More Barbwire or More Immigration, or Both? EU Migration Policy in the Nexus of Border Security Management and Neoliberal Economic Growth

Since the late 1980s a growing number of scholars, journalists, and NGOs have been employing the metaphor fortress Europe to depict what are allegedly disastrous migration policies enacted within the framework of the European Union. Today, fortress Europe has matured into a politically footloose charge, which means that Brussels and member state governments no longer enjoy the luxury of brushing it aside as the mere cry of the idealistic and hyperbolic do-gooders on the left. Rather, the portrayal of the EU as a fortress, dead set on repelling migrants from the less fortunate places of the world, now also holds sway within much of the global news media's neoliberal punditry. On one level, the fortress Europe charge is both understandable and laudable. It represents a moral and political refusal to retreat into complacency before the almost daily news images of capsized refugee boats in the Mediterranean, and the equally frequent reports of drowned Africans floating ashore on the beaches of Spain, Malta or Italy. It also represents a sobering response to the EU's twenty-year old assertion that the migration crisis somehow can be solved, or at least alleviated, by throwing more security measures at the problem; that is, more militarized border controls, barbwire, thermocameras, patrol boats, helicopters, external camps, and cooperation with countries such as Morocco and Libya to combat so-called illegal immigration.1 After all, the EU's sustained investment in security-oriented migration measures has coincided with the steady increase of migrant casualties in the Mediterranean and elsewhere.