In recent years, Europe has seen its largest influx of migrants and refugees in decades, with 1.9 million arrivals to the continent between 2014 and 2017. Peak arrivals in 2015, and sustained flows since then, have found the European Union and its 28 member states unable to face what has been called the “European migration crisis.” Part of their response has focused on cooperation with third countries of transit or origin, by leveraging development, humanitarian, and foreign policy tools to try and reduce migrant flows to Europe, including through many funding and budgetary decisions. This report attempts to quantify, through budgetary analysis, what shifts occurred in the external dimension of Europe’s migration policy following the crisis, and in three member states (Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands). These short-term shifts, representing policy priorities, carry long-term consequences for the European Union’s role as a foreign policy and soft power actor.

Since the peak of Europe's so-called 2015 'migration crisis', the dominant governmental response has been to turn to deterrent border security across the Mediterranean and construct border walls throughout the EU. During the same timeframe, EU citizens are widely represented - by politicians, by media sources, and by opinion polls - as fearing a loss of control over national and EU borders. Despite the intensification of EU border security with visibly violent effects, EU citizens are portrayed as 'threatened majorities'. These dynamics beg the question: Why is it that tougher deterrent border security and walling appear to have heightened rather than diminished border anxieties among EU citizens? While the populist mantra of 'taking back control' purports to speak on behalf of EU citizens, little is known about how diverse EU citizens conceptualize, understand, and talk about the so-called 'crisis'. Yet, if social and cultural meanings of 'migration' and 'border security' are constructed intersubjectively and contested politically (Weldes et al. 1999), then EU citizens —as well as governmental elites and people on the move— are significant in shaping dominant framings of and responses to the 'crisis'. This book argues that, in order to address the overarching puzzle, a conceptual and methodological shift is required in the way that border security is understood: a new approach is urgently required that complements 'top-down' analyses of elite governmental practices with 'bottom-up' vernacular studies of how those practices are both reproduced and contested in everyday life.

The European Union (EU) Commission champions a 'migrant-centred' approach to border security and 'irregular' migration management: it claims not only to observe human rights, but also to use surveillance to enhance the humanitarian protection of 'endangered' lives on land and at sea. Yet research presented by Non-Governmental Organizations and 'irregular' migrants' own testimonies reveal systemic border violence, dehumanization in spaces of detention, and exposure to death via abandonment in hostile environments. This book turns to conceptual resources found in biopolitical theory in order to move diagnoses of Europe's border crisis beyond that of a 'gap' between the policy 'rhetoric' of humanitarianism and the 'reality' of 'irregular' migrants' embodied experiences. It argues that both 'positive' and 'negative' dimensions of EU border security are symptomatic of tensions within biopolitical techniques of government and what Roberto Esposito refers to as the paradigm of immunization. While bordering practices are designed to play a defensive role they contain the potential for excessive and often lethal security mechanisms that end up threatening the very values and lives they purport to protect. Each chapter draws on a different biopolitical key to identify and interrogate diverse technologies of power at a range of border sites. Must border security always result in dehumanization and death? Are humanitarian discourses sufficient for critiquing contemporary forms of border violence? Is a more affirmative approach to border politics possible? 'Europe's border crisis' addresses these pressing questions and advances new research agendas for critical border and migration studies beyond existing debates about 'control' versus 'escape'.

