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Abstract

This commentary demonstrates how the risk analysis reports of Frontex (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency) invert deviance and blame by lumping together smugglers, refugees and migrants and portraying the latter as responsible for their own suffering at Europe’s borders while obscuring the role of restrictive migration policies and border controls in producing irregularised migration in the first place. Showing how this discursive framing furthers the securitisation of migration and displaces accountability for border deaths, the author argues that it is important to question the objectivity of Frontex’s risk analyses since they contribute to normalising securitised border controls in response to irregularised migration.

Keywords

border deaths Europe’s borders Frontex irregularised migration risk analysis

Introduction

With EU member states’ adoption of the New Pact on Migration and Asylum in May 2024, Europe’s ‘fight against irregular migration’ has gained renewed efforts. The pact introduces a host of new security measures aimed at curbing unwanted migration, including, amongst others: screening of all ‘irregularly’ arriving refugees and migrants to determine whether they pose a health or security risk; a mandatory border procedure for asylum applicants from countries with a recognition rate lower than 20 per cent, where they will be detained at the border until their application has been processed; as well as a separate legal regime during declared ‘crises’, which allows member states to derogate from the existing legal framework in order to cope with the number of arrivals. The pact is hence set to make the journey to Europe more difficult for people fleeing poverty and persecution. These restrictive policies stem from policymakers’ treatment of irregularised migration as a problem of crime or even a security threat, despite civil society actors’ critique of their de-humanising effects and scholarly evidence that they are counterproductive, producing more irregularised migration and deaths at Europe’s borders rather than less.¹

At the heart of Europe’s ‘fight against irregular migration’ is the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex. It has been criticised for fundamental rights violations since its first operations off the West African coast in 2005, being engulfed in a mediatised pushback scandal in 2020 which resulted in the resignation of its executive director after the EU anti-fraud office (OLAF) revealed his awareness of the violations.² Most research has accordingly focused on Frontex’s operational role in EU border control. Less research, however, has focused on Frontex’s role in providing the evidence base for EU-level decision-making in border control through its risk analyses. Risk analysis is one of Frontex’s main tasks and is aimed at informing high-level strategic, budgetary and operational decisions in EU border control. Frontex’s risk analyses are therefore an overlooked but important source of knowledge in this field, influencing policies and practices on the ground.³

This commentary demonstrates how Frontex’s risk analyses conflate smugglers, refugees and migrants and then portray the latter as deviant and at fault for their own suffering at Europe’s borders rather than restrictive border controls, which are framed as humanitarian.⁴ It builds on analysis of Frontex’s annual risk analysis reports from 2010−21, which were read in detail and coded according to overarching themes, where inversion stood out.⁵ Using critical discourse analysis, I examined how deviance and blame are inverted in the reports, identifying three discursive practices as key to this: construction, inversion and obscuring.⁶ These refer to the linguistic ways in which Frontex frames refugees and migrants as responsible for their own deaths due to their deviant behaviour, as well as how the role of securitised border controls is simultaneously obscured. These inversions displace accountability from Europe’s border regime and legitimise even more controls in response to irregularised migration – which, in turn, contributes to normalise the securitisation of migration. The following will illustrate how this occurs.

The inversion of deviance and blame in Frontex’s risk analysis

Although not a mirror inversion, a prominent discursive construction in Frontex’s risk analysis reports is that of smugglers being unscrupulous and border guards as their antithesis, which obscures fundamental right violations committed by border guards.⁷ This is evident in the 2011 report, which describes ruthless smugglers who adapt their ‘modus operandi’ to avoid detection by border guards, which includes dropping refugees and migrants close to the border at night with instructions on how to cross, taking advantage of shift changes.⁸ The report similarly constructs refugees and migrants as devious, describing their method of crossing the border simultaneously in small groups, which makes it more difficult for border guards to apprehend them. The securitisation of migration is clear here, with the report emphasising that people from nationalities that are unlikely to be returned ‘do not fear being detained’ and ‘consider detention as a stopover on their journey into the EU’.⁹

