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It is in the identification of the contemporary conditions of transnational borders as a crisis that the notion of ‘crisis’ becomes tricky. To call the flight of populations from wars, fragile states, ethnic conflicts, collapsing economies, environmental disasters, crime, violence, and the poverty of geo-political inequalities a ‘migrant crisis’ or a ‘refugee crisis’ is to risk misrecognition of the dynamics that have contributed to the problems experienced by migrants, particularly those regarded as ‘unskilled’, asylum seekers and refugees. These were the terms that dominated media and political discourses around the movement of Syrian refugees and asylum seekers in the summer of 2015 and continued to do so long after, weaving in and out of a growing ethno-nationalist populism. The Daily Mail warned repeatedly of a migration and/or refugee ‘crisis’, associating it with illegality, criminality and Islam, a phobia that has become increasingly gendered (Gray and Franck 2019). In so far as ‘crisis’ implies danger and difficulty, then these discourses signify this phenomenon as a disaster and danger not for those risking their lives but for sovereignty, governments and resident populations of migrants’ European destinations or, for the US, by Muslims and those crossing the Mexican border. Where Trump accused Mexican immigrants of being criminals and rapists in 2018 (Jacobs 2018), Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, claimed a clear correlation between ‘illegal’ immigration and terrorism. In both cases the material construction of borders became ‘spectacles’ of mythical threats to the nation and dehumanization and exclusion from it (Cantat and Rajaram 2019).

Such representation detracts, first, from the experiences and suffering experienced by those who are migrants, refugees or asylum seekers, including death at sea or suffocation in the backs of lorries. By 2016 over 3,000 refugees attempting to enter Europe by sea had drowned; worldwide it was over 4,000 (IOM 2016). Second, the idea of ‘crisis’ as portending mass migration exaggerates both the impact and the long history of migration into Europe. Between 2011 and 2016, 884,462 asylum applications were made across Europe. In fact, general international migration started to slow down a little after 2007 (OECD and UNDESA 2013) at the same time that refugee migration started to accelerate. There were 11.7 million refugees under the UNHCR’s mandate in 2013 – 1.2 million more than the previous year (UNHCR 2013). While some countries (Germany, Sweden) took proportionately more and some less (Britain took 0.06 per cent of its total population), the average amounted to only 0.25 per cent of the total European population, an easily absorbable number (figures cited in Bhambra 2017: 396–7). Indeed, immigration and asylum seeking have historically been relatively steady phenomena in Europe. Third, the crisis panic of today correlates migrants with danger, illegality, conflict, violence and terrorism. In doing so it has legitimated the ratcheting up of coercive border controls, detention and deportation policies, which now characterize immigration controls across the world: the precaritization of work and citizenship together (Geiger and Pécoud 2010). As Yuval-Davis and her colleagues argue, bordering has re-emerged as ‘a principal organizing mechanism in constructing, maintaining and controlling social and political order’ (Yuval-Davis et al. 2019: 5). As such, it affects all social groups and not simply migrants and minority groups. At the same time, it is the restrictive legal and social policies of immigration that lead to the desperate conditions in refugee camps, such as Sangatte on the French coast, and, as Alex Sager argues, that create the illegalization of immigrants and the so-called crisis:

Illegalization is closely connected to securitization in which migration is treated as primarily a security issue. The language of crisis contributes to securitization so that restrictive, coercive border controls become the norm. Measures such as offshore detention of people seeking asylum or the repatriation of refugees to more dangerous regions become more palatable when they are seen as responding to a crisis. (Sager 2020: 15)

Subscribing to a ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee’ crisis is thus to compress the biases of methodological nationalism – privileging the perspective of the nation-state – with sedentarism – seeing mobility as an unnatural state.

Yet there is a crisis in both the experiences of refugees and migrants and the abdication of responsibility by global, supranational and national governance to address this dehumanization and the wave of xenophobia that reproduces it. Global governance is about the ‘management’ of migration and is at some distance from the demands of migrants’ rights’ movements: it is presumed that it can be managed in a technocratic, top-down manner. ‘“Management”, however, leaves little room for participation, and migrants and their movements are thus seen as policy objects with hardly any agency of their own’ (Rother 2018: 858, citing Piper and Rother 2012: 1737).

In relation to Europe, Nicholas de Genova calls this ‘an unresolved racial crisis that derives fundamentally from the postcolonial condition of “Europe” as a whole’ (de Genova 2018: 1765; original emphasis). I term this ‘the racialized crisis of borders’ in order to combine how the shaping of hierarchies of exclusion and inclusion at national borders is (i) both part of the postcolonial condition and (ii) also represents a set of dehumanizing technologies and racist practices extended within national borders through restrictions to social welfare entitlements. For example, formal barriers and legal restrictions to accessing health care by asylum seekers and undocumented migrants have legitimated formal and informal practices of exclusion to minorities within welfare states (Phillimore et al. 2021). The term intends to capture the conjuncture of three processes of othering at work (whose articulation in the UK I explore in chapter 4):

 the dehumanization of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees at national, supranational and global scales, described above;

 its contagion with heightened national racist policies and practices and their extension to other groups of welfare claimants (internal bordering practices);

 its justification through both the assumptions of the ‘post-racial’ and the rise of ethno-nationalist populist politics.

