Blocking Migration: The Underside of European Politics

Abstract

This article examines European policies blocking migration. It outlines a theory of borders and bordering that conceptualizes both as being far more complex and consequential than the mere regulation of conventional national frontiers. Although due attention is paid to efforts at the formal frontiers of Europe, the bulk of the analysis focuses on the effective externalization of Europe’s borders into African and Asian states that European governments pay (in kind or cash) to stop migrants from ever reaching Europe’s shores. The essay goes on to introduce the notion of Anglo-European hegemony to explain why postcolonial states, despite having achieved formal independence from colonial rule, continue to contribute to and even emulate patterns of blocking migration that originate in the Global North. Blocked migration casts doubt on Europe’s democratic credentials—so much so that efforts to reduce, end or evade blocked migration should be reinterpreted as necessary steps in the ongoing decolonization and democratization of European politics.

1. Introduction

The lion’s share of research on European migration policy focuses on migration into Europe [1,2]. However, the fact of the matter is that European migration policies affect far more people residing beyond than within the European Union (EU). Due in large measure to the “securitization” of migration, viewing migrants as a threat to member states’ well-being [3,4], the EU actually devotes more resources to repelling than facilitating migration [5]. Polls indicate that over 700 million humans wish to migrate, though less than ten percent do so [6]. The UNHCR [7] estimated that by May of 2025, 122.1 million people were forcibly displaced from their homes, 73 percent of whom reside in the Global South. Although it would be outlandish to claim that all migrants seek to reach Europe, displaced persons do apply for refugee status more often to democracies than autocracies [8]. Moreover, because democracies reject the applications at a higher rate than autocracies [8,9], it is fair to assert that Europe’s restrictive migration policies block tens of millions (and disincentivize perhaps hundreds of millions) of (would-be) migrants from entering Europe.

This article explores the impact of Europe’s policies of blocking migration. It contends that their consequences for migrants’ lives profoundly undermine Europe’s democratic credentials, for example, the commitment to the “values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights” promulgated in Article Two of the Treaty of European Union of 1999. To realize these lofty ideals, I contend that it is necessary to reimagine European politics, indeed “Europe” itself, by placing the perspective of the (blocked) migrant at the core of both.

This article proceeds as follows. After explaining the materials employed in the analysis, I outline a theory of borders and bordering that conceptualizes both as being far more complex and consequential than the mere regulation of conventional national frontiers. Then, I turn to analyzing the various policies designed to block (some) migrants. Although due attention is paid to efforts at the formal frontiers of Europe, the bulk of the analysis focuses on the effective externalization of Europe’s borders into African and Asian states that European governments pay (in kind or cash) to stop migrants from ever reaching Europe’s shores. I then introduce the notion of Anglo-European hegemony to explain why postcolonial states, despite having achieved formal independence from colonial rule, continue to contribute to and even emulate patterns of blocking migration that originate in the Global North. Finally, I contend that efforts to reduce, end or evade blocked migration should be reinterpreted as necessary steps in the ongoing decolonization and democratization of European politics.

I intentionally use many different terms—“refugees”, “asylum-seekers”, “migrants”, “people”—to refer to persons migrating or thinking about migrating. Although this stylistic choice may perturb those preoccupied with precision, humans are complex and should not be wholly defined by one aspect of their existence. For the most part, this study focuses attention on people who wish to improve their lives but who judge that they cannot if they remain where they are, often due to one or more dimensions of structural violence, of which, it turns out, blocked migration is one.

2. Materials and Methods

This article utilizes three types of materials. The first are government documents. Because the focus is on European efforts at blocking migration, most documents stem from the EU, which has primary responsibility for coordinating migration policies across member states. Most of the materials are policy pronouncements and assessments published by the European Commission, the principal executive branch of the EU. The emphasis rests on the executive because this article analyzes policy implementation as opposed to the policy-making process. Because no attempt is undertaken here to explain how policy is made, documents from the Council of the EU and the European Parliament—the principal legislative branches—are not considered. Some cases from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) are reviewed because its rulings do impact policy implementation.

However, some non-EU governmental documents relate to this study. This is because the EU is a unique political animal—a sui generis hybrid between a unitary government (like a nation-state) and an intergovernmental body (like the United Nations) [10,11,12]. Although the EU has a body of laws (acquis) of its own making, it has no constitution. The EU derives its ultimate political authority from a set of treaties made among sovereign nation-states, most importantly, the Treaties of Rome (1957), the (Maastricht) Treaty on European Union (1992) and the Lisbon Treaty (2009). Through a virtual labyrinth of regulations and relations, member states sometimes delegate national authority to the supranational level of the EU but sometimes decide to act independently. Certain policies of individual member states therefore come into consideration, for example, bilateral agreements with non-EU states, which, however, are often supported or supplemented by the EU itself.

Second, this article draws on materials produced by organizations other than the EU and its member states. For example, all EU member states are signatories to certain international declarations and conventions that can bear significantly on migration policy, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the European Convention on Human Rights (1950), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990). Other non-EU publications are helpful in analyzing the impact of blocking migration outside Europe, for example, the number of (would be) migrants and the conditions under which they live. The bulk of these documents stem from the United Nations (UN), especially the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), but some are issued by prominent intergovernmental organizations, like the World Bank, or non-governmental organizations, such as Amnesty International or Oxfam.

Third, I draw heavily on secondary literature from a broad range of disciplines. Because migration is “shaped by a myriad of interrelated forces”, “including social, economic, cultural, political, environmental, and health determinants”, the study of population movements is ultimately best pursued through “cross-disciplinary innovative approaches” [13,14]. Such required breadth, however, exceeds the expertise of any given scholar. I thus synthetically weave together insights and findings from a rich array of scholars from various (sub)fields.

That said, this study is theoretically rooted in Critical Border Studies. The field has deeply enhanced the understanding of borders beyond the conventional idea of the formal physical frontiers of current nation-states. Particularly germane to the present article is what border scholars refer to as “externalization” [15]. This transpires when a state negotiates an agreement with other states to deny sojourners with insufficient documentation to travel to its borders. When this happens, a state’s borders are practically extended into the “sovereign” territory of other nation-states [3,16,17,18]. Moreover, the latter may often contract this border control out to private-sector actors such as NGOs or para-military outfits [19]. Both types of arrangement profoundly alter the politics of the border. For example, when the partner government is authoritarian instead of democratic or the private partners are more concerned with profits than human rights, the nature and practice of sovereignty change fundamentally [20].

