This dissertation examines how migration has become securitized in what I term the field of EUropean external(ized) border control and how this securitization has become increasingly normalized. It does so by focusing on the role of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency’s (Frontex) risk analysis reports in constructing migration as a security threat. Although framed as an apolitical and objective overview of the situation at the external(ized) border, I conceptualize these reports as constituting a particular form of knowledge with securitized ontological and epistemological assumptions, which preclude alternative framings of irregularized migration. By drawing on critical discourse analysis, I interrogate how this border knowledge securitizes migration in both banal and explicit ways, normalizes crises, and portrays border control as humanitarian. Interviews with civil society actors, border guards, Frontex, and European Commission officials were conducted to analyze how they resist or reproduce this securitization, which is taken as indicative of its normalization. The dissertation aims to question the taken-for-grantedness of treating unwanted migration as a security issue in this field and draws attention to its harmful effects for refugees and migrants who try to cross increasingly inaccessible borders.