Description
The European hostile stance towards migration at state level begins in the late 1960s ‘with a number of very inelegant and frankly racially discriminatory measures’ and other restrictive laws. Recent critical scholarship has established the racialised nature of this while tracing how imperialist ways of thinking, Eurocentric stereotypes and colonial mentalities still persist in EU border security, in securitised representations of immigration and in the regulation of inclusion and exclusion of migrants. This paper engages with this long EU border security history of constructing and excluding racialised subjectivities to inquire into its relation with human rights violations and to argue that it reaches its epitome in the New EU Pact on Migration and Asylum. It will explore the Pact’s racial and colonial undertones, considering in particular its external dimension and EU’s relationship with third countries. ‘A colonial approach’ according to UNHCR (2021), this externalisation of EU border security responsibilities, the paper argues, shows the serious racialised nature and effects of EU border security in the way it increasingly conflates mobility, crime and security, leading to the criminalisation of migration or ‘crimmigration’, but also to violence against migrants and their rights.
