum for Europe

Europe had typically seen the arrival of between 200,000 and 400,000 asylum seekers per year before 2015, when this figure shot up to 1.2 million. However, the number of arrivals has decreased since 2015. We must remember that this crisis is not as new as many people suppose, since, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe received 500,000 asylum seekers every year between 1989 to 1993, mostly in Germany, which received three-quarters of all asylum seekers in Europe. In 1995, the crisis in the former Yugoslavia also led to large numbers of refugees, most of whom arrived in Germany.

Present flows of refugees are mainly coming from Syria (6.5 million Syrians have left their country since 2013, and 7 million are internal refugees within Syria), Iraq (4 million), the Horn of Africa (travelling via Libya), Afghanistan (4 million), and Kosovo. Turkey has received the largest proportion of these refugees, with 4.5 million on its territory. This situation has led to conflict between EU Member States and EU institutions as to the best way to respond to the influx of migrants.

2.7 Conflict Between EU Member States and EU Institutions

The first answer offered at the European level, through the voice of Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, was the proposal on May 2015 to share the burden of receiving refugees across the EU. During summer 2015, many central European countries closed their national borders to newcomers arriving along the Balkan route. Hungary was the first country to express its opposition to receiving new refugees, followed by the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland – all countries in which far right parties were prominent in national politics. On September 2015, Jean-Claude Juncker made a new appeal to EU Member States to each welcome 160,000 asylum seekers. Angela Merkel’s announcement on 7 September that Germany would receive 800,000 asylum seekers in 2015, closely followed by the widely shared photograph of the corpse of the three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi, who washed ashore near Bodrum after the wreckage of the boat taken by his parents, led Western European states to accept, with some reluctance, Juncker’s proposals. During 2015, according to UNHCR, Greece received the largest share of newcomers, who then tried to enter other EU Member States. Italy, who had received the largest numbers of arrivals before 2015, was also heavily involved, since the EU-Turkish agreements of March 2016 stopped most sea crossings between Turkey and Greece.

This agreement belongs to a long tradition of EU Member States bypassing the rules of their shared EU policies by means of bi- or multilateral agreements with non-European neighbour countries. The EU-Turkish agreement is thus the result of a number of negotiations between European nation states, led by Germany, and Turkey, rather than an EU treaty that would comply with EU norms. Libya was previously the most important contractor for European countries such as France and Italy, and played a role as a filter for Sub-Saharans wanting to reach Europe. President Gadhafi was paid with money, infrastructure projects, and recognition as a legitimate partner in return for his cooperation in the dirty job of containment and readmission. As Libya is now a land of human smugglers facilitating irregular migration, Turkey has instead become the co-contractor of choice for EU Member States. Through these agreements, Turkey came to be automatically considered as a safe country for asylum seekers. In return for its cooperation, it drove a hard bargain: €6 billion, the renewal of negotiations around Turkey’s application to join the EU, and the removal of the requirement for visas for Turkish people visiting Europe. In fact, Turkish citizens represent the largest population of non-Europeans in the EU (4.5 million), although there are fewer Turks travelling from Turkey to Europe than there are returning from Europe to Turkey. The legitimacy of President Erdoğan, who had been criticised for his authoritarian rule and religious governance, was partly restored in the EU through these agreements. His re-election as President of Turkey reassured European states that Turkey would continue to be able to receive 4 million refugees under his leadership, while Europe itself remained unable to find a clear and united solution.

