The European Union’s migrant ‘emergency’ is entirely of its own making

Ruben Andersson

Amid all the panic over the EU’s mounting “migrant crisis”, let’s remember that we have been here before: in fact, a near-perpetual emergency has gathered force ever since the EU started closing its common external borders in the 1990s. Since that time, migration has come to be colonised by interior ministries and security forces as their field of action – with predictable results.

Patrol boats, military planes and drones now track people’s movements at sea; coastguards in biohazard suits lead them ashore; then internment awaits in vast camps guarded by men with guns. Overland migration has come to be framed as an emergency in need of a security response; witness this summer’s launch of an EU military mission targeting smugglers’ boats or the razor wire, tear-gas rounds and patrols keeping people back from Calais to the Balkan borderlands.

Europe’s security response has been disastrous and urgently needs a rethink. Instead of “controlling” migration, our policing efforts over the past two decades have simply helped make “emergency” the default setting.

Consider Calais. Millions have been spent on more border security, yet the result has been only more desperation and riskier entry attempts among the Afghans, Syrians or Eritreans there. Or consider the Spanish-Moroccan and Greek-Turkish borders, where tough cross-border policing and tall fences have shifted routes towards riskier maritime crossings. Or look at Libya, where the $200m-a-year “Friendship Treaty” with Italy, signed in 2009, smoothed the way for pushbacks, detentions and expulsions, resulting in rerouted flows towards Greece.

All the while, Europe-sponsored crackdowns have made life increasingly impossible for sub-Saharan foreigners in north Africa, giving smugglers a stronger hold on their client base.

In short, our “emergency” response has become a self-fulfilling prophecy as arrivals grow, fatalities rise and the smuggling business gets stronger. If border controls were scrutinised in the same way as other publicly funded areas, this abysmal failure would be triggering serious political debate. But instead, governments are going further, with fences, patrols and even military vessels, supposedly deployed to destroy the smugglers’ boats pre-emptively, while refusing any sharing of responsibility over refugees or any common approach to migration. Einstein’s definition of madness comes to mind: Europe is doing the same thing over and over, each time hoping for a different result.

Yet denouncing the emergency response as counterproductive and quite mad is rather easy. In fact, we also need to see what function it serves if we want to stand any chance of breaking the vicious cycle at the borders.

To politicians, the emergency response is useful – even as it reproduces the problem it is supposedly meant to combat

The “emergency” label mobilises resources and political support, as Silvio Berlusconi knew when he kept Tunisians indefinitely stranded on Lampedusa in 2011 to force Brussels to act, and as Macedonia surely knows today. It allows defence contractors, outsourcing companies and security forces to find willing buyers for their security-based “solutions”, bringing new surveillance systems, patrol vessels, co-ordination centres and detention facilities to the market with little scrutiny or due diligence.

As the next “emergency” hits, no one will ask if enough is enough; instead, more money will be earmarked for securing the borders, defying austerity while opening up wormholes for the misappropriation of funds, as investigations into the mafia’s involvement in Italy’s mass reception regime indicate. To politicians and those with a stake in the system, the emergency response is useful, even as it reproduces the problem it is supposedly meant to combat.

The emergency is not inevitable: we could treat asylum and labour mobility as questions of justice or opportunity, as some European states did in the postwar era. The choice is political. We can keep militarising the borders or bank on mobility. We can opt for ferries, visas and aeroplane tickets instead of sinking rubber boats, squalid detention centres and makeshift camps.

Yet we first need to recognise that powerful interests are stacked against such a move. Indeed, confronting these interests must be at the top of the agenda to have a chance of ending Europe’s self-perpetuating migration emergency. /Guardian