Migration: Border Control and Security

Since the 'refugee crisis' in 2015, EU Member States have claimed to represent or act on behalf of the Union when regulating migration. Some measures were outside or at the margins of the EU legal order. How can Member States reconcile their double bind as members of the Union and as sovereign nation states? Enriching legal doctrine with constitutional theories, this book argues that EU law is still able to uphold the rule of law, in line with its foundational promise, while also empowering the Member States to govern migration in the common European interest.

Esta monografía ofrece un análisis riguroso, actualizado y crítico del régimen jurídico de las fronteras exteriores y la política común de visados en la Unión Europea. A partir de un enfoque multidisciplinar, se examina la evolución histórica y normativa de ambos instrumentos, con especial atención a sus fundamentos jurídicos, instituciones clave y sistemas tecnológicos asociados. Se abordan en detalle el papel de agencias como FRONTEX o EU-LISA, así como los sistemas SIS, VIS, ETIAS y SES, esenciales para garantizar la seguridad sin menoscabar la movilidad. La obra incorpora los desarrollos normativos más recientes, y ofrece una reflexión profunda sobre los desafíos contemporáneos, incluyendo la tensión entre soberanía nacional y solidaridad europea, la externalización del control migratorio o el impacto de la inteligencia artificial. Dirigido tanto a especialistas como a personas interesadas en el futuro de la gobernanza europea, el estudio defiende la necesidad de un modelo fronterizo eficiente, ético y respetuoso con los derechos fundamentales, capaz de responder a los retos del siglo XXI sin renunciar a los valores fundacionales de la Unión.

This book critically explores the complexities of intra-Schengen border control and migration dynamics within Europe. It provides a comprehensive analysis of how various actors, including border officials and state apparatuses, interact in managing mobility and enforcing controls. The theoretical foundation draws on Foucault's concept of the dispositif, examining how borders are enforced through a combination of legal frameworks, discourses, and on-the-ground practices. The book emphasises the importance of discretion in border control, arguing that it plays a pivotal role in shaping decisions at both the organisational and street levels. It delves into the experiences of Dutch border control officers and the wider European context, offering a comparative analysis of Europe's intra-Schengen borderlands. By drawing on real-world case studies, it showcases the tensions between security and mobility and how migration is managed through both visible and covert policing practices. The work is grounded in rich qualitative data, collected over years of fieldwork, and addresses key debates in migration and criminology studies, particularly the evolving concept of 'crimmigration' and its implications for human rights and security policies. This book will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists, legal scholars, and political scientists alike, as well as all those engaged in studies on migration, mobility, and the European Union. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

What are the human rights obligations of Frontex and its member states at the borders of Europe? Who is responsible when the rights of people crossing those borders are breached? Those are the main questions that this open access book addresses while exploring the evolution of the European integrated border management (EIBM). The mode of administration of European borders has become a complex and polymorphous affair involving multiple actors working at different levels, with different competences and powers. In this context, borders are no longer lines on a map but enmeshed in a tapestry of different actors and technologies. This evolution not only puts to test the relationship between territory and public power, but it also requires a different understanding of the responsibility for the exercise of that power by a panoply of actors. This book addresses the challenges related to the implementation of the EIBM and the human rights responsibilities that it can trigger. It entwines two separate but interlaced discourses: the first being a reflection on the concept of EIBM and its human rights impact; the second being the question of the attribution of international responsibility for violations that occurred in the implementation of the EIBM.

The Routledge Handbook of European Borderlands revisits and reassesses the concept of borderlands in Europe, balancing case-specific perspectives with rich theoretical and conceptual avenues of research. The significance of the transformations after the fall of the Soviet Union made European borders central to the emergence of border studies as an emerging field of study, and since then, the financial crisis, rising migration, Brexit, and the Covid-19 pandemic have continued to make European borderlands a focus of research, national and international policy, media, and everyday concern. Bringing together a wealth of cross-cutting and empirically rigorous international scholarship, the handbook investigates European borderlands as spaces of encounter and political, social, and cultural change. This book depicts borderlands as both fundamentally relational and ambiguous products of fanciful geographical imagination, as well as real and lived places in which communities engage in different forms of integration, differentiation and contestation, at many levels of political, economic, geographic, and social interaction. Drawing on a range of different disciplinary perspectives, the handbook covers key topics such as security, migration, social inequality and justice, cross-border governance, cooperation and development, environmental threats, health and disease, and conflicts over citizenship, sovereignty, and territory. This handbook provides the perfect guide to understanding the multilayered complexities surrounding borderlands, and as such will be of interest to researchers across the fields of geography, politics, migration studies, international relations, anthropology, sociology, tourism, cultural studies, and European studies.