2.8 Factors of Failure and Implications for EU Member States and Institutions

Since 1990, EU immigration and asylum policies have focused on a security-based approach, using the tools of dissuasion, repression, and confinement. The Schengen system of reinforcing control of Europe’s external borders led to thousands of people dying in the Mediterranean Sea between 2000 and 2020. Since 2015, 4000 people have died at sea every year. The main response to the closure of borders is the emergence of human smuggling, which provides large sums of money to smugglers, with limited possibilities for restricting those involved. Nonetheless, after every disaster at sea, the Frontex mechanism (established in 2004 as a shared police force at the EU’s external borders, and implemented from 2005) saw its funding increased, without questions as to its effectiveness. From €5 million in 2004, it budget has now reached €500 million. The Dublin agreements on asylum have been criticised but never abandoned: the Dublin I (1990) agreement tried to define a common EU asylum policy to combat “asylum shopping”, thus reducing individuals’ chances of getting refugee status through a harmonisation of policies between all EU Member States. Dublin II (2003), which was highly criticised but never cancelled, asserts that an asylum seeker who has entered an EU Member State must make a claim for asylum in that country (the “one-stop shop” system). In practice this system does not work, because asylum seekers usually have a precise idea of the country where they want to apply, and Greece is rarely their first choice. The European strategy of extending its war on irregular migration to the southern rim of the Mediterranean also runs into difficulties, owing to the sovereignty of countries of departure on the North African coast, as well as the difficulty of preventing clandestine departures from their coasts. Both return policies and dissuasion policies have shown their limited effectiveness, and yet have repeatedly been proposed anew.

However, the greatest failure is the crisis of solidarity between EU Member States. In the years before Dublin II, the approach proposed by most large countries of destination for asylum seekers – such as Germany and Austria in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall – was that of sharing the burden across the EU. The Dublin II regime effectively placed most of the burden on Southern European countries with a Mediterranean coast, and especially Italy and Greece. A divergence also appeared in 2015 between Eastern and Western European countries regarding EU proposals for resettlement: most Eastern European countries refused to receive newcomers and closed their national borders, on the grounds that large numbers of immigrants would undermine the integrity of their national identity and increase the risk of terrorist attacks. However, solidarity is one of the values of the EU, as defined in the EU Treaty of Lisbon, and is also one of the founding values of the EU, alongside democracy, the protection of human rights, liberalism, diversity, and the secularisation of the state. The challenges of immigration and refugee policy have given rise to a lack of trust between EU Member States, connected to the rise of nationalist ideologies all over Europe and the return of national borders and assertions of state sovereignty.

Other possible solutions were not debated, such as the possibility of implementing a 2001 European directive on temporary protection for newcomers who do not fit the criteria of refugees as defined by the Geneva Convention, or the creation of legal channels for immigration for employment. The continuing use of old solutions that have repeatedly proven their ineffectiveness, such as return policies and repatriation agreements (which formed part of the Valletta Euro-African summit of autumn 2015, and then the European summit of June 2018 in Brussels), are also part of the crisis, which is ultimately more a crisis of solidarity than of refugees themselves.

2.9 Civil Society and “Crimes of Solidarity”, Ethics Versus Control

Over the course of this long migration crisis, new civil society actors have emerged to defend the rights of migrants: NGOs, associations focused on migrants’ rights (PICUM at the EU level, Caritas, CIMADE, and GISTI in France), and human rights associations (Amnesty International, Ligue des droits de l’Homme). Some associations (Utopia 56, No Border in Calais) have been considered as activists, and their members have been interrogated intensively by the police. Some individuals have been prosecuted and found guilty of breaking national laws. In France, Cédric Herrou, a farmer in the south-east of France was prosecuted for providing support to irregular migrants whom he welcomed at his farm: these were Sub-Saharan Africans who had got lost in the mountains trying to cross the border between Italy and France. The 2018 film Free relates the true story of this journey. Other films have been produced on this subject, mostly highlighting the contradictions between the law and humane ethical principles: Terra ferma and Fuocoammare about Lampedusa, and L’escale about Greece. There are also many books on similar subjects. In southern Italy, the mayor of Riace, Domenico Lucani, was prohibited from staying in the town where he was the mayor because he provided jobs to irregular migrants in a cooperative. Some well-known mayors, such as Leoluca Orlando, mayor of Palermo (subsequently re-elected with 72% of the vote), refused to abide by the law requiring the closure of harbours, and continued to receive newcomers during the period when the far right party Lega was part of the national government in 2018. The situation was similar for Damien Carême, the ecologist mayor of Grande-Synthe, in the north of France, close to Calais and Dunkirk.

In recent years, the principal contradiction has no longer been that between economic liberalism and the control of borders, but rather that between solidarity and security. After Cédric Herrou was repeatedly prosecuted for his role in assisting irregular migrants attempting to enter France, the Conseil constitutionnel – the highest court in France – judged in summer 2018 that his actions were admissible on the basis that such actions of “fraternity” (one of the founding values of the French Republic, alongside freedom and equality) are protected by the Constitution. This judgement put an end to his prosecution.