Borders can also exist within a country’s formal physical frontiers [21,22]. Needless to say, bordering is at work whenever migrants face officials charged with deciding to grant or extend visas—situations usually marked by great asymmetry of power [23]. Borders are effectively present wherever police seize, detain, deport or even patrol migrants. As Fabini [24] observes, “every police officer is a border”. De facto bordering also takes place when employers, say, threaten to expose disobedient workers who lack papers or when the undocumented forego taking advantage of state services to which they are entitled for fear of being detected [25,26]. Increasingly, with the expansion of the use of biometrics, such as foreseen in the EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum of 2024, borders can quite literally be imposed on persons’ bodies [27,28,29].

Borders are not only material; they are also figurative and thereby performative [30,31]. Borders define (non)membership. Indeed, they are constitutive, for it is only possible to define who are citizens (insiders) by simultaneously marking who are not citizens (outsiders). After all, “border areas…are not marginal to the constitution of a public sphere but rather at the center” [32]. State-centric theories of citizenship exhibit an ontological and political bias toward stasis. Emigrants are those who are exiting (abandoning) their homeland, while immigrants are understood as those entering (needing to adapt to) a new homeland. Both categories of mobile people are conceptualized in conventional political theory as “failed citizens” of sorts not deserving the same rights as stationary insiders [33,34]. Indeed, with the increasing securitization of migration, migrants tend to be seen as threats to national well-being who should be handled more like criminal suspects than vulnerable people [35]. In this way, borders affect people emotionally as well as physically. This means that migrants can suffer from the psychological trauma of a border(ing) experience long after successfully crossing the physical border; the latter may become no longer relevant, but the psychological border remains detrimental [36].

Borders are also porous. They do not permit only legal, wanted entries. Borders inevitably, even routinely (sometimes with and sometimes without the knowledge of officials) become penetrated by the “unauthorized” [37]. In 2024, Frontex [38] detected just over 239,000 illegal crossings into Europe (down 38 percent from 2023). These are only the “detected” crossings; the actual number must be much higher. The same holds true for the 918,925 known irregular migrants recorded in the EU in 2024 [39]. The Managing Irregular Migration research unit estimates that between 2.6 and 3.2 million irregular migrants were living in twelve European countries [40]. We do know that between 1996 and 2008, 22 of the 27 EU states regularized (granted amnesty to) approximately six million migrants lacking fully legal status [41]. Ironically, “Irregularity…[is] a very regular and predictable feature of the routine and systematic functioning of border and immigration enforcement regimes” [42]. This fact should serve to remind that migrants are not mere pawns who are helpless vis-à-vis the public or private authorities who seek to control them. Scholars informed by the Autonomy of Migration approach document the myriad ways that migrants manage to thwart and elude borders designed to regulate them [43,44]. Moreover, in doing so, they “shape the politics of migration” and even “the whole of society itself” in ways unanticipated or unintended by elite officials [4,33].

3. Analysis

3.1. Blocking Migration Within Europe

Even though migrants carve out some degree of autonomy, the truth is that borders do block millions from reaching their desired destination. Before turning to those persons blocked from entering Europe (the principal focus), a few words regarding blocked migration within Europe are in order. Because their illegalized status makes their presence precarious, irregular(ized) migrants in Europe should be considered among those people (partially) blocked. Despite the sensational media’s spotlight on human traffickers smuggling people across the border, it seems likely that 75–80 percent of irregular migrants enter with a valid visa of some sort (9.7 million issued in 2024 according to the European Commission [45]) and only later become unauthorized by remaining beyond the expiration date [24,46]. Needless to say, there exists a critical difference in both quantity and consequence between undocumented aliens in the custody of the state and those at large. However, not all apprehended aliens without proper papers are deported. Many of the nonremoved remain for long periods in detention centers, while others who are notified of an impending deportation abscond before it is carried out [4,47]. In 2024, only 110,385 (24 percent) of the 453,380 non-EU citizens ordered to leave were actually removed [39].

Just because millions elude formal borders does not mean that they evade the kinds of informal borders mentioned above. The illegalized are highly susceptible to exploitation because of the threat of deportation [48,49,50,51,52]. Some scholars go so far as to speak of the “deportation state” where the practice and threat of removal intimidate non-citizens into accepting the severely underprivileged conditions of the growing underclass of Europe’s post-Fordist and post-social economies [53]. These modern day “helots” [54] so disproportionately fill the ranks of Europe’s “precariat” [55], that some authors discern “an incipient ethno-racial stratification” [56] or even a “European apartheid” [32].

3.2. Blocking Migration Outside Europe

In terms of persons affected, the far more consequential “apartheid” is the one that keeps millions from ever entering “Fortress Europe” in the first place. The EU budgeted over EUR 922 million for Frontex (up from EUR 845 in 2023 and EUR 364 million in 2020) “to reduce the number of irregular migrants entering the EU undetected” [57,58]. Moreover, this does not include the Internal Security Fund, EUR 2.8 billion of which was spent on border management between 2014 and 2020 [5]. Indeed, as mentioned, the EU has, since 2015, appropriated far more money to blocking than facilitating incoming migrants, whereas before 2015 there was no clear preference [5]. For example, the EU’s Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund has committed EUR 9.9 billion for migration management between 2021 and 2027, only EUR 1.9 billion of which is foreseen for integration [59]. According to estimates of the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs [60], there were 304 million international migrants in the world in 2024. In 2023, 4.3 million non-EU citizens (though not including Ukrainians) migrated to the EU; at the end of 2023, the EU registered 23.7 million non-EU migrants (5.3 percent of a total population of 448.8 million) [61]. This means that about 18 percent of the globe’s migrants reside in Europe, though 57 percent of them are citizens of the EU [62]. Of the estimated 123.2 million persons displaced from their homes worldwide in 2024 [7], 208,909 (0.16 percent) arrived in Europe [63]. By the end of 2024, the EU hosted a total of 9.9 million people seeking asylum protection of some sort (2.2 percent of its total population), 6.2 million of whom were Ukrainians [64]. If one combines the number of new legal non-EU immigrants to the EU (4.3 million in 2023) counted by Eurostat with the number of asylum seekers granted protection status (437,900 out of 939,980 applications in 2024) according to Eurostat [65], adds these figures to the 239,000 illegal(ized) crossings into Europe detected by Frontex [38] in 2024 as well as the 123,655 denied entries to the EU [39], and compares them to the vast number of people in the world seeking to migrate, one has to conclude that the EU is quite effective at blocking migration.

