Crisis of Schengen? The effect of two ‘migrant crises’ (2011 and 2015) on the free movement of people at an internal Schengen border

Abstract

The reintroduction of border checks as a chain of reactions during the 2015 "migrant crisis" was interpreted as the dislocation of the Schengen area, and as a "Schengen crisis". Free movement, understood as a complete removal of border checks at internal borders of the Schengen area, would be at risk. However, very few studies have examined the implementation of free movement, and consequently no work has been done on the consequences of such crises on the activities of streetlevel border guards. This article investigates the activities of the French border police at the France-Italy border in an open border setting in 2008 and 2009, and at two moments of crisis and border closing in 2011 and 2015-2016. By adopting a bottom-up approach toward EU policy implementation, this article shows that regardless of government's attempt at spectacularising the checks at the internal border, the extent to which the border is either "closed" or "open" relies on the member states' administrations. At the bottom of the chain of command, street-level bureaucrats are tasked with managing the inherent ambiguities of free movement as defined in the Schengen convention, concentrating the checks on third-country nationals and leaving the vast majorities of border crossings unaffected.

The Schengen Crisis and the End of the “Myth” of Europe Without Borders

“…Then, ironically, by spring 2016, the initial "welcoming countries", i.e. Germany, Austria and Sweden were also revising their open border policies (Colombeau, 2019(Colombeau, , 2258(Colombeau, -2274. Austria was the first country to impose a daily quota on asylum claims in order to limit the flux of migrants travelling through the country.…”

The European Union Current Asylum Policy: Selected Problems in the Shadow of COVID-19

“…Almost all Schengen States have explicitly or implicitly invoked the COVID-19 epidemic threat (only Sweden and Norway have generally invoked the terrorist threat). With regard to data on immigration flows into the European Union [22] in the COVID-19 emergency, the Mediterranean remains the dominant route [3]. Between January and April 2020, 11,211 persons came to the EU illegally via the Eastern Mediterranean Route (Turkey sea route), with the highest number of arrivals from Afghanistan (3250 people), Syria (2446 people), Turkey (940 people), Somalia (538 people) and Pakistan (446 people).…”

“…The aims of the publication are: (1) to present solutions related to the relocation of refugees, which were supposed to be the main way of solving the asylum crisis and to assess the effectiveness of this mechanism, as well as to identify other solutions adopted in this respect; (2) to present temporary restrictions on border traffic justified by the COVID-19 pandemic and their impact on international personal traffic; (3) to present the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on anti-immigration sentiment and the situation of migrants who are already on the European Union territory.…”

Deportation, smart borders and mobile citizens: using digital methods and traditional police activities to deport EU citizens

“…It also makes recommendations for how the technologies should be regulated, both at the national and international level (Koops 2006). Specifically, scholarly debate on the topic of digital technologies engages in border studies and global policing literature by emphasizing the role of technologies in managing irregular migration (Andersson 2016;Casella-Colombeau 2019). On the one hand, despite the development of digital and biometric tools for controlling borders and the movement of people from and to Europe (Sontowski 2018), nation-states preserve competing political narratives on assimilation, harmonization and compliance with international norms on border security (Eule et al 2017;Slominski and Trauner 2018).…”