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“The world is facing an unprecedented displacement crisis.”
- ECHO
“Faced with the most severe refugee crisis the world has seen since the Second World War, the EU managed to bring about a step change in migration management and border protection.”
During the last few years the word “refugee” rarely appeared in the media, political, or public discourse without its shadow-like fellow word “crisis”. The so called “refugee crisis” has entered all the households since 2015 when the number of migrants at the EU borders sharply increased. Nevertheless, even though in times of crisis and emergency we are supposed to proceed like a racing train, slowing down and taking a back seat seems now necessary. While pressing the brakes we will question how the crisis is constructed and what does its proclamation allow?
Media are the principal source of information for people’s understanding of migration issues and do influence the public opinion. Yet, even though the “real word” is not enough, placing the European figures regarding refugees in a wider, global perspective, underscores the common misperception on the theme. By the end of 2017, the European continent was hosting 2.6 million refugees of the 25.4 million refugee population. In comparison, Lebanon was hosting almost one million of refugees resulting in roughly one fourth of the population. How can one of the richest regions in the world be in crisis for so few refugees? This shows that the crisis is not of the numbers but of the E.U. and its principle of solidarity. The Eurocentric stance obscures part of the reality: the refugee crisis is not European. Europe is not drowning under the mass of refugees. But above all, the crisis is used as a method of managing migration, a paradigm with its own logic and tools.
Proclaiming the crisis, and therefore activating the processes and tools that this state of exception allows, is using the crisis as a method. Nevertheless, this model rests on truncated and selective understanding of the events impoverishing the critical analysis by diverting the attention from more structural issues, historical context and past scholarship. Despite all, the crisis does exist because it’s built discursively. That is, the discourse on emergency reactivates and strengthens a system of exclusion based on categorization, where the vocabulary plays an important performative role. It is this categorization process that we see in action when politicians evoke alleged dichotomic categories such as economic migrants and refugees, “legals” and “illegals”. Here, artificial problematic distinctions between two categories, with blurred borders in a time of “normality”, are discursively constructed through processes of irregularization of some and legitimization of others. Indeed, in a time of (perceived) crisis and emergency, there is little time left for a critical reflection on these categories and their discriminatory power, rendering difficult a thorough deconstruction of them. Hence, muscled measures in breach of European values, international law and human rights are enacted and find their justification in the discursive world of crisis. As Jeandesboz puts it “crises demand an immediate response often thought to be outside the politics”.
What can exemplify an immediate response better than the mushrooming of camps all over Europe in the last five years? (Lesbos, Idomeni, Calais, Ventimiglia, Paris to mention just a sample). The reception through camps is one of the most visible aspects of the “crisis management”. Politics of crisis in the E.U. are following logics of deterrence. Unsurprisingly, these practices are based on an old, simplistic and outdated economic theory of migration based on the idea that good conditions of reception would encourage migrants to reach the continent, the so-called push-pull factors. Such ideas perfectly fit with the “crisis management” (since it is ahistorical, lacks consideration in recent scholarship, and takes simplistic reasoning for granted) justifying the creation of a hostile environment. A hostile environment that is a double-edged sword. Supposedly, it should act as a deterrent for the refugees and contribute to the feeling of emergency among the local population. In this context, the underinvestment in the reception conditions frequently coexists with an overinvestment in the security measures creating a hostile environment that justifies the crisis as a method. Simultaneously, this crisis feeling allows the public, powers to enact emergency measures that don’t always manage to abide by international treaties, human rights and also regional regulations.
In a nutshell, the current “refugee crisis” can be considered Eurocentric since it represents a crisis of the E.U. responses to the migratory phenomenon. It is not the size of the human wave that drowned the European Union but it’s inability to swim. Instead of calming down and trying to move first the left arm and then the right one, we are panicking and trying to stay afloat by dint of extraordinary measures. If “Europe is no longer experiencing the migration crisis we lived in 2015”, as the vice-president of the European Commission has announced, what new methods of migration management are we going to embrace?