Securing borders, saving migrants: the EU's security dilemma in the twenty-first century

This chapter makes the argument that while the European Union has failed to explicitly refer to irregular immigration as a challenge to its security in official documents, it has largely securitized its migration policy both through discourses and practices. The end result of this mismatch has been a disconnect between the governance of migration and the EU’s overall security strategy, something which is clearly observable today. It is not by chance that the EU’s new global strategic review (The European Union in a changing global environment, 2015) repeatedly makes reference to migration in relation to security, underlining the ‘mounting migration challenges’ and stressing the urgent need to ‘rethink migration’ in its global dimension. Following the guidelines proposed in the introduction to the volume, this chapter firstly considers how migration has been reported (if ever) in EU’s Security Strategies. The article argues that while migration has not been inserted within the EU’s security strategy at least three out of five challenges (state failure, regional conflicts and organized crime) are related to migration and migration crises with a relevant impact on EU’s peculiar actorness. While the Internal Security Strategy of 2010 put an emphasis on border controls also in this case the opportunity has been missed to connect the management of migratory flows with potential challenges related to the porousness of borders. The second part of the chapter argues that while the EU has failed to provide a framework for the discussion of migration in the EU’s security strategy a parallel track has been the development of a securitized migration policy albeit with an absent overarching security strategy. An assessment of the resources and policies put in place is made, emphasizing the EU and member state different competences. A final consideration about the effectiveness of the migration policy is made with an emphasis on the fact that the failure to insert migration within the EU’s security strategy has paved the way for a securitization path which has led to an inefficient governance and which has left unanswered some key questions about the challenge posed by irregular immigration and immigration crises, such as: whose security is affected? Which roots causes are creating the conditions for massive outflows? How should migration better be reconciled with EU’s security concern and EU’s security strategy?