Europe

Since the 1980s, irregular migration to Europe has rapidly expanded. The perceived economic advantages, particularly in Western European countries, large-scale conflicts in Asia and the Middle East, the effects of global poverty especially in the south but also increasingly restrictive migration policies barring access to the labour market are some of the many converging factors behind the growth of this rather complex phenomenon. Over the past few years, the political turmoil in the Arab world and in particular the ongoing crisis in the Syrian Arab Republic have further exacerbated the number of undocumented migrants reaching Europe (Triandafyllidou and Maroukis, 2012; Shelley, 2014; Kuschminder, de Bresser and Siegel, 2015; McAuliffe, 2013; Salt, 2000). According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), in 2015, over 1 million irregular migrants and refugees arrived in Europe (IOM, 2015) from developing countries in Africa and Asia – the highest migration flow since the Second World War. Frontex, the European Agency for the Management of the European Union’s External Borders reported an unprecedented number of over 1.5 million irregular border crossings, the overwhelming majority of which took place at the Greek–Turkish sea border (Frontex, 2016a). In response to these developments, countries in Europe have kept their eyes fixed on their borders; managing the growing numbers of migrants entering into the continent and discouraging the influx of irregular flows has nowadays evolved into a primary policy objective (Fargues and Fandrich, 2012; Fargues, 2014).

Related Subject(s): Drugs Crime and Terrorism