"Weapons of mass migration": How states exploit failure of migration policies An analysis by The Guardian

Just like the war on drugs and the war on terror, efforts at stopping population movement by force often just fuel the problem. But for many claiming to confront the perceived threat, that suits all too well. The Guardian has published an extract from the "Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything" book, shedding light on the beneficiaries of migrant crises. Caliber.Az reprints this article. 

"Look at the business of tackling the migration crisis in Europe, and you will find evidence not of some one-off failure to plan ahead, or a policy initiative gone wrong through unexpected circumstances. Rather, you face something akin to a complex crime scene where the damage, the ostensible 'mistakes', and the cover-ups have all been systematic. The perverse outcomes of the war on smuggling – including thousands of border deaths, escalating political brinkmanship and the professionalisation of the human smuggling business itself – are more than a blip or an anomaly. When policies persistently fail, we need to look not only at 'what went wrong' but also at 'what went right'– and at who is benefiting from the wreckage.

The habit of waging 'war' on everything has spread from the early days of the war on communism and the war on drugs to 'fights' against crime, terrorism, irregular migration and many more complex political problems. These wars never seem to be won and often have disastrous results, yet politicians continue to declare them. What keeps such disastrous interventions and policies ticking over? What renders them acceptable? Why do they get reinvented from one era to another? And why do we never seem to learn? Using our backgrounds in anthropology [Ruben Andersson] and history/sociology [David Keen], over recent years, we have sought to get to the bottom of these questions. Nowhere illustrates the failure of 'the war on everything' approach better than the fight against migration.

In 2010, when Ruben first arrived in Senegal to study migration to Europe, he was struck by something people kept telling him. Four years earlier, in one of Europe’s earlier 'migration crises', 30,000 west-African migrants had arrived at the Spanish Canary Islands in wooden fishing boats, sparking a large-scale deportation campaign. On the outskirts of Dakar, the capital of Senegal, one of those deported from the Canaries told Ruben that he was, as an anthropologist studying migration, part of a system that was profiting from the migrants’ misery. 'There’s lots of money in illegal migration,' said the deportee, pointing out, on long walks through his seaside neighbourhood, all those who fed off this system: academics, journalists, NGOs and European and Senegalese maritime forces stationed just beyond this fishing community.

At the time, the word on the street was that Senegalese politicians, both locally and nationally, were using Spanish aid money – meant to ensure Senegal’s collaboration in deportations and border patrols – for their own private or political gain. In coming years, the pattern would be replicated as major partners in European immigration control – such as Libya, Turkiye and Sudan – leveraged their promised cooperation, not just for a windfall of aid, but also for wider strategic and economic ends.

Seeing this system in action, we developed an analysis of the political economy of war and of security operations such as deportation and border patrols – asking the old question 'Cui bono' [Who gains?], as well as 'In whose wider interests are the operations staged?' There was an intriguing, if disturbing, challenge of joining the dots between various disastrous interventions, from the wars on drugs and smugglers to the war on terror, where we had observed a very similar pattern. In a variety of war-like interventions, regional powers have been gaming ostensible attempts to eliminate a perceived threat, carving out impunity and making a profit. At the same time, pursuing these various wars and fights has routinely fuelled – or simply displaced – the problem. For a wide range of actors who claim to confront the perceived threat, things keep going wrong in the right way.

Escalating the fights, escalating the demands

One of the most important gamers was Libya’s Col Muammar Gaddafi. By the early 2000s, he had already discovered that he sat on a prize possession. Amid the international arms embargo, the Brotherly Leader had turned his eyes to his African neighbours: sleeping in a great Bedouin tent in New York before the UN general assembly was all of a piece with his newfound role as chief spokesperson for downtrodden African nations breaking free from old colonial shackles. He had established close business links with states in the Sahel and invited African workers into Libya’s booming economy.

As Italy and its northern neighbours anxiously began considering the Mediterranean for signs of migrant boats, however, Gaddafi started seeing his country’s African workers as a double asset. On the one hand, workers could still be exploited; on the other, they could be weaponised. By 2008, a Friendship Treaty had been struck between Gaddafi and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, which was worth $5bn over 20 years. Supposedly aimed at addressing colonial wrongs, it smoothed the path for outsourced border patrols in the central Mediterranean. Even so, Gaddafi, who had by now fully grown into Reagan’s caricature of him as the 'mad dog of the Middle East', escalated the rhetoric and threatened that Europe would 'turn black' unless more favours were forthcoming. And come they did: Libya emerged from the international cold thanks in no small part to Gaddafi’s migration manoeuvres. He also succeeded in presenting himself as someone who could help in the 'war on terror' – not least because of his role in stirring up terror.