Although migrants seeking asylum are not usually the same migrants who end up in, say, care and domestic work, hospitality and agriculture (although they may be), many in both groups are, one way or another, survival migrants. In other words, the distinction between economic migrants and refugees/asylum seekers holds only to a certain degree. They are linked through, first, the political debates that set state sovereignty against human rights and humanitarianism, often in an appeal to a (mythically) homogeneous and/or imperial history and, second, in an everyday struggle to survive in which support has been minimalized.

The Cameroonian postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe conceptualizes this particular dynamic as ‘necropolitics’, in which sovereignty carries the power to expropriate a group’s humanity and, at its most extreme, life itself (Mbembe 2019). Necropolitics builds on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics (state power as the exercise of control over populations) in order to take account of inheritance of imperial and colonial forms of power in contemporary governance in Western late modernity. This results in populations subjected to the status of the living dead (think the migrant and refugee camps, prisons and detention centres). It applies as much to the reduction of rights of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants as it does to the history of environmental degradation which has been built on genocide and enslavement. At the heart of necropolitics is fragility between the systematic creation of (racialized) enemies and an acute existential dependence upon them (as exemplified in the ‘crisis of care’ above).

Accepted scholarly convention premises that cosmopolitanism has become embedded in Europe’s universalist moral traditions, acting especially through the establishment of the European Union as a corrective to nationalist deviations (Calhoun 2009) and replacing the historical conflict and genocide of the Second World War with peace, prosperity and human rights. Yet, as Sian and her colleagues document, by the twenty-first century across Europe there existed a ‘high level of everyday, often casual, racial discrimination and the resulting perception across many groups and communities of systemic hostility’ (Sian et al. 2013: 9). In many different ways this reflects and is reflected in restrictive material and cultural policies, especially against Muslim women. Take, as an example of the first, rules introduced in the UK in 2014 to prevent migrant workers from claiming housing benefit or job seekers’ allowance (a benefit for people who are out of work) for six months after entry and then only on proof of a habitual residence test. And as an example of the second, by 2016 France, Belgium and the Netherlands banned the full-face veil worn by some Muslim women, with some cities in Switzerland, Spain and Italy following suit.

While the Schengen agreement established freedom of movement within member states, encouraging a European citizen sensibility, it has, especially since 2016, tightened its borders to non-EU citizens, creating the sort of illegalization and dehumanization referred to above. By 2019, far-right anti-immigration nationalist parties existed in most European Union member states, with nine countries gaining over 17 per cent of the vote, and in Hungary’s case 49 per cent. In Germany the nationalist Alternative for Germany was the biggest opposition party in the Bundestag (BBC 2019a). What is important to bear in mind here is that Europe is not only a cosmopolitan collectivity of nation-states, it is also a collection of former colonial powers (Gilroy 2005). The European Union was formed as decolonization was taking or had just taken place; nonetheless, the making of subsequent multicultural and postcolonial citizenships was wrought through racial and gendered relations of domination and subordination, not only externally in relation to colonized people but also internally with respect to the Roma or indigenous people (Ponzanesi and Blaagaard 2012). By the 1970s, for example, the UK had established rights to citizenship based on (white) patriality. Gurminder Bhambra argues that Europe was a racialized project from the beginning, and it is ‘the politics of selective memory that is currently playing out in Europe. In this way, Europe claims rights that belong to its national citizens but need not be shared with others … reflecting earlier forms of domination’ (Bhambra 2017: 404).

At the same time, from the 1990s, it is the growing assumption of a ‘post-racial Europe’ that intensifies this amnesia and dilution of policies and practices within the EU to combat racial/migrant/refugee injustices. ‘Post-racial’ is where multiculturalism presumes a ‘splash of colour that becomes a metaphor for a landscape no longer polluted by the horrors of racism’ (Sian et al. 2013: 15). This parallels ‘the move to racial neoliberalism, where the deregulation of markets exacerbates and embeds racial inequalities’ (ibid.: 4). It has created a political discourse in destination countries in which an economic cost–benefit analysis of migration – migrants as units of skilled and unskilled labour – predominates over the ethics of international solidarity, interdependence, hospitality or human rights. On the one hand, in common with the other three crises, all these developments point to the ways in which the discourses of welfare, sustainability, social protection, solidarity and human rights are being jeopardized. On the other, such rights have always been contingent upon constructions of nationality, and what these bordering practices demonstrate is an intense dehumanization – moving the border from human to ‘infrahuman’ (Gilroy 2014).