Since 2015, the idea of a “migration crisis” has invaded public debates and political discourses, evoking a threat to Europe’s culture and economy. A collective work challenges this reading and shows that, if there is indeed a crisis, it results from the failure of reception methods.
The book opens with the number of migrants who died at sea in 2015 (3,771) and the memory of Alan Kurdi, the child whose body was found on the Turkish coast the same year. The tone is set. The general reflection is based on an observation: the first victims of the so-called “migrant crisis” are the migrants themselves, and not the Europeans – as the expression suggests.
The policies deployed in XXIe century in Europe to contain the arrival of new arrivals in Europe are ineffective, and contrary to the fundamental principles to which European states have formally committed themselves. Among these, the European Agenda on Migration (COM(2015) 240 final). Their misinterpretation is based on a language gap. The expression “migration crisis” or “migrant crisis”, almost exclusively used in common parlance, conveys the idea of a threat. It suggests that people entering Europe are radically altering its culture and threatening its socio-economic stability. This assumption is both false and damaging for those primarily concerned. The choice to use this expression “reflects above all the refusal of European States to integrate the contemporary and international dimension of a phenomenon that it is illusory to claim to stop and which, moreover, cannot be described as either new or unpredictable” (p. 12).
The work therefore tackles two related objects: a semantic choice (migration crisis) and a policy (that of containing migration flows and fighting against so-called economic immigration).
The issue is studied from three angles. The first four articles question the effectiveness of migration policy, which claims to curb immigration, and denounce its perverse effects. Four other articles study the way migrants are treated at the borders, and report on the human rights violations that take place there. The last four examine the effect of migration policies on mobilization within the civil societies of “host” countries.
Ineffective and xenophobic reception methods
Far from dismissing the notion of crisis outright, the book intends to question it. If we accept that the term means a “disruption of balance that endangers”, are we really facing a “refugee crisis”? Are we not rather experiencing a “crisis of reception”? Many political measures are aimed at keeping at a distance those who ask to be welcomed.
This notion of “reception crisis” encompasses two others: that of the management of controls, and that of solidarity. hotspots and other reception or customs infrastructures multiply human rights violations and contribute to making the travel conditions of migrants miserable. The book is full of examples, whether they took place on the eastern borders of theEUin Bulgaria and Hungary (pp. 121-143 and pp. 273-298), on the islands of Lesbos and Lampedusa (pp. 161-186), on the French-Italian border (pp. 187-211), or in the Spanish enclave of Melilla (pp. 231-250). Because if the States claim to defend human rights, practice shows, on the contrary, that the most fundamental rights of migrants are not guaranteed. Furthermore, the European member states show no support for each other when it comes to the distribution of migrants according to the rules imposed by the European Commission. Nor when it comes to incriminating citizens who have multiplied gestures of hospitality towards migrants.
What the 2015 crisis reveals to us, says Alain Morice (pp. 33-64), is the quagmire in which European political leaders are currently caught, “between the concern to defend the indefensible, and their endless race towards expedients with no other outcome than increased cynicism, in the art of externalizing barbarity” (p. 62).
This state of affairs could well prove lethal for theEU. This is the thesis of Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche (pp. 65-80), who regrets that the European Union did not take advantage of the opportunity to reaffirm the values carried by fundamental rights, thereby losing the opportunity to build a positive and stimulating image. More than rallying Europeans, migration policies divide, jeopardizing the European project.
Words that kill
Anthropologist Michel Agier points out that the speech of states is performative (pp. 81-96). By simply establishing the administrative categories of “refugee” and “migrant,” state structures influence the behavior of fellow citizens toward non-nationals, but also between migrants. Annalisa Lendaro, who takes Emmanuel Macron’s speech of July 27, 2017 as an example, notes that the figure of the “true refugee” (the good one, the asylum seeker) continues to oppose that of the “false refugee” (the bad one, the economic, illegal migrant), although the criteria for differentiating them vary (pp. 97-120). In France, the considerations allowing the granting of refugee status depend on multiple factors, sometimes unexpected, such as the change in the social profiles of civil servants, or the existence of an unofficial list of preferences of countries of origin (p. 105). The figure of the “smuggler”, who allows theEU to combine its humanitarian and security policies, is just as inconsistent. It happens that in order to finance its journey, a “past” becomes a “ferryman” for a moment (p. 112).