“Harsha Walia has played a central role in building some of North America’s most innovative, diverse, and effective new movements. That this brilliant organizer and theorist has found time to share her wisdom in this book is a tremendous gift to us all.”—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine Undoing Border Imperialism combines academic discourse, lived experiences of displacement, and movement-based practices into an exciting new book. By reformulating immigrant rights movements within a transnational analysis of capitalism, labor exploitation, settler colonialism, state building, and racialized empire, it provides the alternative conceptual frameworks of border imperialism and decolonization. Drawing on the author’s experiences in No One Is Illegal, this work offers relevant insights for all social movement organizers on effective strategies to overcome the barriers and borders within movements in order to cultivate fierce, loving, and sustainable communities of resistance striving toward liberation. The author grounds the book in collective vision, with short contributions from over twenty organizers and writers from across North America. Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist, writer, and popular educator rooted in emancipatory movements and communities for over a decade. Praise for Undoing Border Imperialism: “Border imperialism is an apt conceptualization for capturing the politics of massive displacement due to capitalist neoglobalization. Within the wealthy countries, Canada’s No One Is Illegal is one of the most effective organizations of migrants and allies. Walia is an outstanding organizer who has done a lot of thinking and can write—not a common combination. Besides being brilliantly conceived and presented, this book is the first extended work on immigration that refuses to make First Nations sovereignty invisible.”—Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, author of Indians of the Americas and Blood on the Border “Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism demonstrates that geography has certainly not ended, and nor has the urge for people to stretch out our arms across borders to create our communities. One of the most rewarding things about this book is its capaciousness—astute insights that emerge out of careful organizing linked to the voices of a generation of strugglers, trying to find their own analysis to build their own movements to make this world our own. This is both a manual and a memoir, a guide to the world and a guide to the organizer's heart.”—Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World “This book belongs in every wannabe revolutionary’s war backpack. I addictively jumped all over its contents: a radical mixtape of ancestral wisdoms to present-day grounded organizers theorizing about their own experiences. A must for me is Walia’s decision to infuse this volume’s fight against border imperialism, white supremacy, and empire with the vulnerability of her own personal narrative. This book is a breath of fresh air and offers an urgently needed movement-based praxis. Undoing Border Imperialism is too hot to be sitting on bookshelves; it will help make the revolution.”—Ashanti Alston, Black Panther elder and former political prisoner

Immigrants and minorities in Europe and America have responded in diverse ways to security legislation introduced since 9/11 that targets them, labeling them as threats. This book identifies how different groups have responded and explains why, synthesizing findings in the fields of securitization, migrant integration, and migrant mobilization.

This open access book investigates the complexity and the modalities of securitization of migration and border control at the EU level. It discusses and compares how different EU institutions and agencies have been deploying different logics of security, e.g. humanitarianism or management of risk, while framing increased migratory flows and so called migration crisis as a security problem. The book argues that the (re)development of EU migration and border control policies in response to increased migratory flows of 2015 have revealed an increasingly tangled nature of securitization of migration in the EU. This is reflected in the intertwining of security logics where migrants and human mobility tend to be securitized through different, sometimes multiple, interpretative lenses at different stages of policy framing. From a theoretical point of view, the book develops a fresh analytical perspective that further contributes to burgeoning discussion on securitization theory. By bridging the literature on policy framing and securitization it makes a significant contribution to the debates on both securitization and migration. As such this book is of great interest to students, academics, policy makers and all those working in the fields of EU politics, migration, security, and international relations.

In recent years the borders of Europe have been perceived as being besieged by a staggering refugee and migration crisis. The contributors to The Borders of "Europe" see this crisis less as an incursion into Europe by external conflicts than as the result of migrants exercising their freedom of movement. Addressing the new technologies and technical forms European states use to curb, control, and constrain what contributors to the volume call the autonomy of migration, this book shows how the continent's amorphous borders present a premier site for the enactment and disputation of the very idea of Europe. They also outline how from Istanbul to London, Sweden to Mali, and Tunisia to Latvia, migrants are finding ways to subvert visa policies and asylum procedures while negotiating increasingly militarized and surveilled borders. Situating the migration crisis within a global frame and attending to migrant and refugee supporters as well as those who stoke nativist fears, this timely volume demonstrates how the enforcement of Europe’s borders is an important element of the worldwide regulation of human mobility. Contributors. Ruben Andersson, Nicholas De Genova, Dace Dzenovska, Evelina Gambino, Glenda Garelli, Charles Heller, Clara Lecadet, Souad Osseiran, Lorenzo Pezzani, Fiorenza Picozza, Stephan Scheel, Maurice Stierl, Laia Soto Bermant, Martina Tazzioli