How does the EU do it? David Scott FitzGerald [3] has provided the cleverly formulated answer by cage (on land), by moat (at sea) and by dome (in the sky). Obviously, blocking migration begins with visa restrictions. The so-called “blacklist” of countries whose citizens require a visa to enter the EU currently numbers 106 (and has risen as high as 134 in 2001) and mostly includes states in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Caribbean and Pacific. The Dublin Regulation (originally enforced in 1997 and amended in 2003 and 2013) includes all EU member states and four more (Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Iceland). To prevent so-called asylum shopping or hopping from one state to the next, the regulation stipulates that a ruling on an asylum case in any of the signatory states is valid for the rest—a stipulation that puts a disproportionate burden on states like Greece, Italy and Spain, which receive more asylum seekers. Furthermore, as permitted by the EU’s Asylum Procedures Directive, all Dublin states have identified lengthy lists of “safe third countries” through which asylum seekers have already transited and “safe countries of origin” whose citizens and residents are assumed not to face persecution. The Dublin states have abrogated themselves from accepting asylum seekers from these states and made it lawful to return asylum seekers there (without hearing their cases for protection). Although formally each of the “safe” states must be polities “where the law is applied democratically, and political circumstances do not generally and consistently lead to persecution, torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, or threat by reason of indiscriminate violence in situations of international or internal armed conflict” [66], critics charge that many (from Russia to Turkey to Egypt to Morocco to Libya) have highly questionable track records with regard to human rights and democratic accountability [15,67,68] that cast grave doubt on European countries’ commitment to the principle of non-refoulement. Despite violating the spirit (if not the precise letter) of the non-refoulement clauses anchored in the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees (Article 33), not to mention the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights (Article 3), these measures have enabled European countries to create a wide buffer around themselves, effectively extending their borders far beyond the conventional geographical frontiers of “Europe”. The fact that Eritreans, Syrians and Afghans who managed to make it past these many obstacles were typically granted asylum in Europe demonstrates that the restrictions are designed to keep out both potential applicants who would qualify for asylum and those who would likely not [3].

European states do not only identify so-called “safe” countries; the former actively assist the latter in quarantining (caging) migrants within their borders. Already in 2016, the European Commission declared “external migratory pressure” “the new normal” [69]. In fact, the EU allocates about two thirds (EUR 14.45 billion in 2025–2027) of its total funds for migration management to be spent outside of Europe [70]. Spain, due to its proximity to and two enclaves (Ceuta and Melilla) in North Africa, has proven to be a leader in the off-shoring of “Europe’s” borders. By 2006, Spain (with mostly EU funds) had built a triple row of fences up to six meters high around the enclaves but on Spanish territory (one must hurdle all three to officially be considered within Spain’s border). Between 2003 and 2010, the EU gave the Moroccan government EUR 67.6 million, including EUR 40 million to dig a trench around the two enclaves. In 2013, the EU negotiated a deal with Rabat for EUR 250 million (over multiple years) to enhance its containment capacities in exchange for, among other things, trade concessions and reduced fees on remittances originating in the EU [3]. Working in concert, Moroccan police and the Guardia Civil have injured hundreds and killed dozens (with impunity) over the years, the latest egregious example being the killing of at least 37 persons on 24 June 2022 when around 1500 men mainly from Sudan, South Sudan and Chad stormed and endeavored to scale the (now ten-meter-high) fences at Melilla only to be met with batons, rubber bullets and even rocks [71]. Experts from the UNHCR concluded:

The violence documented in videos of the scenes at Melilla’s gate tragically reveals the status quo of the European Union’s borders, namely racialised exclusion and deadly violence deployed to keep out people of African and Middle Eastern descent, and other non-white populations, irrespective of their rights under international refugee or international human rights law.

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Italy too has worked hard to externalize its borders. Its island of Lampedusa just 290 km off the shores of Libya has been a magnet for people trying to get from Africa to Europe. In 2000, Rome signed its first accord with Tripoli to deter crossings in bold defiance of UN sanctions against Libya for its involvement in the bombing of Pan Am flight 747 over Lockerbie in 1988. In 2004, Silvio Berlusconi declared a “day of friendship” to mark negotiations with Muammar Gaddafi that ended with Italy sending equipment for migrant control as well as promises to reimburse Libya for deportation flights of thousands of unauthorized migrants, mainly Eritreans and Sudanese. Since nearly all of the latter were granted asylum if they made it to Europe, Libya’s deportations were plain cases of refoulement, though it deserves mention that Libya is a signatory to neither the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees nor the 1967 Protocol [3]. Nevertheless, Berlusconi made another deal in 2008 (Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Co-operation promising EUR 5 billion and renewed in 2023) with his “friend” Gaddafi, who threatened to “turn Europe black” by releasing irregular migrants [73]. In the wake of Gaddafi’s assassination and the civil war, the EU appropriated EUR 26 million annually for training migration authorities in what had become essentially a failed state and thereby a “funnel” for Africans to Europe. Laurent Wauquiez, French Minister for European Affairs, fretted that “Libya is the funnel of Africa: countries like Liberia, Somalia, and Eritrea have flows of illegal immigration that pass through Libya; it is a true risk for Europe” [74]. Indeed, since 2017, Italy (with EU approval and financial support of EUR 700 million) has indirectly (through the Government of National Accord) paid private militia to block the Libyan route to Europe [75]. A report issued in March 2023 by the United Nations Human Rights Council [76] found “numerous cases of, inter alia, arbitrary detention, murder, torture, rape, enslavement, sexual slavery, extrajudicial killing and enforced disappearance, confirming their widespread practice in Libya”.

