The Eternal Scapegoat : Europe and its Migration Policies

I/ The externalization of borders : Between cruelty and frivolity

On October 8, 2017, Josep Borrell, then Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain, said during a speech against Catalan nationalism: “Borders are the scars that History has left engraved on the skin of the Earth”. It seems that, for Europeans, this idea is more than clear, insofar as, after decades, or rather centuries, of confrontation around the borders of Empires and then of Nation States, we had come to a “status quo” carried by Schengen, which abolished the internal borders of the space and tended little by little to eliminate them with the rest of the Countries which would like to join it. Today we are faced with a Europe whose historical movement tends to destroy internal borders, but, unfortunately, also to strengthen them against the rest of the world.

The reactionary wave in which we find ourselves since the crisis of 2008, some would even say before, with the advent of the “conservative revolution” since the 1980s, has found its perfect alibi to continue to move forward, the migrants, with a measure very transferable during a political speech and materially realizable in the head of that perceives the message: a wall at the borders. This was one of Donald Trump’s most powerful campaign messages of 2016 and recently 12 EU countries asked for it to contain borders in the East. In Spain, a wall in Melilla, facing Morocco, has been operating since 1971, failing to contain the waves of people who want to cross it, sometimes leading to massacres with dozens of deaths.

All of this enters a very particular logic towards which the reactionary ideological system tends: it is a question of fanning the hatred of the penultimate on the social ladder against the last, of the unemployed worker against the migrant who tries to return to his country, while turning a blind eye to the real tragedy that is happening. The most paradigmatic example of this is the idea that countries like England or Denmark have recently had of externalizing their borders to Rwanda, sending there their nationals entitled to asylum or illegal migrants who cannot be returned to their country of origin. According to British Minister Suella Braverman, this would be a question of the deportation of people of all origins to Rwanda, a way for the United Kingdom to “control its border”, in a rather notable exercise in fantasy, the Kingdom United being an island which only has a land border with Ireland and where most migrants come by plane. The consideration of the migrant, not as an individual who comes to make a living in a different country but as a formless mass who is the enemy of society allows this kind of action. If we look at the arguments of the Danish or British leaders who propose it, it is a matter of “control”, of a “mass”, of “boats”, of “crimes”, but never concretely of people.

Recently, this project was considered illegal by a Court of Appeal in the United Kingdom. By reading this judgment, we realize that it is by restoring the migrant’s human condition that the border as a political object, as an ideological fetish, ceases to have meaning. The judgment says that there is “a real risk that persons sent to Rwanda will suffer persecution or other inhuman treatment even when they have a good reason to seek asylum”.This is about the effort to be made: waging a cultural battle which rehumanizes the migrant, which prevents him from being treated as a statistic or a mass which could be stopped by a simple concrete barrier but as a real actor in the History, his own and that of his people in relation to the different host countries.

II/ The worrying humanitarian record of European migration policies

The European Union’s concern to provide itself with a coherent legislative direction in the management of ‘external migratory flows’ has existed since some decades: the first ratification of the Dublin Convention dates from 1990 – the aim of which, with its many amendments in the years that followed, was to organize asylum applications in the countries of entry – and therefore goes back before the Union reached its current political conformation. However, it is at least since 2013 that the migration issue has emerged as a real political emergency: since the first of the countless, gigantic shipwrecks that bloodied the Mediterranean Sea in October 2013, off the Italian island of Lampedusa, where between 370 and 500 people died trying to reach the shores of the Old Continent. Since then, the problem has reached a level not previously envisaged. According to the United Nations agency IOM (International Organisation for Migration), the total number of victims on the migratory routes to Europe will be at least 30,000 between 2014 and 2021 ; and in these months we are facing a new crisis at Europe’s southern border, where the death toll has already reached several hundred since the summer of 2022.

In this way, the dehumanization of migrants also involves the transformation of the lives, individual lives of adults and minors fleeing their countries, into numbers that appear on the front pages of the newspapers and in the reports of competent institutions, such as Frontex (the European agency responsible for “securing the external borders”) and the IOM. These same institutions, these same policies deployed by Europe and its politicians, are directly responsible for this carnage which never ceases (and which also and principally involves the externalization of borders, an approach whose human cost almost never reaches public opinions) in an assumed cynicism which reveals, once again, the true face of “Fortress Europe”, the self-proclaimed bastion of Human Rights and democracy.

Europe’s response to the peak of the migratory crisis in 2015, which was due to the war in Syria among other factors, was effectively to externalize the borders: to shift responsibility to non-European countries, the intermediaries on the migratory routes. As regards the Mediterranean, the continent’s ‘southern border’, the EU has identified three main routes: the western Mediterranean, with migrants crossing Morocco to reach Spain; the central Mediterranean, with flows of exiles passing through Libya to reach Malta and Italy; and the eastern Mediterranean, with arrivals in Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria via Turkey. In all three cases, the EU’s policy has been, and still is, to limit the number of landings by “collaborating” with these transit countries: in concrete terms, by offering them generous funding so that they can prevent migrants from arriving in Europe, no matter how. In particular, this translates into systematic violence against migrants: at the borders of Ceuta and Melilla, the two Spanish enclaves in Morocco, attempts to cross are violently repressed by the local authorities, as in Libya, where European money is used to imprison and torture exiles in fields; and in Turkey, where their treatment is not very different.

