The new European Migration Pacts 2023 adopt a eurocentric framing of the refugee crisis by focusing on the security concerns of the European Union borders. Elif Lootens writes about the consequences of the number of illegal pushbacks from European member states which reached record levels in 2023. 

The new European Migration Pacts 2023, adopts a eurocentric framing of the ‘refugee crisis’ by focusing purely on the security concerns of the European Union borders. In this Pact, little attention is paid to the consequences of the European Union’s hardening of their external borders and the way they manage migrants. In 2023, European member states carried out 340.000 illegal pushbacks (an average of 1000 a day), which is the forcing back of refugees and immigrants over the border they have tried to cross. With this violent violation of international and European law by EU member states, the EU created the world’s biggest graveyard, the Mediterranean Sea, without ever claiming responsibility.

These pushbacks, under this Eurocentric framing, treat the refugee deaths as the inadvertent—or worse, unavoidable—consequences of enforcing a law that puts EU borders first. But a different perspective, one that puts humanity over mere borders, shows us these deaths are not unavoidable, and thus, apolitical, but rather, deeply political choices made by the state (here, European member states). This is an instance of what Mbembe (2003) calls necropolitics: the power of the sovereign state “to kill or allow to live.” That is, the nation-state neither overtly kills nor allows to live, but rather “lets die’’ the individuals that are deemed disposable, without ever being held accountable for what this really is: homicide.

Let die at sea

With the Dublin system- which is an EU law, that sets out that refugees are required to apply for asylum in the first EU country they enter, Mediterranean countries like Greece and Italy are in the spotlight for the ‘refugee crisis’, because the asylum seeker must submit asylum in the first ‘safe country’ in the European Union where the refugee passes. After the European-Turkey deal in 2016, Greece has become an “outpost” of Europe and this is realised by legal frameworks, in the first place by requiring processing of migrants’ applications in the country of arrival at hand while keeping them in enclosed camps. Kouvelakis points out that the Greek state has an important role, namely to ‘protect’ the richer Central Europe. This country turned into a system which shields more powerful European countries from migrant flows by isolating migrants in detention centres and camps.

The Mediterranean Sea developed into one of the most dangerous external borders of the European Union and its waters are a physical space of interlacing sovereign state powers, which has delimited refugees from the state borders. This is clear necropolitical governing because they exclude the refugee lives of humanity and ‘let them die’ via a control mechanism framed in legal ways that makes crossing the border impossible, to guard the position of Europe. Policies such as constant active vigilance of the border police have made the route of the Aegean Sea a dangerous channel for the asylum seekers, which forced the refugees to take more hazardous detours to circumvent these measures-such as the Eastern Route from Libya. Due to those policies and consequent detours the mortality rate increased by 35 per cent from 2015-2016. After 2016, the rate of arrivals has reduced, while the rate of mortality per arrival increased significantly in the last few years. With the new European migration deal, these numbers did not stop. We should not be surprised by the number of dead bodies of refugees. If we take this cause-and-effect reasoning to the extreme, one could cynically state successful arrival and residency in the European Union is predominantly determined by ‘survival of the luckiest’.

Ungrievable lives

When we hear about missing refugees, we are often given numbers and statistics, without an individual or collective story (Kovras & Robins 2016; Butler, 2004). There is thus an ‘un-grievability’ to those lives that are deemed politically unimportant, rendering them not just invisible but ‘non-living.’ These immigrants, as well as those others living in a zone of indistinction, are not really living lives, they are living in a condition of waiting between life and death. Their deaths, thus, summarised as neat statistics are all too easy to view as tragedies resulting from poor choices and fate, and not as the results of destruction. In other words, when a population is deemed as non-living, and subsequently faces destruction, there are no political repercussions (Butler, 2004).

The unequal distribution of grievability and different production of humanity, lets us reflect on the question ‘Who is included in the category of being a human?’ Agamben (2008) emphasises that refugees are put in the ‘state of exception’, a condition where the state has the ability to declare emergencies that suspend legal rights and validate its destructive power. During the current so-called ‘refugee crisis’, the lives of refugees are devalued, criminalised, and deprived of their political value. This makes it possible to sacrifice life without committing what would otherwise be viewed as political violence.

In this way, both stopping rescues and illegal pushbacks has become part of European migration policy. The several moves of Greek coastguards to capsize boats of refugees or recently the cooperating of Frontex with refoulement of asylum seekers in the Aegean Sea are practices of governance through death. These actions happened despite international opposition. It is certainly the case that Europe is opting for violence at its borders. Moreover, it is telling that the European Union has not yet been held accountable for these human rights violations.

Borders beyond death

Finally, the borders have an impact beyond the death, there is an afterlife within which deaths at the border become trapped. Deaths which occur crossing these borders become stuck in this afterlife where they are simultaneously ungrievable and devalued by the states that pushed them back, and grieved by their families, who unaware of their whereabouts, want to grieve and mourn their disappearance. This afterlife is a new border, keeping refugees away both from the places they wished to seek asylum in and away from their families. For their families, it is yet another border, a symbolic and material border, one they constantly want to cross.

In conclusion, if the European Union wants to play a pioneering role in the field of ‘human rights’, it cannot do so without first changing its immigration policy. It must first push its policy towards creating legal and safe access, which will begin with changing the current European Migration Pacts of 2023. The EU currently opts for violence at its borders, this is not an accidental occurrence. It is an active choice, a decision, contributing to prolonged yet ultimately preventable suffering.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Department of Sociology, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: Najmul Hasan on pexels