This book explores the processes and practices of the securitization and de-securitization of European infrastructures and how political institutions interact with security and insecurity. Expert contributors address distinct areas, from border politics and biosecurity to health governance and law and border control enforcement, to examine the various ways in which infrastructures are envisioned, designed, negotiated and built. They explore how 'infrastructuring' contributes to emergent forms of European identity, integration, and statehood. The book will appeal to scholars and students of Science and Technology Studies, Political Sociology, Critical Security Studies, International Relations, European Integration Studies, Infrastructure Studies, or Critical Border and Migration Studies

This book examines the role of European Union (EU) agencies in the EU's external border control policy, looking at how the empowerment of particular bodies has shaped the management of their external borders and influenced EU governance more broadly. Focusing on four key aspects of agency involvement – joint sea operations, information access, inter-agency cooperation, and international action – the book sheds light on the daily policy implementation and operational collaboration at the EU’s external borders and beyond. It finds that the agencies increasingly demonstrated the capacity to sway decision-making and implementation from within. This has led to a reduction in Member States’ policy autonomy, an increase in EU oversight over border management, and the institutionalisation of a common administrative capacity at the EU level, leading to a shift in the EU’s approach to border management towards integration.

How the UK's immigration detention and deportation system turns people into monetized, measurable units on a supply chain In the UK's fully outsourced "immigration detainee escorting system," private sector security employees detain, circulate and deport foreign national citizens. Run and organized like a supply chain, this system dehumanises those who are detained and deported, treating them as if they were packages to be moved from place to place and relying on poorly paid, minimally trained staff to do so. In Supply Chain Justice, Mary Bosworth offers the first empirically grounded, scholarly analysis of the British detention and deportation system. Drawing on four years of extensive ethnographic research, Bosworth examines what keeps the system in place and whether it might be effectively challenged. Told by a senior manager that "this is a logistics business," Bosworth documents how the public and private sectors have built a supply chain in which people's humanity is transformed both symbolically and tangibly through administrative processes and bureaucracy into monetized, measurable units. Like all logistics, the system has failure built into it. The contract does not seek to eradicate risk but rather to manage it, determining responsibility and apportioning a financial value to such "failures" as delay, escape, aborted flight or death in custody. Front-line workers and managers depoliticise and normalise their efforts by casting their duties in familiar bureaucratic terms, with targets, "service level agreements" and "key performance indicators." Focusing on first-hand accounts from workers and lengthy observation and document analysis, Bosworth explores the impact of border logistics in order to ask what it would take to build inclusive infrastructures rather than those designed to exclude.

This book focuses on the role mainstream humanitarian organizations have in the functioning of the border management system on the southern European border (i.e. Italy). In particular, the author analyses the mainstream humanitarian organizations and NGOs (i.e. Red Cross, the UNHCR, Medici per I Diritti Umani – MEDU, Terre des Hommes and Oxfam) and their role within and beyond the implementation of the so-called ‘hotspot approach’ in Sicily. This work suggests that a vision of humanitarian action as just anti-political and complicit with migration control can be questioned. This book suggests that a) mainstream organizations have been able to politicize their positioning and actions vis-à-vis authorities when migration policies have been tightened; b) mainstream organizations’ political borderwork has helped to promote incremental change in the status quo rather than a radical one. Finally, this book suggests that the discourses and practices of mainstream and grassroots actors seems to be characterized by similar contradictions.

This book provides a broad geopolitical and legal analysis of the longer-term dispute between the Belarusian regime and the European Union, played out through conflict on the Polish-Belarusian border, which started in 2021. Although Poland finds itself at the center of this conflict, the book covers all countries whose territorial integrity has been affected, revealing a Belarusian regime taking advantage of the refugee crisis as a tool of hybrid warfare for destabilizing the political situation. As such, it also examines the role of Russia and its influence by means of its Belarusian neighbor, exposing the underlying motivations and mechanisms used by the Lukashenko regime towards the European community. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Central and Eastern European politics, EU politics, migration politics/studies, global governance, human rights, crisis management and, more broadly, to international relations, security studies, and international law.

The digitalisation of border security is reshaping migration governance across Europe and beyond, transforming border areas through the deployment of advanced surveillance technologies. Greece and Spain, as critical gateways, have become testing grounds for drones and remote monitoring systems designed to enforce borders from afar. In a walk down extreme border zones, this book delves into the rise of digital patrolling, a key facet of this transformation, offering a multidisciplinary analysis grounded in human rights law, comparative migration law, and critical migration studies. By exploring how digital patrolling impacts the ‘filtering’ of human mobility, it uncovers the legal and societal fallouts of Europe’s shifting borders, highlighting the tension between security measures and fundamental rights.

This book critically challenges the usual territorial understanding of borders by examining the often messy internal, transborder, ambiguous, and in-between spaces that co-exist with traditional borders. By considering those less visible aspects of borders, the book develops an inclusive understanding of how contemporary borders are structured and how they influence human identity, mobility, and belonging. The introduction and conclusion provide theoretical and contextual framing, while chapters explore topics of global labor and refugees, unrecognized states, ethnic networks, cyberspace, transboundary resource conflicts, and indigenous and religious spaces that rarely register on conventional maps or commonplace understandings of territory. In the end, the volume demonstrates that, despite being "invisible" on most maps, these borders have a very real, material, and tangible presence and consequences for those people who live within, alongside, and across them.