Then came war. Amid the Arab spring, Nato and assorted Middle Eastern countries intervened militarily in the scramble for power in Libya. The violent removal of Gaddafi and the conflict that followed led to a cascade of displacement and migration; it also escalated the gaming and brinkmanship. Nato missiles had ended his previously cosy relationship with European leaders, but Gaddafi did not give up on his threats and cajoling in the dying days of his regime – quite the opposite. Europe would be 'invaded' by migrants, he said, unless Nato backed down; his troops tried to make good on his threat, forcing African workers to board unseaworthy vessels at gunpoint.

In the following years, assorted warlords have kept up this tradition by simultaneously combating and facilitating migration, taking handsome rewards while threatening Europe with further 'invasions'. In one notable episode, one militia leader in the north-western Libyan city of Zawiya, known as Al Bija, was found by journalists to be managing the smuggling market by taking a substantial cut from any departing boats before promptly 'rescuing' those who had not paid, towing them back to land and imprisoning them in brutal detention centres run by his own tribe. The double game of migration control – extracting cash and impunity by issuing threats, while simultaneously offering to remedy them – was, by the time of Libya’s conflict, a high-stakes scramble for profit and power.

Gaming Europe’s migration fixation

The stakes were to rise higher still. In 2015, Turkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was in a tight spot: he had called snap elections and was under siege from all sides. But Erdoğan held the trump card: migration. Though the details were to remain murky, by spring 2016 it was becoming clear that threatening to turn on the tap of onward migration was an important tactic for the Turkish leadership. [Questions still remain over Russia’s role in fomenting the crisis as part of its Syria manoeuvres.] The 2015-16 border crisis would strengthen Erdoğan’s grip on power as he extracted promises from the EU – only partially met, but that did not particularly matter for short-term electoral purposes – on visa-free travel for Turkish citizens and billions of euros of financial support for Turkiye’s refugee operations.

Selling yourself as an unreliable bulwark against migration had by 2015 become big business. 'Weapons of mass migration' is how one scholar, Kelly Greenhill, has labelled this use of migrants as a geopolitical tool. Whatever we call this gaming of migration and forced displacement, it is a remarkably effective way for less powerful states to exert pressure on their stronger counterparts. One further example comes from Morocco, which in 2022 managed finally to shift Spain’s policy on occupied Western Sahara in its favour in exchange for further migration enforcement – halting, at least temporarily, the brinkmanship that had fomented politically motivated 'border crises' at the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, as well as in the strait of Gibraltar, over previous decades. The costs of this bargaining were regularly borne by migrants; for instance, in June 2022 at least 37 migrants died between the Spanish and Moroccan fences at Melilla, where they had been trapped and teargassed in a security operation subsequently covered up by both sides.

In her study, Greenhill argues that certain features of liberal democracies – including respect for rights and open democratic debate – make them particularly vulnerable to being played. However, we have seen in Libya and Turkiye how the illiberal tendency of treating migration as a threat has been a key part of the game. Once fighting migration has come to be seen as a paramount political objective in destination states, and once huge resources are being spent on this endeavour, buffer states will spot vulnerabilities and opportunities to play on this perceived existential threat, selectively closing and opening the gates.

UNHCR figures as of 2023 confirm a broader trend: 83% of refugees worldwide are hosted by low- and middle-income countries, and 72% by countries neighbouring conflict zones. Turkiye, topping the list of global refugee hosts, can reasonably argue that it has done its 'fair share' in hosting more than 3.6 million refugees, mostly from neighbouring Syria. When larger refugee hosts leverage human displacement, they are using the 'weapons of the weak', to use anthropologist James Scott’s term, against a more powerful counterpart. While border security has spectacularly failed to address international migration [and has generated a raft of destructive consequences], it has nevertheless 'succeeded' in keeping refugees away from the protection that might have been provided by the richest states, at least for some time. Yet this is far from the only shortsighted gain for destination states. Another comes from the potent politics of distraction and drama that border control provides.

