This is like putting the cart before the horse. If migration is being instrumentalised by neighboring countries, it is because the EU treats migration and migrants as a security issue. As a result, the EU has undertaken very strict measures to prevent migrants from accessing its territories and has used the economic power of the bloc to force neighboring countries into asymmetrical economic agreements, often tying trade to conditions such as migration control.
When these states retaliate by occasionally using migration control as a tool to improve their negotiating position, this author presents that retaliation as the threat, rather than acknowledging that the EU itself created these conditions. This demonstrates a clear lack of critical thought and comes across as intellectually lazy.
Additionally, data from the last two decades show that European populations generally hold positive attitudes toward migration. Yet the author insinuates that the EU’s securitised approach to migration governance is driven by public demand. Research suggests otherwise. It points instead to policymaking that is not supported by the facts on the ground.
More fundamentally, the EU’s migration governance framework is deeply shaped by structural racism. Migration is framed as a civilisational and security threat based on unfounded fears and right-wing paranoia surrounding the need to protect a supposedly threatened white European identity, often echoed in “great replacement” rhetoric. This racialised logic underpins the securitisation of migration and helps explain why migration is consistently characterised as a threat rather than approached as a social, economic, and humanitarian issue grounded in evidence.
Both the premises and conclusions of this article are based on a largely imaginary scenario in which the EU and its population are under threat, rather than on observable evidence showing that the EU is creating conditions that force people to migrate from their home countries. At the same time, the EU has actively used migration control as a condition in trade negotiations. The EU is effectively imposing legislation in countries such as Niger, Senegal, and Mauritania. When these countries push back, they are then constructed as the threat. It reflects a classic colonial mindset.
If you are going to theorise international relations politics, at least do it rigorously.
Dr Achiri, thank you for engaging critically with the article.
I agree with a substantial part of your argument. The European Union has itself helped create the conditions that make this form of pressure possible. Through the externalisation of border control, migration-related conditionality, and the use of economic and political incentives to secure cooperation from neighbouring states, the EU has turned migration management into a valuable bargaining asset — most visibly in its relations with Turkey and with several North and West African countries. The article could have stated that more explicitly, and doing so would strengthen its causal context.
That said, the episodes discussed do not reduce to a single causal story. Turkey and Libya illustrate bargaining built on migration cooperation, which fits your account well. The others do not. Morocco relaxed controls around Ceuta during a bilateral dispute over the hospitalisation of the Polisario leader; Belarus constructed a route in retaliation for sanctions imposed after the repression of the 2020 post-electoral protests; Russia was accused of facilitating crossings in the context of Finland's accession to NATO. None of these is a response to European trade or migration conditionality, even though that wider asymmetry forms part of the background.
This is why the object of the article is narrower than a full account of how European governance produced the vulnerability, and why that narrowing is not evasive. Retaliatory coercion remains coercion, even when it responds to an earlier asymmetry. Acknowledging that Europe helped create the dependency does not make the mechanism analytically irrelevant.
On the substantive interpretation, there is a difference between your reading and the position the article advances. The article does not characterise migrants, immigration, or demographic change as threats; it locates the threat in the conduct of states that deliberately use people as instruments of pressure, and says so in those terms. It argues for genuine asylum procedures, effective integration, legal safeguards, and responses directed at the governments responsible for instrumentalisation. It explicitly rejects both weakening the right of asylum and militarising borders. There is no claim about a threatened European civilisation, racial identity, or anything resembling "great replacement" rhetoric.
The racialisation of European migration governance is a legitimate and important research agenda, but it addresses a different explanandum. Even granting it in full, it accounts for the conduct of the destination state, not for that of the sender. No theory of structural racism in Europe explains why Minsk organised transfers from Baghdad in 2021.
A similar distinction applies to public opinion. The article claims that migration has become electorally salient, not that European populations are hostile or that securitisation reflects popular demand. Salience and attitudes are different variables, and the evidence you invoke supports that distinction rather than undercutting it: Dennison and Geddes (2019), and Dennison, Kustov and Geddes (2023), find that attitudes towards immigration in Europe have remained stable or become more favourable while salience rose sharply, and that it is salience rather than hostility that tracks political behaviour. Salience is precisely what an external actor can activate.
We appear to be addressing two different and potentially complementary questions: how European policies created the leverage, and how third states subsequently exploit it. Both processes operate simultaneously.