The book provides a holistic review, presenting a multi-stakeholder, multi-disciplinary, international, and evidence-based approach to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in migration. The book brings together different views and multifaceted responses to ICT-based migration management, examining their overlap, conflict, and synergies. The book is a major addition to the field, tackling important debates concerning humanitarianism and securitization in the reception of migrants, as well as exploring the role of digital technology in aiding migrant integration. The authors explore contentious areas such as the use of new technologies deployed on borders for migration management and border security under the umbrella of smart border solutions including drones, AI algorithms, and face recognition, which are widely criticized for ignoring the fundamental human rights of migrants. The research presented will depart from the euphoric appraisals that technology has made thingseasier for migrants and those who assist them, to critically examine the bane and boon, benefits and afflictions, highlighting the barriers, as well as the solutions, including several under-researched aspects of digital surveillance and the digital divide. This edited volume has been developed by the MIICT project, funded under the EU Horizon 2020 Action and Innovation programme, under grant agreement No 822380. Provides a positive approach to the integration of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees using Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions Offers a strategic approach to providing digital services for migrants at an EU, national and local level Bridges the gap between academia and front-line practitioners' work by providing theoretical, policy, ethical, and methodological recommendations

This book assesses data protection rules that are applicable to the processing of personal data in a law enforcement context. It offers the first extensive analysis of the LED and Regulation (EU) 2018/1725. It illustrates the challenges arising from the unclear delineation between the different data protection instruments at both national and EU level. Taking a practical approach, it exemplifies situations where the application of data protection instruments could give rise to a lowering of data protection standards where the data protection rules applicable in the law enforcement context are interpreted broadly. Given the scope of data protection instruments applied by law enforcement authorities, processing for border control, migration management and asylum, could all be impacted due to this unclear delineation between the different data protection instruments. Volume 17 in the series Hart Studies in European Criminal Law.

Postcolonial Surveillance investigates the long history of the European border regime, focusing on the colonial forerunners of today's border technologies. The book takes a longue durée perspective to uncover how Europe's colonial history continues to shape the high-tech political present and has morphed into EU border migration policies, border security, and surveillance apparatuses. It exposes the racial hierarchies and power relations that form these systems and highlights key moments when the past and present interact and collide, such as in panoptic surveillance, biopolitical registers, biometric sorting, and deterrent media infrastructure. The technological genealogies assembled in this book reveal the unacknowledged histories that had to be rejected for the seemingly clean, unbiased, and neutral technologies to emerge as such.

In an era marked by rising securitarian policies and contested human mobility, Borders, Migrations, and Human Rights offers a rigorous and interdisciplinary examination of the complex relationship between state sovereignty, migration, and fundamental rights. Edited by Maurizio Ambrosini, Marilisa D’Amico, and Emilia Perassi, this volume brings together leading scholars to analyze the resurgence of border enforcement as a central political priority, often at the expense of international legal obligations and human dignity.Drawing from sociology, law, history, psychology, and literary studies, the book interrogates the evolving functions of borders—not only as physical demarcations but as sites of legal, political, and social contestation. Contributors explore topics such as the securitization of migration, the constitutional rights of migrants, EU border policies, the criminalization of solidarity, and the narratives of border-crossing in literature and cultural discourse. Through this multi-faceted lens, the volume reveals how contemporary border practices reshape democratic societies, challenge human rights principles, and expose the persistent tensions between national security and universal justice.A product of the CRC “Migrations and Human Rights” initiative at the University of Milan, this book is essential reading for scholars, policymakers, and advocates engaged in the urgent debates on migration governance and human rights in the 21st century.

Few places are more revealing than the Alps to grasp the uneven EU core-periphery dynamics intrinsic to the EU border regime. In 2015, the reintroduction of controls at northern Italian borders, as a response to asylum seekers' mobility, gave rise to a series of conflicts, contradictions and solidarities which this book explores. The ethnographic analysis of the everyday life of the French/Italian and Austrian/Italian borders makes visible the impacts of governance strategies which promote social polarization to contain potentially subversive moments of disruptions and transgressions. By contextualizing the governance of borders and migration in a broader framework, which includes the governance of EU states' debt, Alpine Border Conflicts focuses on the effects of border regimes not only on migrants but also on EU societies.

This book explores how spontaneous volunteers disrupt the politics and practices of managing the movement of life seekers. Drawing on rich empirical material from the 2015 Greek refugee crisis, it reveals how these unaffiliated actors challenge humanitarian systems shaped by neoliberal logic and border violence. Through a multimethod approach--including autoethnography, interviews, and participatory observation--the book traces how spontaneous volunteers expose the failures of international organisations and states to uphold human rights. It shows how their presence unsettles dominant narratives, disrupts illiberal governance, and surfaces the emotional and moral cost of crisis response. Chapters examine the criminalisation of aid, the commodification of humanitarian values, and the psychosocial toll on those who step in where institutions fall short. Situated in Critical Development Studies, this book offers interdisciplinary insights relevant to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers working on solidarity, humanitarianism, security, and global governance.