A Qualitative Study on Unauthorized Arrivals to the EU: Refugees, migrants, smugglers and the power of labels

Abstract

This thesis explores the dominant dichotomous labelling practices of unauthorized arrivals to the European Union into either refugees or economic migrants in relation to migratory motivations, degrees of volition, deservingness and human rights. Drawing from previous literature which has contested the empirical and ethical validity of these categorizations, the analysis sheds light on degrees of arbitrariness involved in these labelling practices. The assumptions enclosed in the migrant/refugee binary have devastating consequences for unauthorized border crossers labelled as undeserving economic migrants, but also for asylum seekers who become subject to the same criminalization practices within the contemporary migration/asylum regime. The assumptions enclosed in the migrant/refugee binary regarding the line between voluntary versus forced migration, and economic versus political motivations are explored through critical discourse analysis of three discursive bodies. Namely, the European Commission’s discourse, examined through twenty-five official press releases, practitioners working in migration-related fields, based on sixty-three semi-structured interviews, and the testimonies of one-hundred asylum seekers and other migrants, forty-one of which declared to have crossed borders unauthorized. The figure of the human smuggler emerged as central in the European Commission’s overall framework of dichotomous labelling practices of unauthorized arrivals, pushing for the inclusion of the role of human smugglers to be explored in the analysis and the official discourse on them to be contrasted with portrayals granted by those who had engaged with them. The results reveal that their influence in migrants’ decision-making process within dominant discourse is overstated in relation to those labelled as economic migrants and understated in relation to asylum seekers. Furthermore, the results reveal that while practitioners widely tend to present the categories of asylum seekers and economic migrants as self-evident, identifying the former with political motivations and forced migration, and the latter with economic motivations and voluntary migration, their statements regarding who would fall into each of these categories reveal high degrees of variation and arbitrariness. Practitioners’ perceptions of deservingness and claims for increased rights recognition of those labelled as economic migrants aligned more with broader notions of state responsibility and global justice, than with skepticism towards the assumptions regarding the voluntary/forced and the economic/political dichotomies engrained in the migrant/refugee binary framework, which remained largely unchecked. These assumptions, however, are problematized by the testimonies of unauthorized border crossers likely labelled as economic migrants, as their accounts detailed how they had migrated with feelings of having no other choice, and described motivations that greatly exceed economic aspirations, framing their migratory journeys within a human rights framework