It is concluded that the perverse effects due to the institutionalized use of the terms mentioned above deserve to be addressed by the competent authorities, otherwise they could be held responsible for maintaining a regime which unnecessarily produces injustices towards migrants.
The activist world is not immune to this phenomenon. According to Serhat Karakayali and Elias Steinhilper, “the humanitarian register sometimes becomes complicit in a migratory regime of exclusion, through the reproduction of exclusions and hierarchies” (p. 252).
Similarly, it should be acknowledged that some moral categories are no less damaging. In Canada, social workers, depending on the case, liken migrants to the figure of the hero, the resourceful person, or the impostor, while in France, Ofpra employees seek to flush out “lying refugees,” which unequally affects the chances of success of asylum applications (pp. 86-87).
Beyond categories
The book is easy to access, informative, conclusive. Its analyses are clear, its overall reasoning obvious. It is a particularly fine work, deeply attentive to the human, and eager to question all presuppositions, without hesitating to take a critical look at the civil servants working with these migrants, nor at the support movements.
We will also appreciate the geographical scope covered by the researchers, who testify to facts and dynamics in more than nine European countries (Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, Spain, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, and the United Kingdom). The contribution of the work is valuable, again, for the period studied: it sheds light on recent facts (from 2015 to today), and consequently little-informed.
But its real strength lies in the search for completeness. This collection of articles offers contributions with a sociological vocation, describing concrete situations, such as the interactions between migrants and Moroccan police officers, the behavior of customs officers in the South of France, the Serbian-Hungarian “border spectacle”, or the tensions between activists in Calais. It provides a critical analysis of Bulgarian, Hungarian, Anglo-Saxon and European national migration policies. It also offers considerations that can nourish ethical reflection on the subject. Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche, for example, questions the nature of societies, what they want to be, and what they do in their way of considering the integration or rejection of potential new members (pp. 68-69). Michel Agier mentions Hannah Arendt, who emphasized that the term ” refugee ” does not refer to an identity, but to a moment in life, to a set of circumstances (p. 91). It is therefore necessary to think about alternatives to these categories, which would take into account the conditions faced by migrants, and would allow for a more empathetic, more realistic and therefore more appropriate policy.
The need for this type of theoretical consideration is such that it would have been appreciated if the reflection had been pushed a little further. One avenue that would deserve to be studied in more detail is that presented by Annalisa Lenandro and concerns the process of collective creation of categorization. More intuitive, this daily action of the individual, which “takes shape and evolves during daily interactions between individuals”, “tends to reduce the complexity of the world through distinctions and separations” (p. 98). To the extent that categories influence the daily lives of people in migration to this extent, this process would be worth dwelling on.
Another key reflection of the book concerns the nature of migration policies, which are constructed, strategic, do not seek to resolve what is abusively called the “migration crisis”, but are put at the service of an unacknowledged, disguised and above all artificial fear. But what about the conceptual roots that produced this particular political approach? Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche touches on the subject by evoking the missed opportunity of theEU to position itself as a protector of the fundamental rights of the most vulnerable. She explains this “because the feeling that individuals have of belonging to the same political body is based on a fundamental legal principle: the principle of sovereignty, by virtue of which the State of which they are nationals defines in a discretionary manner the rules of belonging to the political community and determines the binary opposition between national and foreign, on which the opposition friend enemy is dangerously grafted” (p. 65). This principle of sovereignty, whether legal or ideal, would deserve to be dissected in the same way as the categories of illegal migrant, refugee, smuggler and asylum seeker have been in this work.