The securitisation of European migration policies: perceptions of threat and management of risk

Over the last few decades, migration has been constructed as a process that poses threats to the security, identity and wellbeing of European states and societies, and has been the target of policies aimed at reducing the risks posed by it. While securitised discourses, politics and policy responses are often articulated at the national level, the European Union has been the locus of both discourses and practices securitising migration in the European context. As a territorial political entity with defined external borders and political institutions generating binding legal and policy arrangements on behalf of its member states, the European Union has been particularly active in the field of migration control and asylum policies. These policies, as will be demonstrated in this chapter, are not only guided — although not exclusively — by a logic of securitisation, but have had the effect of producing and reproducing migrants as security threats.