However, arrivals, which had partially declined since the 2015 crisis, continued and continue to do so today (at the same rate as the crisis 8 years ago). The reception operations that had worked were those managed by the national navies of the Member States, but they were very costly, such as the Italian government’s “mare nostrum” operation in 2013. Since 2014, Frontex has been coordinating the local coastguards, often accused of systematically and violently pushing back migrants’ improvised boats, sometimes causing them to sink, as the NGO Sea-Watch denounced in a report entitled “Frontex’s crimes in the central Mediterranean”. The tragedy of Europe’s humanitarian management of migration also continues in domestic policy, in reception and asylum policies, in particular by using administrative detention centers, locations predisposed to the expulsion of undocumented migrants, where human rights are systematically violated.

In order to avoid difficulties with public opinion and, perhaps, because of the false idea that mass immigration would require an unsustainable economic and social effort, the EU is directly responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

III/ An unjustifiable policy from an economic point of view

Let us stop for a moment to think about the matter in humanistic and idealistic terms. Let us think, for a moment, as someone who has been imbued with a mercantilist logic in relation to migration would think, as someone who would think of migration, not as a phenomenon of people, not even as a phenomenon of masses, but as a phenomenon of numbers. And it is by thinking in this way that we realize that, even from a strictly economic point of view, even according to the most basic laws of the market, a policy that tries at all costs to contain arrivals or exclude newcomers is untenable. Whether it is the externalization of borders in Rwanda or the contention policy conducted with countries like Turkey, Belarus, or Morocco, it remains something that does not stand up economically speaking.

Thus, returning to the subject of the externalization of the British border in Rwanda, the British government itself published an economic roadmap on the whole project, considered one of its five government priorities by Rishi Sunak. And it is by looking in depth at the costs established for each migrant that we understand that it is not a question here of containing migration for “the economic and social well-being” of the country but indeed to create a goat ideological emissary of all the mismanagement of the government, which we see now exacerbated but which has been developing for decades. The deportation of each person would cost around 169,000 pounds, or 197,000 euros, with 105,000 pounds going directly to Rwanda for the “service provided”, 22,000 for transport costs, and 18,000 for all the bureaucratic procedures that it takes to kick the person out. If we multiply that by the 45,000 people who have arrived in England this year and who are counted, we arrive at a final cost of 7.605 billion pounds sterling, or, to give an idea, about 10 % of the UK education budget. This measure is only a drain from a numerical point of view and, even if it were practicable, it would prevent other public services from developing and cannot be maintained in the long term for reasons of pure reasonableness.

On the other hand, if we look at the common European policy and the efforts that have been made to contain migration at the borders, we find ourselves faced with a similar phenomenon. To give just one example, in the agreement signed with Turkey in March 2016, where Turkey committed itself to keeping all the migrants who wanted to go to Greece, there is an initial budget of around 6 billion euros, which recently increased to 10 billion euros with an addition of capital for the period 2021-2023. It is true that, since the agreement, the pressure at the borders has decreased, but at what cost? Do we really have to spend tens of millions of euros to contain the arrival of people who only seek to live with dignity and who have been deprived of any possibility of a dignified life in their country of origin? Do we think this is a smart expense that could not be used for true integration?

IV/ Reality and ideology :

Even in a cynical assessment of costs and benefits, reception and regularization are clearly more
advantageous than avoiding rescues at all costs, or barricading ourselves by building walls within our own borders.

And the facts, which run counter to the rhetoric and propaganda, bear this out. The Italian government of Giorgia Meloni, which won the political elections in September 2022 by deploying the classic anti-immigration propaganda of the ultra-right, repeatedly speaking, she and her ministers, of the “ethnic replacement of the Italian race”, has promulgated a “fluxes decree” that envisages an unprecedented number of foreign workers entering the country: 500,000 in three years; and even goes so far as to call for the intervention of NGOs to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean, criminalized just in January when a major shipwreck occurred off the coast of Calabria. Rhetoric, propaganda, and xenophobic ravings are no match for the facts.

Moreover, this political choice responds to the specific demands of the business sector: to lower the cost of labor. This is all the more true in a country like Italy, where much of the work is irregular, where there is no minimum wage, and working conditions are always borderline legal and dehumanizing.

So, if there are economic advantages in spending on welcoming policies compared to externalization, we must avoid at all costs creating competition between an “industrial reserve army” ready to be exploited and workers who see their social benefits eroded by desperate competition. While wage insecurity continues to grow, migrants find themselves in conditions (particularly in the agricultural sector) that border on slavery. The direct consequence of this situation, which is highly profitable for employers, is an upsurge in racial hatred, which feeds the vicious circle of nationalism and, ultimately, leads to a general decline in wages and living conditions for all workers. While wage insecurity continues to grow, migrants find themselves in conditions (particularly in the agricultural sector) that border on slavery. The direct consequence of this situation, which is highly profitable for employers, is an upsurge in racial hatred, which feeds the vicious circle of nationalism and, ultimately, leads to a general decline in wages and living conditions for all workers.

Marcos Bartolomé Terreros and Ismaele Calaciura Errante

Bibliography :

Marcos Bartolomé Terreros

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Marcos Bartolomé Terreros is a spaniard, born in 2003. He studies the double degree in Spanish and French Law at the Complutense University of Madrid and the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is interested in politics, literature and cinema.

Ismaele Calaciura Errante

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Ismaele Calaciura Errante was born in Rome in 2003. He is a double degree student in Philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne and in Modern Literature at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. He participates in the French and Italian social and student movements.