The burgeoning business of border security

It is worth reflecting on how swiftly borders became bulwarks against unwanted migration. The end of the cold war once promised, to optimistic liberal thinkers, a borderless world; instead, it gifted us an increasingly globalised border business. Not only are more and more partner states being enrolled in border security, but many countries are also instigating their own border security fixations. Barriers are today separating neighbours not just in the west but far beyond. While there were 15 walls at nation-state borders around the world at the end of the cold war, the total had risen to more than 70 barely three decades later. Unlike older border fortifications, the new ones are not built to keep state enemies away [or to keep citizens in, as in the case of the Berlin Wall]: they are aimed at keeping people out.

Calls for 'security' and 'border protection' justify not just the building of walls but also a wider architecture of control, separation and surveillance at national borders, and well beyond them. Drones have been repurposed from the 'war on terror' for border surveillance in the US and the Mediterranean; complex offshore detention and sea patrolling agreements have been rolled out from Australia to the Atlantic; advanced radar equipment and satellite surveillance have proven a boon for Europe’s defence industry; and in the increasing number of border security 'expos', security firms have presented their customers with ever more intrusive technologies– heartbeat scanners, oxygen detectors, ground sensors, online surveillance – in a market that, according to one estimate, will soon be worth more than $65bn. Meanwhile, the budget of the EU border and coast guard agency, Frontex, shot up from €19m in 2006 to more than €750m by 2022, a year in which it was facing mounting scandal over support for illegal Greek 'pushbacks' at sea.

The US, as so often, has led the way in this trend while actively heating the global border security market – with the budget of the US Border Patrol increasing almost tenfold in the past three decades, from $363m in 1993 to nearly $4.9bn by 2021. While these sums are still small relative to military expenditure, the remarkable growth rate of the US Border Patrol’s budget is strongly related to the wider security marketplace, with great scope for synergies, 'dual-use' technology, seed funding and more, across civilian policing and military sectors. At the heart of this complex sits the vast Department for Homeland Security bureaucracy.

Besides the escalating border security investments, politicians have put huge amounts of time, money and effort into the complicated business of getting tough on migration – and being seen to get tough.

Yet this has massively backfired on a practical level. Douglas Massey, a leading migration scholar, has found that, since the 1980s, vast expenditure on border security has gone hand in hand with a large growth of undocumented migration within the US.

The reason is remarkably simple: as it became much harder for seasonal migrant workers to circulate back 'home', owing to harsh border controls and barriers, people stayed. So why, if border controls were backfiring so spectacularly, were successive administrations so committed to them?

The political profits of fighting migration

The gap between rhetoric and reality in migration policy has been especially notable when it comes to fighting migration. The political gains from a strong stance on borders are clear, even when politicians fail to achieve the outcomes they seek. Some years ago in the US, the political scientist Peter Andreas described this as a 'border game' with various layers: from the spectacle – and distraction – of border enforcement on the political level, to the institutional funding game, through to the cat-and-mouse game at the border itself.

Racism came to play a prominent role here, reflecting a longer history of racial exclusion, fed by a fear-based narrative. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan said undocumented migration was 'a threat to national security', with 'terrorists and subversives ... just two days’ driving time' from the Texas border, and communist agents ready 'to feed on the anger and frustration of recent Central and South American immigrants'. Massey is among those who have pointed out how, over the decades that followed, a racialised 'Latino threat narrative was manufactured and sustained by an expanding set of self-interested actors who benefited from the perpetuation of an immigration crisis'. This new migration pattern also had clear winners within the wider economy, as an undocumented and deportable labour force was even more exploitable than its legal predecessors.

A large part of the incentive to keep escalating the fight, in the US and Europe, concerned the gains to be had from fixating on and fighting illegal migration. Especially in the US, border closures have brought economic gains in rendering the cross-border labour force increasingly exploitable. Meanwhile, the political gains are twofold. On the one hand, a tough nationalist message attracts voters; on the other, it provides a distraction from problems that governments cannot or do not want to solve, including inequality, economic insecurity and environmental catastrophe. Irregular migration by land and sea was a boon for this kind of politics in Europe. Yet the numbers have in general been relatively small, 2015 excluded. Most irregular migration in Europe occurs when people overstay their visas, as the European Commission itself acknowledges, while regular immigration dwarfs land and sea arrivals.

