Valeria Luiselli's latest novel "Början Mitt Slut" begins in Sicily. In the parks, newly arrived migrants sit and wait while the Italian election posters scream at them to go back to Africa. It was in Sicily that the protagonist's own grandmother once stepped on a boat westward never to return: "It is hard to imagine that just a hundred years ago Europeans went to Latin America to escape poverty. And hard to understand that, now that they are on the receiving end of migration, they behave as if it never happened to them, as if it could never happen to them again," she thinks.
In our own reality, babies are drowning at the EU's borders, while the Union's politicians display an astonishing arrogance in the face of migration as a reality and a future risk. The others are on the outside, we are on the inside. That heat waves, fires and parched soils will make it impossible to live also in parts of Europe does not change those laws. Recently, the European Commission proposed that the border guard agency Frontex should have an extended mandate. The number of border guards is to grow to 30,000, with a reserve force that can be deployed if needed. The Sweden Democrat Charlie Weimers is among those who are delighted, but he regrets that a bureaucracy is being forced on the border guards to ensure that "illegal and criminal" migrants get their "so-called" basic human rights satisfied (Expressen 4/11).
Frankly, the Weimers need not worry. In the year that the UN Refugee Convention turns 75, the right to asylum has more or less lost in Europe, with "fast tracks" eroding the right to a fair and individual process. In the new book "Age of security. The rise of a global obsession", the Oxford researcher Ruben Andersson also states that the political space around the issue of migration control seems to have ended - there is simply nothing to discuss. "Instead, the border has become an arena where mainstream politicians and the extreme right compete to show off their dystopian fantasies," he writes (my translation). So obvious is the border as over-ideology that the image of people in motion becomes by definition a threat.
"This is nothing less than an invasion," Jimmie Åkesson wrote on Instagram after this summer's border incident in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Donald Trump spoke of war, and Expressen used the phrase "migrant invasion" in its news reporting (Facebook, 30/7). Otherwise, the reactions mostly resembled an embarrassing charade. Ulf Kristersson was "concerned" and warned of "new migration chaos" even though it should be obvious that people in Ceuta in one way or another became pawns in Morocco's geopolitical game. A tougher approach combined with the fact that more and more of the migration policy is being outsourced to countries outside the Union simply means an increased risk of the countries at the EU's external border "being subject to blackmail", as DN's Sigrid Melchior stated in an analysis (6/8).
The idea of so-called externalization, where rich countries outsource border control and asylum management, has gone from fringe idea to reality in recent decades. In perhaps the most famous example, Britain was finally forced to scrap the plan to start deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, but they are not alone in the ambition to more or less sell unwanted people to poorer countries. Last year, Australia signed an agreement with the small island nation of Nauru, which will accept migrants who have nowhere else to go in return for compensation.
A central aim of the EU's new asylum rules is for member states to be able to send people to deportation camps outside the union, and the work is already underway - with Denmark at the forefront. The research institute Sieps writes that the model, among other things, raises the question of how the EU should be able to guarantee that people are not sent on from the "safe" third countries they have been referred to - which would go against the very essence of the right to asylum.
In an essay in the magazine Brand, economic historian Rasmus Fleischer compares this type of human dumping with the child auctions that were held in Sweden until the beginning of the 20th century. "As soon as a brutalized policy makes it possible to ignore all humanity and the formalities of international law, what remains then? The market's coldly rational solution: give the unwanted people a negative price. Pay to avoid them," he writes (no. 3/2025).
Barely ten years later, it was reported how Libyan soldiers, at gunpoint, forced refugees into rickety boats on the Mediterranean Sea, intended as projectiles aimed at Europe in an extreme form of dehumanization.
If different types of "partnerships" are one side of this coin, the other is to use migrants as a regular weapon. Political scientist Kelly M. Greenhill shows in the book "Weapons of mass migration" (Cornell University Press, 2010) how "migration-driven" pressures have been an unexpectedly successful method of getting one's way for more than half a century.
When the EU lifted its long-standing arms embargo against Libya in 2004, the maneuver was directly linked to stopping the influx of North African migrants. Greenhill writes that Europe's fear of uncontrolled immigration allowed Gaddafi to get the world's largest political union where he wanted - by manipulating and exploiting ongoing refugee crises. Barely ten years later, it was reported how Libyan soldiers, at gunpoint, forced refugees into rickety boats on the Mediterranean Sea, intended as projectiles aimed at Europe in an extreme form of dehumanization. This is nothing strange - our NATO brother in Ankara is playing with the same cards.
When politicians and the media talk about an "invasion", they link to a long tradition of dehumanizing language when it comes to migrants. The Swedish favorite "volumes" is often associated with various types of natural phenomena and disasters, where migrants are likened to "currents" and "waves". In the summer of 2015, David Cameron spoke about how a "swarm" was trying to get to the UK. That same year, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble warned that the country was about to trigger an "avalanche" of refugees. And now it is war.
The idea of migrants as a kind of invasion force is not just a rhetorical figure. In the book "Violent borders. Refugees and the right to move", researcher Reece Jones describes how the militarization of borders has been an obvious trend in recent decades, with ever-growing funding, more employees on the ground and increasingly sophisticated surveillance technology.
In its annual report on asylum and migration, which came out in early November, the EU boasts of having "the world's most advanced border control system" and that the European model for dealing with migrants is "delivering good results". Frontex, which is now the EU's largest agency, has since its inception twenty years ago gone from a budget of six million euros to just over a billion. In propaganda videos that mix aesthetics from car commercials and action films, Frontex soldiers declare this autumn that they guarantee the EU's security "day and night, in rain and snow".
The war is becoming permanent, and with Donald Trump in the White House, ICE's armed forces have induced a state of siege in many places in the United States.
During large parts of the 20th century, borders were mostly lines on a map, which were basically only strictly guarded in wartime. Borders such as those between North and South Korea or India and Pakistan have been exceptions, while the new global ideal is rather the border between the United States and Mexico. There you protect yourself not against enemy armies but individuals who seek protection or a better life.
In the case of the United States, there are also clear links to traditional warfare, where tracking technology created for use in Afghanistan and Iraq has been given new life in the national border guard. The war is becoming permanent, and with Donald Trump in the White House, ICE's armed forces have induced a state of siege in many places in the United States. Even in the EU, the most extreme seems to have become normal. About ten years ago, the Greek right-wing extremist Thanos Plevris said that secure borders require dead refugees. Since last year, he has been Greece's migration minister.
There is simply an obvious function of militarizing borders against people seeking a better life – and of likening individuals crossing a border to an invasion.
You want to give yourself the right to shoot to kill.