Despite this ostensibly devious behaviour, the report remarks that ‘in general, migrants did not attempt to escape or avoid apprehension’ but walked to the nearest town to be picked up by the police.¹⁰ Frontex’s difficulties in explaining this behaviour illustrates its securitised assumptions, expecting refugees and migrants to behave like criminals who would hide from the police. This is further illustrated by the report’s assertion that refugees and migrants are ‘well aware of the asylum and return policies existing in Greece’ and that they purposefully destroy their documents and claim a nationality with a higher recognition rate.¹¹ Similarly, the section entitled ‘unfounded international protection’ portrays refugees and migrants as deviant, discussing how many only ‘claim asylum’ if they are apprehended, abscond from asylum centres, or apply for asylum to ‘prolong their stay and benefit from social services’.¹² The report’s reference to refugees and migrants’ mobility as ‘modus operandi’ has criminal connotations and creates an image of scheming people who will do anything to get to Europe.

The 2012 report illustrates Frontex’s inversion of blame, underlining that the ‘persistently large number of annual illegal border-crossings . . . has created a market for criminal organizations’,¹³ blaming refugees and migrants rather than restrictive European migration and asylum policies for creating a need for this ‘illegality industry’¹⁴ in the first place. The discursive practice of obscuring is also evident in the 2013 report, which describes smugglers’ shift from large wooden fishing boats to small rubber boats as ‘increasingly put[ting] migrant lives at risk’,¹⁵ while remaining silent about the decreasing safe and legal routes provided by member states and their policy of destroying the boats. More overt inversions of deviance are evident in this report, with ‘illegal’ border crossings at the Morocco-Melilla land border described as an ‘assault over the fence’, with groups of migrants ‘jumping’ the six-meter-high fence ‘equipped with sticks and stones, which they used to threaten civil guards’.¹⁶ Here the report explicitly securitises migration, neglecting the possibility that these tools could be intended for self-defence and portraying refugees and migrants as violent rather than Europe’s militarised borders.

The 2013 report further constructs deviance by emphasising refugees and migrants’ abuse of voluntary return schemes operated by the International Organization for Migration, which provide them with a small financial compensation. It cautions that ‘the Norwegian authorities have closely monitored the system in order to detect possible misuse and to monitor the possible pull-factor effect’, temporarily exempting Belarussians and Georgians from the scheme after ‘experiencing a sudden increase in the number of asylum seekers’ from these nationals, with many applying for ‘assisted voluntary return suspiciously shortly after they were registered as asylum seekers’.¹⁷ Here refugees and migrants are constructed as deviant for taking advantage of these schemes, whereas member states’ use of money to incentivise the return of marginalised groups and calling it ‘voluntary’ is not considered devious. The frequency of these discursive inversions increases surrounding the 2015 ‘crisis’, with the 2014 report stressing that:

Tragically, this period of an intense flow of migrants between North Africa and the EU saw several major incidents of boats capsizing in the region resulting in a massive loss of life, including women and children. These events were widely reported in the media and attracted a lot of political attention to the issue of irregular migration in the Mediterranean.¹⁸

By drawing on the discursive practice of inversion, the report frames this humanitarian disaster as a political ‘issue of irregular migration’, focusing on the alleged risks posed by these arrivals rather than Europe’s role in producing this precarity. Instead, the report goes on to blame smugglers for their recklessness, refugees and migrants for their ignorance and search and rescue (SAR) operations for constituting a pull-factor for refugees and migrants since the operations are ‘undertaken ever closer to the Libyan coast’, with the ‘awareness of these measures among facilitators and migrants decreas[ing] their . . . perception of risk taken when embarking on what remains a perilous journey’.¹⁹

This scapegoating of smugglers intensifies in the 2015 report, which estimates their profits on the Eastern Mediterranean route to be between 2.5 to 4 million Euros for each journey, underlining that ‘given this level of financial gain it is important to act against this modus operandi . . . to limit the financial assets of the smuggling networks’.²⁰ Here the discursive practice of obscuring is evident, with the report not mentioning the similarly lucrative border industry and its role in creating a profit-market for smuggling²¹ or the reasons why refugees and migrants take to rickety boats when commercial flights are both safer and cheaper. Instead, smugglers serve as a convenient scapegoat for deadly European border controls, being described as ‘a significant threat to the EU . . . callously disregard[ing] the safety and human rights of migrants’ and prompting increased ‘irregular’ migration.²² This vilification of smugglers absolves Europe from accountability for what happens at its external borders and, in turn, justifies more border controls in response to irregularised migration and deaths.