Turkey has also been a focal point for the externalization of European borders. In a bid to become a major regional power both geopolitically and economically, Ankara eliminated visa requirements for Syria, Albania, Libya, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran in 2009 [3]. Given its proximity to the EU, Turkey swiftly became a major conduit for Asians and Africans seeking to reach Europe, and today has more refugees (4.1 million, 2.8 million of whom are Syrians) than any country in the world [77]. In 2015, 861,000 refugees entered Greece from Turkey (many hoping to make it to Germany, where Angela Merkel’s government was accepting unlimited numbers of asylum seekers—nearly 1 million—from Syria). In 2016, the EU committed to give Turkey EUR 6 billion in aid (and other trade concessions and promises) to help manage the Syrian refugees if Ankara agreed to re-accept Syrians from Greece. The plan worked; the number of asylum-seekers to Greece dropped to 36,000 in 2017 [78]. Especially since the imposition of martial law after the failed coup attempt in 2016, human rights groups have cast doubt on Turkey as a safe third country, citing such abuses as firing live ammunition to repel (Afghan) migrants or forced repatriations to Syria [79]. The pact nearly unraveled in 2020 when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan threatened to open up the borders to Greece. However, the EU committed to another EUR 3 billion in 2021 [80]. EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen had already announced EUR 700 million for Greece—the “European aspida” [“shield”]—to enhance Frontex’s efforts there to stem irregular migration [81]. In 2024, von der Leyen added EUR 1 billion for Lebanon ostensibly to help block Syrian refugees from fleeing to EU-member Cyprus [82].

The Balkans were, of course, an additional focal point as the region too became a preferred route for thousands fleeing the civil war in Syria after 2011. When the eastern and central European states were applying for accession before 2004, the EU made adoption of the entire acquis regarding asylum a requirement. In return, the EU has appropriated funds, personnel and equipment to enhance border security. Hungary, for example, used the aid in 2015 to erect barbed-wire fencing along its entire 175 km border with Serbia and 348 km border with Croatia and ordered officials to guard it with pepper spray, water cannons and batons. Net migration fell from 13,856 in 2015 to 68 in 2016 [83]. That was, however, not enough; in 2017 Hungarian police deported at least 40,000 asylum seekers, making arrests as deep as eight kilometers into Hungarian territory. In addition, Hungary stipulated that applicants for asylum must apply from outside the border (for example on the Serbian side), allowing no more than one per day to enter [3], and no “Muslim invaders,” stressed Viktor Orbán [84]. The blocking deterrence appears to have worked well. For example, Frontex [38] announced a 78 percent decrease in illegal(ized) crossings along the “Western Balkan route” in 2024, though “increasing violence by smugglers” was noted. Encouraged by such success, the European Commission [85] proposed in May 2025 to expand efforts to create “return hubs” outside the EU to which “third-country nationals who have been issued a return decision” may be sent, including “by coercive measures.” Because it is a “matter of urgency” to “implement a more assertive and comprehensive approach,” people may be deported to countries other than their homelands for “the short or longer term”.

In fact, all European states had already begun taking part in externalizing borders. Dozens of multilateral and bilateral agreements (with states in Asia and Africa) have been facilitated through such sources as the Aeneas program and the Thematic Programme for Migration, the EU-Africa Action Plan, the Partnership Framework in the European Agenda on Migration, the EU’s Trust Fund for Africa, the Madad Fund for displaced Syrians, the Cotonou Agreements of 2000 and 2010 or the European Neighborhood Policy of 2004 and 2015. Such agreements typically condition aid (in kind or cash) in exchange for recipient countries agreeing to process applications for asylum there, to readmit migrants currently in Europe or, more importantly, to barricade them from exiting their lands. Some countries, for instance, France and Britain, have even deployed troops in parts of Africa to assist with caging efforts [3]. German interior minister Thomas de Maiziere voiced the opinions and wishes of most of his European counterparts with regard to countries in Asia and Africa when he said during a visit to Cairo in 2016 that Egypt is an “indispensable ally…in the battle against irregular migration” [86]. Germany is also currently negotiating an arrangement with Nigeria to process asylum applications and to resettle the 14,000 Nigerian nationals without proper documentation currently in Germany [87]. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has even suggested opening negotiations with the Taliban to accept deportees [88].

Such deals to externalize borders can be quite appealing to non-European states. Indeed, Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, has been marketing his country as a kind of global warehouse for rejected asylum applicants from rich countries and has already cut deals with the UK, Denmark, and Israel, although the UK’s became tied up in the Supreme Court and ultimately abolished by Kier Starmer as promised on the campaign trail [89]. Kagame may be shrewdly seeking more than just direct foreign aid. For, despite their bad reputation as a burden for host countries, migrants can actually represent an economic boon as cheap labor, innovative entrepreneurs, able facilitators of trade with their home countries and advantageous recipients of remittances [90,91]. Kelly Greenhill [73] labels this type of diplomacy “coercive engineered migration”, referring to the deliberate orchestration of the movement of people to prompt lucrative gains from other (receiving) countries.