2.10 Dilemmas Between Wisdom and Politics: Public Opinion and Decision-Making

On migration issues, the gap between knowledge and political decision-making continues. For the social sciences, the analysis of ongoing events is difficult, without the benefit of the distance that makes research possible. Yet it is precisely in times of crisis that scientific knowledge, and particularly policy-relevant data and analyses, are sought after. The overall trends of European migration policy in the past decades appear to be at odds with the main results of scientific knowledge gathered around migration issues in the last 30 years by researchers and experts. This includes not only findings from academic circles but also those from governmental and non-governmental organisations. The gap between knowledge on migration matters and the perceptions involved in policy making is part of a more general gap between science and politics. While this divergence is not new, it is particularly acute for the case of migration and refugee policies in the EU. This gap poses some serious questions. Why do EU Member States tend not to anticipate refugee crises (either now, or in the early 1990s when refugees fled the Caucasus region and the Balkans), and conversely, why do they anticipate crises that do not happen (for example, after the demise of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin wall)? Why do policy makers stick to decisions and policy options that have manifestly failed to achieve their explicit goals in the past?

Migration studies specialists have suggested that migration is a field where policy inefficiency is particularly striking, and have named this the “gap hypothesis”. Stephen Castles, among others, has also theorised the “failure” of migration policies and the discrepancy between the desired control of migration flows and the difficulties of absorbing migrants into the populations of developed countries. The theme of “migration policy failure” has yet again come to the fore, with recent migration, asylum, and humanitarian “crises” in the Mediterranean. Yet, for specialists in the field, the current “crisis” has mostly been interpreted as a continuation of long-term mechanisms and trends rather than as an abrupt change (Schmoll et al., 2015).

One can argue that migration policies fail because policy makers do not listen to the “wise” advice of researchers and experts, and fail to explore the various reasons for such failure (public opinion, short-term economic interests, institutional path dependency, etc.). We can also analyse and question the ways in which migration knowledge is produced and disseminated among policy circles. Since most governing institutions, and the EU in particular, claim to construct policy agendas on the basis of scientific evidence, we can explore the processes through which migration specialists (academics, experts, and activists) are involved in (or excluded from) policy making. The importance of expertise and science in European policy cycles is often highlighted in policy documents and roadmaps, such as in this passage from a white paper in 2001: “scientific and other experts play an increasingly significant role in preparing and monitoring decisions. From human and animal health to social legislation, the institutions rely on specialist expertise to anticipate and identify the nature of problems and uncertainties that the Union faces, to take decisions and to ensure risks can be explained clearly and simply to the public” (European Commission, 2001, p. 19). However, the decision-making process makes it difficult to diverge from the path dependency established by older frameworks of EU migration policies, including those which did not succeed in their goals, because the veto of one country can block any attempt at change.

At the global level, faced with the failure of most immigration policies, countries in the Global South are now part of the debate and are beginning to make their voice heard in World Social Forums, as well in the annual meetings of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) and the United Nations High Level Dialogue on Migration and Development (UN-HLD).

2.11 Conclusion

The current situation of migration and migration governance leaves a wide range of questions unresolved, including: the situation of the 13 million stateless people in the world, environmentally displaced persons without any status, and the unexpected consequences on migration flows of phenomena such as the fluctuating price of cotton, the development of coffee plantations in new countries such as Vietnam, extensive fishing in African waters by Chinese or Japanese vessels, and changes to volatile markets in raw materials. These problems and developments demonstrate the interdependency of migration in relation to other global concerns, yet migration policy continues to be dominated by assertions of sovereignty by nation states and the intense politicisation of the topic.

Migration is one of the most controversial topics in public policy, because it includes a large number of unspoken contradictions: between economic liberalism and security-based approaches to dissuading and restricting migration, between human rights and state controls, between economic and demographic needs and nationalist attempts to close borders, between ethics and sovereignty, and between mobility and development. In the current migration regime, mobility inevitably gives rise to the transgression of laws and borders. And in a world on the move, the nation state stands to lose the most, because the stability of borders, populations, identity, citizenship, and the rule of national laws are all challenged by transnational and liquid forms of movement (Wihtol de Wenden, 2017a, b).