Frontex’s inversion of deviance and blame continues in the 2016 report, which highlights that the large number of arrivals in 2015 was accompanied by ‘a surge in violent incidents’ at the borders, with smugglers ‘threaten[ing] border guards to recover boats or escape apprehension’ and refugees and migrants crossing the border ‘en masse’.²³ It describes smugglers as ‘forcing migrants to board already overcrowded boats’,²⁴ which is contrasted with the picture of a young, female border guard cleaning up life vests from a beach on the Greek islands, illustrating Frontex’s humanitarian border control.²⁵ Smugglers are also partly blamed for the deaths of refugees and migrants hiding in lorries, with the report framing more risk analysis as able to both ‘prevent . . . clandestine entries and reduce the number of casualties’,²⁶ portraying border guards as good Samaritans rescuing people from smugglers.²⁷ The emptiness of this humanitarian discourse is apparent, however, with the report underlining that ‘people hiding in vehicles is a growing concern of the road transport industry’, posing ‘threats to drivers, breaking into trucks and damaging loads, with inevitable economic consequences’.²⁸ This shows that Frontex is more concerned with refugees and migrants’ supposedly devious behaviour than their lives.

Illustrating the inversion of blame, the report features a section entitled ‘managing violence at the borders’, which describes the violence of smugglers, refugees and migrants but not that of border guards, as if that does not exist.²⁹ Here the discursive practice of obscuring is apparent, with the report leaving out any references to serious incidence reports (SIR) from Frontex operations, complaints received through the Complaints Mechanism and fundamental rights concerns which the Fundamental Rights Office (FRO) and Consultative Forum (CF) regularly report on. Instead, the report describes violent incidents involving large crowds of refugees and migrants as a challenge, especially since their ‘mixed composition’ render traditional crowd-control techniques unfit, with women and children being ‘purposely put in front of the groups to facilitate their progression’.³⁰

The securitisation of migration is here intense, with the report contending that refugees and migrants ‘do not stop when requested to do so by border guards . . . do not obey orders . . . and are not afraid to engage in physical contact while crossing the border’, portraying them as dangerous masses which ‘required the intervention of police authorities to restore and maintain order’.³¹ Frontex here caricatures refugees and migrants as unruly intruders with the same ruthless attitude as their smugglers, which further serves to conflate the categories. The discursive practice of obscuring is clear here, with Frontex not acknowledging the lack of accessible regular entryways to Europe despite citing that ‘a staggering 96%’ of refugees and migrants have used smugglers to cross the Central Mediterranean.³² Although the 2017 report admits that ‘irregular migration via Libya is entirely dependent on the services of the smuggling networks’ and that ‘any activity that would disrupt or deter these groups could significantly curb the flow’, it does not consider the relaxation of border controls to remove the dependence on smugglers.³³

The discursive practice of obscuring continues in the 2020 report, which warns that refugees and migrants will ‘apply the “mass movement” modus operandi to force their way across regional borders’ in the Western Balkans, framing them as deviant while ignoring the reasons as to why they resort to such means.³⁴ The report also inverts blame, warning that ‘it has become more common for boats to reach the EU without the presence of a smuggler’, which makes the crossing more dangerous.³⁵ Implying that smugglers are becoming more unscrupulous in their attempts to make profit, Frontex does not mention that this ‘modus operandi’ is partly a consequence of Europe’s fight against smugglers, which has made migrant journeys more treacherous as smugglers need to come up with new ways to avoid detection;³⁶ or that those who take over to steer the boats to safety are frequently charged with smuggling or manslaughter (if the boat capsizes) upon arrival.³⁷

This is a clear case of the discursive practice of obscuring, with the report instead pointing out another ‘modus operandi’ of non-visa exempt nationals (especially Africans) ‘abusing’ the transit visa waiver at European airports to claim asylum, cautioning that ‘this has shown to be an increasingly popular way to gain entry to the EU/SAC which . . . does not require the services of a human smuggler’.³⁸ By drawing on the discursive practice of inversion, the report frames these people as calculated migrants who misuse a legal channel of entry, when according to its own description they are de facto asylum seekers, applying for asylum upon entry. The report also does not consider that this is a safer route than clandestine entry or smuggling, which is further testimony to the shallowness of Frontex’s humanitarian discourse. Rather, it shifts blame by arguing that:

Organised crime groups . . . business model is largely founded on the exploitation of migrants’ aspirations for a brighter future in a new country, and often conducted without any regard for the lives of those they are meant to be assisting.³⁹

Frontex’s construction of heinous smugglers thus serves as a smoke screen for Europe’s similar disregard for refugees and migrants’ lives. As Little and Vaughan-Williams point out in terms of the EU’s response to the 2015 ‘crisis’:

The re-problematisation of the problem as being essentially one of criminality – rather than as an outcome of repressive border security and migration policy and longer-term structural inequalities – depoliticises the broader political context in which the crisis can be located and understood.⁴⁰

Together, Frontex’s inversion of deviance and blame therefore not only securitises migration but contributes to normalise this securitisation by portraying it as a rational response to suffering and deaths at the borders.⁴¹ This makes it important to problematise the knowledge produced by Frontex’s risk analyses and how it is put to use, as it has very real consequences for refugees and migrants’ lives.⁴²

Conclusion

As this commentary has illuminated, Frontex’s risk analyses serve as an important evidence base for EU-level decision-making in border control. Rather than being an objective source of knowledge, however, the risk analysis reports are characterised by securitised assumptions, which in turn influence policies and practices aimed at preventing irregularised migration. Frontex discursively inverts both deviance and blame, lumping together smugglers, refugees and migrants and portraying them as deviant, with the latter being to blame for their own suffering and deaths at Europe’s borders, while simultaneously obscuring the role in this of restrictive migration policies and border controls. This framing needs to be challenged since it securitises migration and portrays more border controls rather than less as the solution to irregularised migration, which contributes to normalising securitisation. This is even more important as member states are starting to implement the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, which includes new tools in the ‘fight against irregular migration’.

Footnotes

Eline Wærp is a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedrich Alexander University’s Center for Human Rights Erlangen-Nuremberg (CHREN). Her research focuses on EU border controls and the securitisation of migration.

References

See Ruben Andersson, “Europe’s Failed ‘Fight’ against Irregular Migration: Ethnographic Notes on a Counterproductive Industry,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42, no. 7 (2016): 1055−75; and Franck Düvell, “Paths into Irregularity: The Legal and Political Construction of Irregular Migration,” European Journal of Migration and Law 13, no. 3 (2011): 275−95.

Jacopo Barigazzi and Suzanne Lynch, “EU Border Agency Chief Resigns After Critical Watchdog Probe,” Politico, April 29, 2022, https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-border-agency-fabrice-leggeri-resigns-watchdog-probe-findings-released-misconduct/.

Giuseppe Campesi, Policing Mobility Regimes: Frontex and the Production of the European Borderscape (London: Routledge, 2022); Regine Paul, “Risk Analysis as a Governance Tool in European Border Control,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Migration in Europe, ed. Agniezska Weinar, Saskia Bonjour and Lyubov Zhyznomirska (London: Routledge, 2018), 227−38.

For the ‘victim-perpetrator reversal’ as a common discursive strategy to frame migrants as responsible for their own suffering, see Ruth Wodak, “The Boundaries of What Can Be Said Have Shifted: An Expert Interview with Ruth Wodak (questions posed by Andreas Schulz),” Discourse & Society 31, no. 2 (2020): 235−44.

See Eline Waerp, “The Age of Frontex: Banal Securitization and its Normalization in European External(ized) Border Control” (PhD diss., Malmö University, 2024).

For more on discursive practices, see Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (New York: Routledge, 2015).

See also Shahram Koshravi, “The ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders,” Social Anthropology 15, no. 3 (2007): 321−34; and Jill M. Williams, “The Safety/Security Nexus and the Humanitarianisation of Border Enforcement,” The Geographical Journal 182, no. 1 (2016): 27−37.

Frontex, “Annual Risk Analysis 2011,” Risk Analysis Unit, ref. no. 4591 (Warsaw, 2011): 27.

Frontex, “Annual Risk Analysis 2011,” 28.

10.