European states’ penchant for caging has not deflected attention from the moat. Concerted efforts to block unwanted travelers from reaching Europe by sea stretch from the Atlantic Ocean (off the coast of West Africa) across the whole of the Mediterranean and up into the Aegean and Adriatic. The EU fittingly changed the formal name of Frontex to “European Border and Coast Guard Agency” in 2016. Often coordinated by Frontex under the names of Greek gods and goddesses such as Hera (Atlantic), Hermes (Mediterranean) or Poseidon (Aegean), the patrolling and interception on the high seas usually involve some kind of joint effort by national European and non-European navies and coast guards, with the Europeans covering most of the expenses [2]. In 2023, the EU negotiated a deal worth EUR 1 billion with Tunisia to stem irregular migration across the Mediterranean [92]. This came on the heels of a similar pact between the EU and Morocco for EUR 500 million [93]. Agreements initiated by individual member states had transpired much earlier. In an effort to stop migrants from reaching the Canary Islands, Spain began cooperating with Mauritania in 2006 to return migrants intercepted at sea. Similar agreements soon followed with Senegal, Guinea, Gambia, Cape Verde, even Mali and Niger (including caging on land to prevent people from reaching the ocean) [3]. Italy, which has become infamous for not allowing NGO rescue vessels to moor in Italian ports or for mandating that those who do carry police on board or face fines of EUR 50,000 [94], has extensive cooperation with the Libyan coast guard. The EU welcomed the cooperation and added EUR 10 million despite the fact that Libya, as mentioned, was not party to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees [3]. In November of 2023, Italy struck a deal with Albania (for EUR 650 million) to transport up to 36,000 migrants apprehended at sea to facilities in Albania operated by the Italian government—presumably the first such detention center operated by an EU member state outside the EU [95]. Italy’s interior minister boasted that the various measures have blocked an estimated 200,000 crossings from North Africa and reduced the number of illegal(ized) entries by 60 percent since Giorgia Meloni assumed the premiership in 2023 [96]. In 2025, the CJEU ruled that the deal with Albania contravenes EU law.

Even Turkey and Greece surprisingly cooperated (partially) in a NATO-led expedition to patrol the Aegean [3]. The rare cooperation between the arch enemies was likely prompted by the international outrage over the horrific photos of the washed-up corpse of Kurdish toddler Alan Kurdi, who drowned with his mother and brother in 2015 (after fleeing ISIS in Syria) near Bodrum while trying to reach the nearby Greek island of Kos. Sadly, Kurdi’s tragic story is but one among the estimated 31,234 (surely low) who have perished in the Mediterranean alone between 2014 and 2024 [97] as a result of “governing migration through death” [98]. The deaths are fully avoidable. Although abandoning passengers of any nationality or legal status transgresses international sea law and norms in designated search-and-rescue waters (SAR), maritime officials regularly delay or deny rescue of stranded migrants while haggling over jurisdictional boundaries or even turn a blind eye to and in some cases facilitate coast guards who are paid to return intercepted migrants to their traffickers so the victims have to pay their exploiters again and again [99]. The paradox in the “Euro-moat” [3] could not be starker, as the migrants in rickety dinghies often share the same waters alongside cruise liners and luxury yachts all in plain view of recreating tourists sunning themselves on the nearby beaches [94].

Due to the ease and frequency of flying, the EU has deemed it necessary to erect a virtual dome in its skies to block unwanted air travelers. Indeed, inhibiting air travel into Europe counted among the earliest measures in the externalization of European borders. The UK’s Immigration Act of 1971 permitted officials to order any passenger denied entry to be returned to the country of origin at the carrier’s expense. In 1987, the UK added a GBP 1000 fine levied against an airline that transported anyone with insufficient documentation. Noticing the resulting 50 percent reduction in applications for asylum to the UK, Belgium and Germany followed suit in 1987. The Schengen Implementing Agreement of 1990 required all Schengen countries to impose similar fines. In 1994, through the Berlin Declaration, the states of Central and Eastern Europe (eager to join the EU) pledged to introduce carrier sanctions. Driven by the profit motive, the carriers (which include cruise ships as well) typically refuse to board any passengers with even the slightest documentary inconsistencies, even though Article 31 of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees plainly stipulates that asylum-seekers may not be penalized for unauthorized entry. Keep in mind too that as mostly private enterprises the carriers offer no avenues for appeal of their decisions or democratic opportunity to protest or change the policies [3,100]. Several European states have copied the example of the United States by conducting passport control in the airports (and other ports of exit) from which flights originate (as opposed to at the actual frontiers of the destination land) [3].

Needless to say, neither dome, moat nor cage is perfectly foolproof. In the first place, resourceful, courageous migrants frequently find ways to elude restrictions meant to block them [94]. In the second place, the democratic polities of Europe, through their systems of checks and balances, provide opportunities to challenge blocking measures. Especially (though not exclusively) the courts (both national and international) have at times placed limits on restrictive policies For example, in Hirsi Jamaa v. Italy (2012) and Shahzhad v. Hungary (2021) the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that the three respective countries violated international law governing non-refoulement. In Demirci v. Hungary in May 2025, the ECtHR concluded that Hungary unlawfully deported a Turkish national because the government failed to provide him the documents and evidence that deemed him a threat to national security, as is required under Article 1 of Protocol No. 7 to the European Convention on Human Rights (“Procedural safeguards relating to expulsion of aliens”). In January 2024, the CJEU (2024) ruled in a case in which a Turkish woman was denied protection in Germany that “women, as a whole, may be regarded as belonging to a social group” facing persecution in keeping with Article 2 of the Istanbul Convention (2023) that protects against “all forms of violence against women, including domestic violence, which affects women disproportionately”.

However, the courts do not always defend migrants’ rights. Indeed, supranational courts more often than not permit the blocking policies of nation-states [101]. Therefore, court rulings do not in the end dismantle Europe’s “architecture of repulsion” [3] which has been further extended and strengthened by the EU Migration and Asylum Pact of 2024 funded with EUR 11 billion until 2027 [70]. Rather, the EU’s measures expose the contradictions between a commitment to human rights and remote control of migration that form a “catch-22” for refugees…[whereby] the rich democracies are essentially telling them, “We will not kick you out if you come here. But we will not let you come here” [3].

In the end, well-meaning political and legal advocates for migrants’ rights are no match for the vast “assemblage” [102] of actors—national and international, governmental and non-governmental—who benefit from blocking migration [37].

