Managing migrations in Europe’s southern borderThe cases of Spain, Italy and Portugal

Resumo

n today’s international system, international migrations should be regulated and managed by States, in order to ensure their positive impact in host countries and migrants’ integration. Furthermore, they should also guarantee a fair treatment of migrants and the recognition of their rights. However, experience has showed that this ideal does not always become a reality and States may conceive migratory flows, particularly irregular ones, as a threat. With this in mind, we have focused our study in the management of migratory flows in the Mediterranean, within an international security perspective. The management of migrations in the Mediterranean is one of the greatest challenges that the EU (European Union) currently faces. The intense migratory flows registered during the year 2015 and the tragedies in the Mediterranean Sea have tested the mechanisms of the Union’s immigration and asylum policies and its ability to respond to humanitarian crises. Moreover, these flows of varying intensities and geographies represent a threat to the internal security of the EU and its Member States. Therefore, in order to guarantee the safety of the external borders, the EU’s approach focuses on the security dimension in the definition of strategies to manage irregular migrations. In the context of the management of migrations in the Mediterranean we have taken the study of three Southern European countries: Spain, Italy and Portugal, given that those countries offer us a comparative study of the management of the Western Africa and Western and Central Mediterranean routes. Furthermore, the Portuguese case allows for the analysis of a different reality at the European level, as well as a thorough research on border management in Portugal, an understudied topic within the academia. We found that the success of a model of migrations’ governance of in the Mediterranean results from the interdependency of different levels of action (bilateral, multilateral and regional) and actors; and presently the dimension of deterrence through the management of the external borders and cooperation with third countries, including the externalisation of the border, prevails. Therefore, we assume that the EU, given its inability to adopt and implement a common policy to effectively manage migratory flows on its Southern border uses a deterrence strategy based on minimum common denominators.