Frontex, “Annual Risk Analysis 2011,” 27.

11.

Frontex, “Annual Risk Analysis 2011,” 28.

12.

Frontex, “Annual Risk Analysis 2011,” 29.

13.

Frontex, “Annual Risk Analysis 2012,” Risk Analysis Unit, ref. no. 5202 (Warsaw, 2012): 41−42.

14.

Ruben Andersson, Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014).

15.

Frontex, “Annual Risk Analysis Report 2013,” Risk Analysis Unit, ref. no. 4901 (Warsaw, 2013): 29.

16.

Frontex, “Annual Risk Analysis Report 2013,” 32.

17.

Frontex, “Annual Risk Analysis Report 2013,” 45.

18.

Frontex, “Annual Risk Analysis Report 2014,” Risk Analysis Unit, ref. no. 5119 (Warsaw, 2014): 32−33.

19.

Frontex, “Annual Risk Analysis Report 2014,” 34.

20.

Frontex, “Annual Risk Analysis 2015,” Risk Analysis Unit, ref. no. 4613 (Warsaw, 2015): 22.

21.

See e.g. Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, “Security, Industry and Migration in European Border Control,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Migration in Europe, ed. Agniezska Weinar, Saskia Bonjour and Lyubov Zhyznomirska (London: Routledge, 2018), 239−50.

22.

Frontex, “Annual Risk Analysis 2015,” 33.

23.

Frontex, “Risk Analysis for 2016,” Risk Analysis Unit, ref. no. 2499 (Warsaw, 2016): 8.

24.

Frontex, “Risk Analysis for 2016,” 18.

25.

See also Eugenio Cusumano, “Migrant Rescue as Organized Hypocrisy: EU Maritime Missions Offshore Libya between Humanitarianism and Border Control,” Cooperation and Conflict 54, no. 1 (2019): 3−24.

26.

Frontex, “Risk Analysis for 2016,” 26.

27.

See also Polly Pallister-Wilkins, “The Humanitarian Politics of European Border Policing: Frontex and Border Police in Evros,” International Political Sociology 9, no. 1 (2015): 53−69.

28.

Frontex, “Risk Analysis for 2016,” 27.

29.

Frontex, “Risk Analysis for 2016,” 44.

30.

Frontex, “Risk Analysis for 2016,” 45.

31.

Frontex, “Risk Analysis for 2016,” 45.

32.

Frontex, “Risk Analysis for 2017,” Risk Analysis Unit, ref. no. 2133 (Warsaw, 2017): 36.

33.

Frontex, “Risk Analysis for 2017,” 8.

34.

Frontex, “Risk Analysis for 2020,” Risk Analysis Unit, ref. no. 1218 (Warsaw, 2020): 20.

35.

Frontex, “Risk Analysis for 2020,” 22.

36.

Paolo Cuttitta, “Preface: The Increasing Focus on Border Deaths,” in Border Deaths: Causes, Dynamics and Consequences of Migration Related Mortality, ed. Paolo Cuttitta and Tamara Last (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 9−20.

37.

For the case of El Hiblu 3, see Daniela DeBono and Cetta Mainwaring, “Victims without Justice, Graves without Names, Policies that Kill,” Free the El Hiblu 3 Campaign, https://elhiblu3.info/cetta-daniela.html.

38.

Frontex, “Risk Analysis for 2020,” 37.

39.

Frontex, “Risk Analysis for 2020,” 55.

40.

Adrian Little and Nick Vaughan-Williams, “Stopping Boats, Saving Lives, Securing Subjects: Humanitarian Borders in Europe and Australia,” European Journal of International Relations 23, no. 3 (2017): 546.

41.

For the role of naturalising discourses in generating hegemonic common sense, see Fairclough, Language and Power.

42.

See also Karolina Follis, “Border Management in Europe: Europeanisation and its Discontents,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Migration in Europe, ed. Agniezska Weinar, Saskia Bonjour and Lyubov Zhyznomirska (London: Routledge, 2018), 213−26; and Satoko Horii, “The Effect of Frontex’s Risk Analysis on the European Border Controls,” European Politics and Society 17, no. 2 (2016): 242−58.

Devious refugees and harmless borders? How Frontex inverts deviance and blame