3.3. Disproportionate Effects of Blocking Migration

Blocking migration disproportionately impedes the movement of people from the Global South. In a cleverly conceptualized statistical experiment, Andrew Rosenberg [103] devises a counterfactual “baseline model” that generates idealized emigration and immigration numbers in a “fantasy” world in which there are no legal restrictions to migrating across national frontiers. Furthermore, the hypothetical migrants make the decision to migrate based on purely rational cost–benefit analysis among commonly recognized push and pull factors such as geographical proximity, social networks, colonial ties and economic and political conditions. He then compares the baseline model with actual emigration and immigration statistics worldwide between 1960 and 2010 to calculate emigration overflows and underflows—how many more people and how many fewer people actually emigrated than ideally should have done so. The analysis demonstrates significant underflows from the Global South and significant overflows from the Global North (OECD countries). In other words, it is much harder and unlikely to emigrate than it ideally should be if one starts out from the countries of the Global South compared to the Global North. Rosenberg further demonstrates that restrictions on immigration to countries in the Global North have, since the 1980s, steadily intensified as the number of migrants from the Global South to the Global North has grown—a trend especially pronounced in erstwhile colonizing countries confronted with increased immigration from their former colonies [103]. It deserves reminding that the Convention on the Status of Refugees (itself a response to the neglect of Jewish refugees during and after the Holocaust) applied only to (White) refugees from Europe before 1951. It was when the 1967 Protocol was universalized to include non-Europeans, that Western states (with the notable exception of Germany until 1993) began to resist refugee resettlement from the Global South. To be sure, Western nations signed the Protocol but tended to grant asylum mainly to people fleeing communism until the Cold War ended [1]. Since the fall of communism, Western states have steadily denied visas to applicants from the Global South at a much higher rate than to those from the Global North [104]. Nothing perhaps better demonstrates this preference than the welcome reception shown to roughly seven million Ukrainians since 2022. What this shows is that countries of the Global North have for decades intensified efforts to block migration from the Global South—exactly the opposite of politically shrewd, sensationalized claims that the prosperous countries have recklessly opened their borders to the impoverished masses of the world whose ongoing invasion imperils or even replaces the native born of these lands.

Not surprisingly, the disproportionate effects of blocking migration occasion charges of racism. Sharma [105], for example, speaks of “global apartheid” in which states of the Global North operate as the “moral regulatory arm of White nationalist movements by denying migration…[to] nonWhites in particular”. Likewise, Danewid [106] asserts that the “moral panic” surrounding the so-called “migration crisis” represents “an attempt to reconstitute racial hegemony” based on “policing the racialized migrant” (also [48]).

However, as an explanation of blocked migration, blatant racism on the part of European policy makers and publics is insufficient for at least two reasons. First, since the Holocaust and decolonization, European laws governing migration have gradually but thoroughly lost their explicitly racist language [103,107]. Of course, extremist politicians and parties continue to play the race card. However, the official policies blocking migrants are not based on race but on a variety of purportedly universally undesirable characteristics (poverty, poor education, crime, disrespect for democracy, among others) [108]. Second, European states predominantly governed by Whites are not the only governments that block migration. Postcolonial states predominantly governed by People of Color also restrict migration, including through measures independent of the international agreements reached with Europe to externalize its borders [103,109,110]. However, these two irrefutable facts do not change the equally irrefutable fact that People of Color from the Global South are the ones who suffer most from blocked migration. We need a theory of “structural racism” [111] that allows for “racism without racists” [112] or racism as an “absent presence” [113] that “hides in plain sight” ([103]; also [114]). That is, we need to comprehend blocked migration in the context of an international “Anglo-European hegemony”, which itself is a byproduct of European colonialism, which was in fact blatantly racist [103]:

states now use “objective” criteria to restrict that correlate with race because the history of colonialism and legal racism in the international system produced modern subjects in the non-White world that now appear undesirable. In short, Western states created the conditions that produced the undesirable migrants that they now restrict today.

[103]

3.4. Colonialism

Consensus abounds that European colonialism was driven by racism. Racialized colonial rule allowed only “subjecthood but not citizenship” for natives [115]—what Chatterjee [116] calls “the rule of colonial difference—of representing the ‘other’ as inferior and radically different, and hence incorrigibly inferior”. Even the purportedly magnanimous “White Man’s Burden” of civilizing the “darker” peoples of the globe beyond Europe reposed on a “racialized international hierarchy” [117]. In fact, the colonies were hardly marginal; they were integral to concentrating economic and political power in the metropoles of the core [118,119]. For example, Eric Williams [120] famously demonstrated that slavery played a central role in eventually establishing Britain as the leading industrial power during the nineteenth century. Sven Beckert [121] writes of “war capitalism” that:

flourished not in the factory but in the field; it was not mechanized but labor- and land-intensive, resting on the violent expropriation of land and labor in Africa and the Americas. From these expropriations came great wealth and new knowledge, and these in turn strengthened European institutions and states—all crucial preconditions for Europe’s extraordinary economic development by the nineteenth century and beyond.

In the colonies, because the colonized were seen as the mere “detritus of men” [118], capitalism’s profit motive knew no bounds; human labor was ruthlessly exploited; natural resources were rapaciously plundered and extracted; local legal and political traditions were systematically upended and/or fully replaced; and indigenous cultures and unique ways of life were ruthlessly neglected into extinction [122,123,124]. “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, is not a body endowed with reason”, wrote Franz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. “It is violence in the state of nature”.

3.5. Postcoloniality and Anglo-European Hegemony

European imperialism left a lasting imprint in its train. It rendered decolonized lands into a ruinous state from which to launch independence. Indeed, “independence” represents something of a misnomer, because the decolonized states transitioned into an international milieu characterized by Anglo-European hegemony [103] and “relations of dependence and domination that subordinated them in the international sphere” [117]. The imperial powers “let go” of their colonial holdings but not without imposing conditions that guaranteed ongoing dependency for their former colonies.

Despite visions of “dispersing and delegating sovereignty beyond the nation-state” [117], postcolonial states, in order to gain recognition from essential international bodies like the United Nations, were forced to adopt the Westphalian model of sovereignty. That model theorizes a state ruling with a monopoly of force domestically over a single nation of people while vying internationally with other sovereign states doing the same [125]. However, from the start the newly independent states were caught in a “Catch-22,” because they lacked similar wherewithal to the European states to make the model succeed. They lacked a broad, prosperous (post)industrial foundation for taxation because colonialism left their economies based on one or two export commodities; they lacked an adequate public bureaucracy because the former colonial states either dismantled what they had installed and/or “brain-drained” away the best and the brightest to staff it; and they lacked a largely united, homogenous citizenry because the colonial regimes had arbitrarily patched together (and in many cases deliberately pitted against one another) peoples of chaotically disparate ethnicities, religions, cultures and languages [103,117,126].

