The European Union and the Securitization of Migration

Abstract

This article deals with the question of how migration has developed into a security issue in western Europe and how the European integration process is implicated in it. Since the 1980s, the political construction of migration increasingly referred to the destabilizing effects of migration on domestic integration and to the dangers for public order it implied. The spillover of the internal market into a European internal security question mirrors these domestic developments at the European level. The Third Pillar on Justice and Home Affairs, the Schengen Agreements, and the Dublin Convention most visibly indicate that the European integration process is implicated in the development of a restrictive migration policy and the social construction of migration into a security question. However, the political process of connecting migration to criminal and terrorist abuses of the internal market does not take place in isolation. It is related to a wider politicization in which immigrants and asylum-seekers are portrayed as a challenge to the protection of national identity and welfare provisions. Moreover, supporting the political construction of migration as a security issue impinges on and is embedded in the politics of belonging in western Europe. It is an integral part of the wider technocratic and political process in which professional agencies -such as the police and customs -and political agents -such as social * My thanks to the anonymous reviewers and John Peterson for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, and to Amy Crawshaw for correcting spelling and grammar. 752

Asylum policy: the EU’s ‘crises’ and the looming policy regime failure

“…Individuals coming in search of protection were often suspected of being 'bogus' asylum seekers who sought to profit from national welfare systems. Migration and asylum have increasingly been converted into a law-and-order question and have become 'securitized' (Guild 2006;Huysmans 2000).…”

The Political Dynamics of Human Mobility: Migration out of, as and into Violence

“…Most studies focus on single case studies relating to immigration to Europe or guerrilla fighters roaming from one conflict to the next, while some critically engage with the securitization of (im)migration to the EU (Baldwin, 2013(Baldwin, , 2014Baldwin, Methmann and Rothe, 2014;Castles et al, 2014;Huysmans, 2000). However, apart from these few exceptions, there is little reflection on the concepts of security which form the basis of common assumptions about the relationship between human mobility and violence.…”

Schengen area shaken: the impact of immigration-related threat perceptions on the European security community

“…An example is the framing of legal and illegal migrants 5 as an existential threat to the host society justifying restrictive migration policies and the militarization of immigration-politics. Migration is generally socially constructed as a security threat to the whole socioeconomic and political spectrum: migrants are usually constructed as destabilizing internal security by correlating crime/terror with foreigners, as challenging both welfare provision and economic growth because they cheat the system, and by threatening majority identities and values at state and regional levels (Huysmans 2000). 6 While acknowledging that both the elite and public levels (Huysmans 2006, 46;Bigo 2009, 586) fuel top-down and bottom-up securitization processes, we embrace the classical securitization theories' emphasis on the political leader's role in determining and defining threats.…”