The Pros And Cons Of Irregular Migration

Implications and Dangers

While it is, in fact, possible for migration to become a threat to security, it is crucial, as Hammerstad (2008) notes, to realize that the issue of forced migration can easily “become over-securitised to where it is in danger of creating threats where before there were none, while at the same time undermining the international refugee protection regime in the name of [a] claim to ‘security needs’” (pp. 1-2). As the way in which we perceive and understand an issue affects how we act on it “changing perceptions of forced migrants […] have had a significant impact not only on how we talk about refugees but also on what actions we deem appropriate and acceptable for dealing with their situation” (Hammerstad, 2011, p.

240). These actions in turn shape the discussing of the phenomenon, resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy causing serious harm to the image of migrants.
In terms of society, one of the most serious consequences of the Europeanization of migration policy is that it indirectly fuels nationalist, racist and xenophobic perception among the local population (Kaya, 2007). Securitizing the issue of migration leads to a very restrictive social interpretation of the ‘problem’. Through the identification of a common threat, the survival of the community becomes dependent upon the presence or absence of the threat, in this case migration. By identifying multiculturalism as negatively impacting on national traditions and societal homogeneity, a differentiation of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ among Europe’s citizens is promoted.
Another danger inherent to the process of securitization lies in the previously mentioned difficulty or inability of the securitizing actor to distinguish between the different types of migrants. The EU has already proven unable to make this distinction between economic migrant and asylum seekers (Jeanne Parks, 2005), which can lead to dangerous generalizations of all migrants as a whole, fuelling the notion that each migrant constitutes a potential threat to security (Aas, 2007).
Furthermore, practice shows that the securitization of migration causes additional frictions among EU member states.

The blurring of national borders has lead states to realize that their desire for order cannot be guaranteed. Irregular migration thus comes to be seen as undermining the exercise of state sovereignty, endangering public confidence in the effectiveness of its government (Koser, 2011). Additionally, the member states that are situated at the external borders feel that those states that are not are lack in taking up their responsibilities, resulting in increased suspiciousness between member states (Koser, 2011). These developments have lead to “foreigners knocking on Europe’s doors looking for better material life or freedom of prosecution find[ing] a Europe disputed along national lines and an absence of a receptive European identity” (Heinitz,

2013).
As Huysmans mentions, EU’s restrictive policy portrays
immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees as a security problem which is different from an approach by means of a policy that emphasizes that asylum is a human rights question and/or which proposes human rights instruments to deal with the issue (2000, p. 757).
This framing has serious impacts on human lives as it justifies refusing asylum seekers access to safe countries, driving more migrants into the arms of human traffickers and forcing them to risk their lives undertaking very dangerous journeys to illegally enter the EU.

Quota plans and increased border security measures may help in reducing the number of migrants entering the EU, but it will not stop them from undertaking the journey. Concurrently, the EU’s inability to set up a common coordinated and proportionate response to irregular migration “is likely to continue to feed sentiments that push individual countries to emphasize national security over international protection [making] closed borders, barbed-wire fences and maritime pushbacks, the policy norm rather than the exception” (Jeanne Parker, 2015). Such practices would not only further endanger the lives of migrant and refugees; it would also compromise the very values upon which the EU was built. As Senior Vice President of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Heather Conley asserts: "[t]he political response of countries pushing migrants out or incarcerating them for long stretches runs counter to the very values that the EU promotes, like protecting human life and the right to asylum" (Jeanne Parker,

2015).