With a dysfunctional state, a far less felicitous form of politics than emerged in (West) Europe after the Second World War took root following decolonization. “The institutional form of the postcolonial state fell short of its democratic and egalitarian aspirations and anticolonial worldmaking retreated into a minimalist defense of the state” [117]. Rampant corruption and predation proliferated instead of responsible government; civil strife and often war ignited instead of political consensus and the rule of law; one-party dictatorships germinated, festered or recrudesced instead of genuine democracy [118,127,128]. For example, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute annually scores polities based on a multi-dimensional assessment of politics, including free and fair elections, free press, civil liberties, rule of law, checks and balances, civic participation and association. Whereas OECD countries regularly score 0.7 or better on a scale from zero to one with zero being least democratic and one being most democratic, polities in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia score on average 0.3 or lower [129]. Fundamentally the same ratios regularly appear in any number of similar indexes that evaluate democratic quality [130], such as the Economist’s Democracy Index, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World Report, the World Bank’s Governance Index, or Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index [130]. With tragic irony, what has taken root is “a form of extremely arbitrary rule that is more reflective of colonial regimes” [128]. Mbembe [118] characterizes this type of politics so widespread in the Global South as a “jouissance machine”, whereby rulers view and use governing as a kind of extension of personal gratification.

As intimated, political dysfunction is often tied to continued economic dependency. As early as 1965, Kwame Nkrumah [131] remarked: “the state that is subject to it [neocolonialism] is, in theory, independent and has all the trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from the outside”. Structural inequality driven by unequal exchange in the global political economy outlasted formal imperialism [132,133]. The economies of the Global North (core) continue to prosper through the extraction of raw materials and exploitation of cheap labor in the Global South (periphery). The latter in particular have attracted manufacturers to the point that the majority of industrial production now transpires in the Global South [134]. However, giant multinational corporations headquartered in the North use monopsony and monopoly power to drive down the wages and prices of suppliers from the South while exercising the same power to set prices for the finalized commodities as high as possible [135]. By buying cheap and selling dear, the Global North is in any given year able to appropriate commodities from the South worth over USD 2 trillion—“enough to end extreme poverty 15 times over”. This ongoing “drain from the South remains a significant feature of the world economy in the post-colonial era; rich countries continue to rely on imperial forms of appropriation to sustain their high levels of income and consumption” [136].

Despite relinquishing their formal imperial powers, governments of the North contributed significantly to persistent global inequality through de facto control over key lending institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Beginning in the 1980s, both organizations made loans (Structural Adjustment Programmes) to the countries of the Global South conditional not only on opening their markets to “free trade” but also on drastically reducing government spending and services. Of course, specific persons and sectors in the South have benefited from the developments. However, the masses have had to make do with devastating cuts from the double-edged sword of persistent poverty in the private sector and reduced governmental assistance in the public sector. Because poorer countries pay on average four times higher interest rates, 40 percent of the global population lives in countries that spend more on debt servicing than on education and health. Governments in these countries spend about USD 100 per person per year on public services compared to USD 17,000 in rich countries [137]. One-fifth (1.7 billion) of the world’s population lives on USD 3.65 or less per person per day; nearly half on USD 6.85. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of people living in poverty rose between 1990 and 2024 (from 282 to 464 million); in the Middle East, the number doubled from 15 million to 30 million [138]. Meanwhile, the world’s richest one percent increased their wealth by more than USD 33.9 trillion in real terms between 2015 and 2024—more than enough to eliminate annual poverty 22 times over at the World Bank’s highest poverty line of USD 8.30 a day. Yet, affluent countries now plan the largest cuts to life-saving development aid since aid records began in 1960. G7 countries alone, who account for around three-quarters of all official aid, are projected to slash aid by 28 percent for 2026 compared to 2024 [139]. While its proponents hail the neoliberal economic world order as one of free trade among equals the world over [140], critics charge that it functions as “an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for ‘underdevelopment’ to be shifted onto the victims” [141].

Accumulated wealth in the Global North has enabled levels of (over)consumption that have caused climate change and dire environmental degradation whose negative consequences are disproportionately borne in the Global South. High-income countries (EU and USA) account for 74 percent of global resource consumption compared to 15 percent for China and 8 percent for the rest of the Global South [142]. Northern citizenries exploit their prosperity, freedoms and democratic voice to insist that such uneven consumption patterns be maintained, even though they depend on the relentless extraction of resources from and damaging exportation of hazardous wastes to the Global South [119]. Moreover, the worst developments of the Anthropocene—pollution, floods, droughts, erosions, extreme temperatures—tend to concentrate in the lands and among the peoples of the Global South, even though they are not principally responsible for the excessive consumption [143,144,145]. There, most people and governments lack the physical and financial resources to even begin to address the devastating consequences of environmental degradation. For example, between 2000 and 2023, 3.2 percent of the population in low-income countries compared to 0.5 percent in high-income countries were injured, killed or made homeless by environmental disasters [137]. The latter, in turn, exacerbate existing societal problems such as intractable poverty, civil strife and mass migration [146,147,148]. Mbembe [118] uses the graphic metaphor of “a corpse stripped of its shroud” to describe these man-made wastelands so tragically common in the Global South.

Confronted with the insurmountable challenges of postcolonial dependency, political elites in the Global South turn to border restrictions to present at least the semblance of independence. Control of state borders represents an integral dimension of the ideal Westphalian model of sovereignty—so much so that it has long been posited as a natural right of nation-states. In fact, it is a nineteenth-century invention of European and American theorists and practitioners who sought to protect the (allegedly) racial, ethnic and religious homogeneity of their societies and citizenries in an increasingly mobile world in which freely crossing borders had been the legal and practical norm (including, ironically, penetrating frontiers to establish settler colonialism itself) [103]. Irrespective of its origins, controlling (or appearing to control) who comes in and out of a state’s territory (and citizenry) has become an important marker of national sovereignty in a world governed by Anglo-European hegemony. And indeed, Anglo-European states have led the way in implementing blocked migration. However, in an effort to gain political advantage both domestically and internationally, postcolonial politicians “have internalized the exclusionary logic of the rest of the world” [103]. Border restrictions, measured, for example, by miles of fencing, have steadily multiplied across the Global South since the 1970s [103]. To be sure, some, but surely not all of these measures are incentivized by bilateral or multilateral deals struck with European states of the kind detailed above. In actuality, border walls and fences are ultimately not very effective in stopping migration, although they do make it more dangerous and expensive to circumvent officials [149,150]. Nonetheless, the restrictions continue to proliferate, because the symbolic value of appearing to be in control of frontiers proves irresistible to politicians [151]. Regardless of the precise motivation, the effect among publics across the region has been intensified xenophobia directed against migrants from the Global South [152,153,154].

