Fortress Europe: The Border-Industrial-Complex
The management of international migration policies is characterized by great paradoxes that are connected with the fact that migration is mainly caused by great inequalities between the Global North and the Global South.
The first paradox is that the Western economy increasingly requires a labor force that Western states are not able to provide due to their aging population; at the same time, these countries have invested heavily in programs to detect, control and stop migrants from reaching their borders with the potential to fill the workforce essential for their economies.
A second paradox is what Fitzgerald calls “catch-22“. The liberalization of capital globally, along with subsequent globalization of the world, has coincided with an increase in state barriers against the movement of people from the Global South. It is notable that borders have become sites of "filtering," facilitating the entry of certain goods and people while obstructing others.
Receiving countries from the Global North typically abide by the principle of non-refoulement but deliberately and systematically shut down most legal pathways to safety. The principle of non-refoulement, enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, prohibits the expulsion or return of a person to a country where they would face threats to their life or freedom on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. According to Fitzgerald, the receiving countries seem to say “we will not kick you out if you come here. But we will not let you come here”. A major example of this approach is the shift of the EU migration policies since the beginning of the 2000s and the politicization of migration that has been increasingly perceived as a threat since 9/11. The EU has progressively shifted its policies towards a “securitization” and “externalization” agenda, transforming what is essentially a humanitarian issue in a matter of existential security for the state. The latest policy shift in this direction is the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, approved by the European Parliament in April 2024. This package of reforms expanded the criminalization and digital surveillance of migrants. With the New Pact, personal data of individuals will be collected in large volumes and shared among police forces across the European Union. Additionally, biometric identification systems will be employed to monitor people's movements and enhance the policing of undocumented migrants. Over 50 NGOs, including Amnesty international, warned that the Pact “will normalise the arbitrary use of immigration detention, including for children and families, increase racial profiling, use ‘crisis’ procedures to enable pushbacks, and return individuals to so called ‘safe third countries’ where they are at risk of violence, torture, and arbitrary imprisonment”.
The increasing restrictions on migration imposed by the EU as part of the securitization agenda led to a process that Anna Triandafyllidou describes as “the vicious circle of migration”. In fact, the increase in restrictions generates the incidence of irregular migration, forcing migrants to face higher risks and costs. This system brings them in the arms of smugglers, fueling an illegal circle that the initial increase in restrictions was designed to defeat. Refugees take illegal routes because, with the imposition of increasing restrictions to legal migration and asylum, there is no other realistic way to reach the Global North apart from reaching its territory first and then ask for asylum. The externalization of EU border control, that shifts border controls in neighboring countries through the funding of operations that prevent refugees from moving towards the Union, further complicates this journey, making it life threatening in most of the cases.
The tortuous bureaucratic process to obtain asylum in EU border countries undermines the international right of non-refoulement. The screening procedures are often summary and inadequate and the migrants often have to wait for a long time for an answer to their asylum request. If the answer is negative, also due to the inefficiency of the system, the migrant’s status in the arriving country becomes administratively illegal. In these cases the migrants are often given a paper that declares their illegal status and that invites them to leave the country. It is not clear with what means that should happen. During the period in which they are considered “illegal” by the state, if they get stopped by the police, they are transferred to detention centers. The Italian detention centres are called CPRs (Centri Permanenza Rimpatrio). After spending some time in these detention centers, they will be either released or deported to the country that is identified as their country of origin. The conditions of these centers are critical and inhumane as demonstrated by the recent perquisition and subsequent seizure of CPR di Via Corelli, in Milan.
Externalization of the EU migration policies takes place on various levels. First, there is externalization of asylum towards peripheral Member States like Italy and Greece based on the Dublin II Regulation of 200314 and the ‘first safe country’ principle, stating that asylum seekers should submit their asylum claims at the first safe country they reach, notably the first EU country they enter (Triandafyllidou and Dimitriadi).
A second level of externalization is towards third neighboring countries through European initiatives like the Global Approach to Migration and Mobility (GAMM, European Commission 2011) and the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), but also national initiatives like the Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between the Italian Republic and Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya signed in August 2008. In November 2023, the Italian government also finalized a Memorandum of Understanding with the Albanian authorities, establishing extraterritorial migration and asylum processes, including assigning to Albania the management of detention centers for migrants.
The last level of externalization is towards delegation of control operations to Home Affairs agencies like Frontex and the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA). A considerable body of research suggests that the contracting-out governance approach revolves around the principal-agent relation, problematizing the fact that private organizations (agents) are bounded rational and opportunist in their actions to pursue self-interest and maximize profit instead of the principal’s interest.
These levels of externalization that introduce new actors in the multi-level governance of migration policies, raise questions in terms of their application and of the violation of international law, as well as on the accountability channels between the various levels and levels of responsibility of the political institutions. By presenting externalization through the façade of ‘saving’ human lives, the blame for deaths is shifted to the migrants themselves, who continue to attempt to bypass the strict border controls and Frontex (Triandafyllidou and Dimitriadi, p.615) . Guiraudon and Lahav (2000) have noted how states sought to bypass human rights and judicial checks and balances by shifting migration controls “upwards, […] downward […] and outward” (Guiraudon and Lahav 2000, p.164).
The UN and international policy platforms have gradually moved towards so-called public–private partnerships and the spreading of economic neoliberalism (Bexell & Moerth 2010). The influential International Organization of Migration has been assessed as akin to a private enterprise (Geiger & Pécoud 2010) and it highlights the ‘potential for an impactful and effective participation of business in migration policy generally and the GCM specifically’ (IOM, 2017). The positions of migrant-receiving states are progressively shaped by neoliberalism’s focus on the net gains from migration in the absence of concerns for distributional effects or issues of equity (Schierup et al. 2015). As Kamat (2004) argues, international institutions on the one hand hail civil society representation and on the other neglect to distinguish between ‘people-oriented’ and corporate NGOs: ‘As a result, business and industry associations are now equally a part of “NGO representation” in international policy forums, making it impossible for progressive NGOs to build a common alliance against corporate interests’ (p.166).
The following articles will give a critical perspective on the shifting of international migration policies towards a public-private partnership, increasingly conflating civil society with the private sector, leaving migrant rights organizations increasingly squeezed into a corner while non-state profit-oriented actors increasingly shape global governing processes and outcomes. (Hennebry and Piper, 2021).
It is essential to look at the negotiating power that private actors are obtaining in shaping international migration policies, raising questions on democratic accountability and institutional responsibility towards international law. The outcomes of these approaches have been repeatedly criticized by human rights organizations but the result seems to be that instead of democratically increasing the space for the civil society and people-oriented NGOs, the little space reserved to the civil society is now being increasingly reserved to profit-oriented organizations whose aims are in line with neoliberal stances and not always conceivable with calls for equality and human rights.