Frontex’s Normalization of Crisis at the EU Borders

In 2015, more than a million refugees and migrants came to Europe during the so-called ‘migration crisis.’ This prompted a host of security-oriented responses to protect the EU’s external borders, spearheaded by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). While the number of irregular border crossings has decreased substantially since, Frontex continues to portray an image of crisis at the borders, which serves to “normalize” crisis and justify increased border controls in its response.

“Europe will be forged in crisis, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.” (Jean Monnet)

Critical border and migration scholars have pointed out that rather than being apolitical and objective, crises are produced by the surrounding political environment (Jeandesboz & Pallister-Wilkins, 2014, 2016). This makes crises partly constructed, and they are often used by political actors to call for an immediate response to tackle an issue that is perceived to be a crisis – such as irregularized migration.

For instance, Malta instrumentalized the 2015 “migration crisis” to receive concessions from the EU due to its gatekeeping role at the frontiers of Europe, despite seeing relatively few arrivals (Mainwaring 2019). The EU’s ability to thrive in crisis is a common refrain in EU studies, which has witnessed a “crisisification” across all policy fields in the last decade, where traditional democratic decision-making procedures have yielded to quicker, risk-focused processes that are driven by the perceived need to respond to the latest crisis (Rhinard 2019). The problem is that the EU’s “search for crises” includes ones that it has constructed itself through a pre-emptive security focus and self-imposed logic of urgency (ibid.) – a tendency that Beck (1992) warned of in modern “risk societies.”

Frontex is no exception to this trend, and actually has an incentive to exaggerate crises to expand its own budget and powers (Campesi 2022). In fact, Frontex’s mandate was strengthened after the 2015 “migration crisis” due to the legitimizing effects of its technical expertise (Fjørtoft 2022), with Perkowski et al. (2023) demonstrating how Frontex has “evolved through crisis” by invoking it as an “ever-present possibility and perpetual threat to Europe.” Frontex has contributed to “normalizing” crises at the EU external borders through its constant invocations of crisis in its risk analysis reports, despite declining arrivals of refugees and migrants the last few years.

Normalizing Crises

While 2015 saw a record number of 1,822,177 irregular border crossings to the EU, 2016 saw a 72% decline, to 511,146 (Frontex 2019). Nevertheless, the preface by the Executive Director asserts that the “EU experienced another year of intense migratory pressure at its external borders” and that “the overall situation at Europe’s external borders remained challenging” (Frontex 2017). Thus, despite irregular border crossings falling by more than a third, Frontex portrays a picture of the crisis as not being over yet. This continues in the 2018 report, which notes a 60% decrease in irregular border crossings in 2017 compared to 2016, totaling 204,719. Nevertheless, the report remarks that this “should not distract from the fact that the aggregate exceeds any total reported… before… 2014, an indicator that the migratory pressure on the EU’s external borders remained very high” (Frontex 2018).

Similarly, the 2019 report shows that irregular border crossings went down 27% from 2017 to 2018, to 150,144. Notwithstanding the declining number of crossings for the third consecutive year after the 2015 “migration crisis,” the report emphasizes that “secondary movements continued on a large scale during 2018” and describes the increase in detections of clandestine entry as “testimony to a persistency in migratory pressure” (Frontex 2019). The 2020 report notes a further 5% decline in irregular border crossings in 2019, totaling 141,846. Despite this being the lowest level since 2013 with a 92% decrease compared to the numbers in 2015, the report suggests that:

“It is instructive to go back further in the data collection… [T]he number of detections in 2019 is roughly comparable to the figure for 2011, when strong migratory pressure was exerted on the EU’s south-eastern land borders and also in the Central Mediterranean.” (Frontex 2020)

This illustrates Frontex’s normalization of crisis, where situations of non-crisis and crisis become blurred, with crisis becoming constant rather than exceptional. 2020 saw a further 12% decline compared to the previous year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, totaling 125,226 border crossings. Regardless, the report underlines that “detections of illegal border-crossing decreased by a much smaller fraction” than regular crossings, “reiterating the necessity to remain vigilant” (Frontex 2021). This demonstrates that despite the decrease in irregular border crossings for the fifth year in a row following the 2015 “migration crisis,” Frontex’s risk analysis reports continue to invoke crisis, painting a picture of the EU external borders as in a state of perpetual crisis. Frontex’s crisis discourse is hence at odds with its own statistics, which is compounded by the fact that Frontex counts the number of border crossings rather than people attempting to cross the border, which leads to double counting if the same person attempts to cross the border multiple times (Sigona 2015). Frontex therefore contributes to normalizing crises and justifying increased border controls in response to suffering and deaths at the EU’s common borders.

Figure 1: Frontex’s overview of irregular border crossings, 2015-18 (Frontex 2019).

Crisis Normalization and the Securitization of Migration

Frontex’s risk analyses inform strategic and operational decisions at the EU level as well as funding allocations to member states, which makes them an important knowledge producer in EU border control (Horii 2016; Paul 2018). Frontex’s portrayal of the situation at the EU’s external borders thus impacts responses to irregularized migration, including the normalization of crisis that contributes to normalizing securitized responses, perceived as necessary in response to constant crises. It is therefore important to problematize Frontex’s crisis normalization since it has very real consequences for refugees and migrants, who find themselves trying to cross increasingly inaccessible borders.

Eline Waerp is a Ph.D. student in International Migration and Ethnic Relations (IMER) at Malmö University. She is a former NCCR visiting fellow with the project “Evolving Regimes of (Im)Mobility in Times of Crisis.”

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