4. Discussion: Europe Reimagined

The focus on blocking migration gives cause to reimagine what we mean by “Europe”, especially from a normative perspective. First, we should rethink Europe’s borders to extend far beyond its de jure borders. This de facto extension of the European polity stems not only from the externalizing measures—cage, moat, dome—detailed above. It results even more so from the legacy of imperialism now manifested through Anglo-European hegemony in international affairs. It is not without good reason that the EU since 2005 has labeled its policies a “Global Approach to Migration” [155]. Similarly, Keir Starmer views irregular migration as a “global crisis” [156]. The European migration regime directly or indirectly assigns a political status (legal or illegal) to every person on the planet, and is well on its way to digitalizing and biometrically monitoring all of them through some of the largest data bases in the world, such as VIS (Visa Information System), EES (Exit/Entry System), SIS II (Schengen Information System, second generation) and EURODAC (fingerprinting asylum seekers and irregular migrants) [37]. These unprecedented blocking measures notwithstanding, “the current configuration of Northern refugee reception—even in the most generous states—is only possible because Southern states contain and control most refugee movement” [1]. As a result of “what might be dubbed a policy of mass excarceration” [157], the vast majority of the world’s (would be) migrants remain trapped in a state of “permanent temporariness” [4], unable to exit what amounts to a kind of unofficial hinterland of Europe in its former colonies in Africa and Asia. Mbembe captures this expanse of the European regime when he pointedly asks:

What, then, is this “borderization”, if not the process by which world powers permanently transform certain spaces into impassable places for certain classes of populations…death-worlds, that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead?

[118]

Second, we should reconceptualize European “democracy”. The normative core of democracy prescribes that every individual who is actually or potentially affected by a policy ought to have an equal say (directly or indirectly) in the determination of that policy [158,159,160]. It goes without saying that blocking migration acutely affects blocked migrants. And yet, they clearly have no (formalized) say in the making of Europe’s policies: “The states that are setting the tone for global immigration politics are not…anywhere near the places where millions of people flow over the borders in desperate need of assistance” [161]. Pointing out the “vestiges of colonialism” [1] that inform and shape European migration policies helps to underscore their profoundly undemocratic nature. Blocked migrants are effectively the EU’s disenfranchised majority languishing in the furthest outposts of the regime ruled over by a privileged minority residing in the centers of power (not wholly dissimilar to colonial times). In the words of Tendayi Achiume [162], these (would-be) migrants are “co-sovereign members of neo-colonial empire” and therefore “entitled to a say in the vehicles of effective collective self-determination within this empire” (also [163]).

To be sure, many will dismiss such a call for radical inclusion of migrants in the rights of democracy as fully impractical (though practical proposals exist [161,164,165,166]). Such a dismissal on (seemingly) practical grounds does not diminish the moral imperative of democratic ethics. As Chantal Mouffe has illuminated, liberal democracy always faces an inherent paradox: the liberal values are meant to be universal, but the creation of a sovereign demos is always particular, necessitating the inclusion of some and exclusion of others [167]. However, she adds that precisely because of the ineluctable paradox, a healthy democracy should take pains to make sure that the question of membership in the demos always remains open to contestation and reform [167]. Through their brave and industrious actions to reach Europe—and thereby to avoid the hapless lot of the “excluded and invisibilized” [168]—migrants contribute to this critical democratic debate regarding “the democracy to come” [118]. From this perspective, attempts to escape the cage, cross the moat or pierce the dome—these “spaces of refusal” [169]—ought, far from being criminalized, to be welcomed on a par with, say, legal demonstrations for better rights in European capitals such as Paris, Rome, Madrid and Berlin that are now routinely experienced and understood as signs of robust democracy. This is migration reinterpreted not as crisis or crime but rather as democratization or even continued “decolonization” [119,162]. What is ultimately needed is a thorough reconceptualization of democracy itself in the direction of what Wendy Brown [170] calls “reparative democracy” that focuses first and foremost on repairing past injustices on a planetary scale—demanding not merely “more democracy, but for democracy to be more”.

Third, we should reimagine European identity. As mentioned, borders are performative. By determining whom to include and exclude, bordering helps to form the We and They markers that constitute collective identity [21,171,172]. Blocked (as well as unblocked) migrants represent a critical element of the They or Other that enables the European sense of We—what Mouffe [167] calls the “constitutive outside”. As discussed above, European governments no longer employ blatantly racist characteristics to distinguish Europeans from non-Europeans. However, the purportedly objective characteristics—skilled versus unskilled, poor versus prosperous, industrious vs. indolent, lawful versus unlawful—by and large mark mainly people from the Global South as undesirables whom Europe should deny entry—for all intents and purposes the same people whom they designated inferior in colonial times [103].

If Europe and Europeans wish to once and for all overcome the “patterns of mobility and immobility today [that] follow…colonial-era logics” [2], they need to embrace rather than spurn the “Other of Europe” [118]. They must strive to make the critique and rejection of Eurocentrism an integral dimension of Europeanness itself [21,173]. This refashioning of European identity is akin to writing an autobiography of Europe “starting from the Other, in response to the questions the Other asks” [118]. It is to approach European identity not as fixed but fluid, in a state of constant and needed transformation “advancing…in an exemplary way towards what it is not” [174]. It is to commit to a “departitioning of the world” that opens rather than closes both borders and minds [118]. It is to forge the fortitude and insight to discern the We in the They and the They in the We; to summon the will to depart the complacent comfort of the Here for the adventurous exploration of the Elsewhere [118].