This is like putting the cart before the horse. If migration is being instrumentalised by neighboring countries, it is because the EU treats migration and migrants as a security issue. As a result, the EU has undertaken very strict measures to prevent migrants from accessing its territories and has used the economic power of the bloc to force neighboring countries into asymmetrical economic agreements, often tying trade to conditions such as migration control.
When these states retaliate by occasionally using migration control as a tool to improve their negotiating position, this author presents that retaliation as the threat, rather than acknowledging that the EU itself created these conditions. This demonstrates a clear lack of critical thought and comes across as intellectually lazy.
Additionally, data from the last two decades show that European populations generally hold positive attitudes toward migration. Yet the author insinuates that the EU’s securitised approach to migration governance is driven by public demand. Research suggests otherwise. It points instead to policymaking that is not supported by the facts on the ground.
More fundamentally, the EU’s migration governance framework is deeply shaped by structural racism. Migration is framed as a civilisational and security threat based on unfounded fears and right-wing paranoia surrounding the need to protect a supposedly threatened white European identity, often echoed in “great replacement” rhetoric. This racialised logic underpins the securitisation of migration and helps explain why migration is consistently characterised as a threat rather than approached as a social, economic, and humanitarian issue grounded in evidence.
Both the premises and conclusions of this article are based on a largely imaginary scenario in which the EU and its population are under threat, rather than on observable evidence showing that the EU is creating conditions that force people to migrate from their home countries. At the same time, the EU has actively used migration control as a condition in trade negotiations. The EU is effectively imposing legislation in countries such as Niger, Senegal, and Mauritania. When these countries push back, they are then constructed as the threat. It reflects a classic colonial mindset.
If you are going to theorise international relations politics, at least do it rigorously.
Dr Achiri, thank you for engaging critically with the article.
I agree with a substantial part of your argument. The European Union has itself helped create the conditions that make this form of pressure possible. Through the externalisation of border control, migration-related conditionality, and the use of economic and political incentives to secure cooperation from neighbouring states, the EU has turned migration management into a valuable bargaining asset — most visibly in its relations with Turkey and with several North and West African countries. The article could have stated that more explicitly, and doing so would strengthen its causal context.
That said, the episodes discussed do not reduce to a single causal story. Turkey and Libya illustrate bargaining built on migration cooperation, which fits your account well. The others do not. Morocco relaxed controls around Ceuta during a bilateral dispute over the hospitalisation of the Polisario leader; Belarus constructed a route in retaliation for sanctions imposed after the repression of the 2020 post-electoral protests; Russia was accused of facilitating crossings in the context of Finland's accession to NATO. None of these is a response to European trade or migration conditionality, even though that wider asymmetry forms part of the background.
This is why the object of the article is narrower than a full account of how European governance produced the vulnerability, and why that narrowing is not evasive. Retaliatory coercion remains coercion, even when it responds to an earlier asymmetry. Acknowledging that Europe helped create the dependency does not make the mechanism analytically irrelevant.
On the substantive interpretation, there is a difference between your reading and the position the article advances. The article does not characterise migrants, immigration, or demographic change as threats; it locates the threat in the conduct of states that deliberately use people as instruments of pressure, and says so in those terms. It argues for genuine asylum procedures, effective integration, legal safeguards, and responses directed at the governments responsible for instrumentalisation. It explicitly rejects both weakening the right of asylum and militarising borders. There is no claim about a threatened European civilisation, racial identity, or anything resembling "great replacement" rhetoric.
The racialisation of European migration governance is a legitimate and important research agenda, but it addresses a different explanandum. Even granting it in full, it accounts for the conduct of the destination state, not for that of the sender. No theory of structural racism in Europe explains why Minsk organised transfers from Baghdad in 2021.
A similar distinction applies to public opinion. The article claims that migration has become electorally salient, not that European populations are hostile or that securitisation reflects popular demand. Salience and attitudes are different variables, and the evidence you invoke supports that distinction rather than undercutting it: Dennison and Geddes (2019), and Dennison, Kustov and Geddes (2023), find that attitudes towards immigration in Europe have remained stable or become more favourable while salience rose sharply, and that it is salience rather than hostility that tracks political behaviour. Salience is precisely what an external actor can activate.
We appear to be addressing two different and potentially complementary questions: how European policies created the leverage, and how third states subsequently exploit it. Both processes operate simultaneously.