Description
Over the years, the EU has indicated that it considers humanitarian concerns complementary to border policing in migration governance, often partnering with different intermediary orchestrators to implement both humanitarian and policing policies at its external borders. The EU has increasingly turned to the IOM and the UNHCR to implementation its ‘global approach’ to migration and has relied on both international organisations and a range of civil society actors to manage border crises. Despite existing research having offered valuable insights in EU’s increasing use of orchestrating intermediaries in migration governance, we have much to learn about why and to what effects the EU fosters partnerships with a range of orchestrating intermediaries in its external border governance. I argue that, through a hands-off approach, the EU has been ‘passing the buck’ by delegating its responsibility of care provision and migrants’ rights protection to multiple orchestrators with the goal of rendering irregular migration ‘invisible’ to the public and, in addition, disengaged from humanitarian interventions on the ground and cut resources for care provision. I further argue that, despite weak governance structures in the domain of irregular migrant care, unfavourable local contexts, and efforts to render invisible all work involving irregular migrants, orchestrating intermediaries operating on the ground continue to operate, albeit informally, to provide essential care to irregular migrants who survive perilous journeys and arrive on European shores even after resources for humanitarian assistance become limited and are allocated in a haphazard manner. I illustrate this argument with a case study of border management in the Canary Islands (Spain) during four years (2020-2024). I draw on ethnographic, interview and participant observation data (collected during 2021-2024) to offer an empirical analysis of the multi-level governance approach at Europe’s most widely used and least research port of entry for irregular migrants – the Canary Islands.