Governments and interior ministries have seen fit, for their own political and institutional reasons, to treat some human movement as a security problem to be solved with force. Instead of looking at the complex drivers of migration – including persistent demand for workers – all politicians had to do was to be seen to address the arrivals. Meanwhile, new actors spotted an opportunity.

How the war on migration feeds the smuggling business

European leaders have been keen to frame their border security efforts as a war on smugglers, especially since 2015, when smugglers [frequently mislabelled as mafia or traffickers] were conveniently assigned the blame for a set of horrific shipwrecks near the Italian and Maltese coasts. Of course, we shouldn’t paint smugglers in a rosy light; theirs is usually a cut-throat business. Yet it is a business that has grown larger and more violent on the back of border enforcement, not just in Europe but worldwide.

In north Africa and the Sahel, the small-scale smuggling of earlier years, often run by migrants themselves, has increasingly given way to organised criminal gangs. In Libya, smugglers have held migrants and refugees hostage and even tortured them until their families pay release fees. The taller the barriers, the more captive your market, as 'customers' have nowhere left to turn except into the hands of professional criminal organisations.

We can put this in economic terms, as Customs and Border Protection [CBP] officials in the US are keen to do themselves. In presentations, CBP economists have asserted, like their European counterparts, that the aim of enforcement is to destroy the smugglers’ business model. This involves increasing the cost of smuggling to the point where revenue takes a hit, making it a less attractive business. Yet what this does in practice is favour smuggling economies of scale. A systemic view, if officials had wished to consider it, would tell them that the fight against migration and the war on smugglers would produce more of precisely that which they said they wanted to curtail: more dangerous migration scenarios and stronger criminal smuggling operations.

This is precisely what happened in Libya, after the fall of Gaddafi. As one report noted in 2017, 'The coastguard, detention centres and key branches of the fragile Libyan state’s security apparatus are largely run by militias, some deeply involved in the illicit economy,' with these militias 'creating a protection market around human smuggling before eventually taking over the business directly'. The political and economic games around European – especially Italian – relationships with the militias have been complex and murky. However, it was becoming clear around this time that external involvement and encouragement were strengthening the power of the militias, who, like many border guards, could play the dual role of poacher and gamekeeper along Libya’s coasts. The strengthening of militias and the ensuing turf battles among them were contributing to Libyan instability.

In impoverished Mali and Niger, various political leaders have sent clear signals that unless they receive the required political support and economic capital, a migratory crisis will ensue. States such as Morocco and Turkiye regularly turn on and off the migratory tap to strengthen their hand in negotiations with the EU. In all these cases, authoritarian leaders, interior ministries, and abusive security forces have been the big winners in the fight against migration – gaining power, recognition and money. Those who have suffered most have been migrants and citizens in these countries, while regional stability has been weakened.

In 2020, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus – despite his regime’s incipient working arrangement with the Frontex border agency – was channelling refugees to a frontier no-man’s-land where Polish guards fought them back. By this stage, EU leaders and the European Commission had cottoned on to what they called the 'instrumentalisation' of migration. Their argument, probably quite correct, was that Lukashenko was seeking to destabilise the EU through uncontrollable migration flows. Yet instead of accounting for its own role in the blatant gaming at the borders, the EU used this incident to propose what amounted to pushbacks in cases where migration was being 'instrumentalised'.

On the central Mediterranean migration route, it is not only Gaddafi’s successors who have continued to instrumentalise migration. So have Italian politicians, who have used these threats at face value to ramp up anti-migration rhetoric, to rally the voter base, and to put blame on the EU – and human smugglers – for the debacle.

This kind of crisis politics has been accompanied by a growing tendency to shift blame on to rescue initiatives on the open sea, with repeated shipwrecks and deaths as a result. On the southern border of the US, while Mexico has often been less willing to stoke the problem in the way Europe’s neighbours have done, this has in no way dented the political appetite in Washington DC for manipulating border crises and finding new groups to blame. A wide range of wars and fights – whether in relation to migration, terrorism, drugs or crime – has created perverse incentives. One is tempted to say that failure has become the new success".