Security-Oriented Migration Policies of The European Union: An Assessment in Terms of Social Policy

Abstract

As a repercussion of globalization, Europe has been a center of attraction and employment for the citizens of underdeveloped and developing countries for many years. The European states, which sometimes enacted laws encouraging immigration to meet the needs of the labor market, experienced the first mass migration wave of the modern age in the European continent with the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The migration crisis, which occurred as a result disintegration of Yugoslavia, mainly affected Yugoslavia’s neighbors Germany and the Netherlands, since national borders had not been abolished yet in the “Schengen Area” in those years. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Europe became the target of a strong mass migration wave for the second time, with the refugees fleeing from regional conflicts reaching its borders. At the beginning, European states approached the refugee influx by adopting a humanitarian rhetoric, however, could not reach a consensus on it, and over time, they presented an attitude that prioritized the protection of borders and preferred to pursue policies based mainly on security measures. While the burden of mass migration, as the “aftershock” of the Arab Spring, was on Turkey in the east, Italy and Malta received the impact in the south. The practices of the EU FRONTEX (“Frontières extérieures”,” European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders”) agency, which was established for the purposes of combating illegal immigration and crime, including pushing back asylum seekers by law enforcement, are issues that have been criticized in many respects. However, it has been experienced in different stages of history that it is not possible to prevent mass migration through security measures and the use of force.
The aim of the study prepared in this context is to draw attention to the importance of developing measures with a social policy perspective instead of security measures with a critical approach. It is a fact that a migrant workforce is needed in industrialized societies. Registration of immigrants within the legal framework and under appropriate conditions is their most natural right in the context of human rights. Qualitative research method was preferred in order to investigate the legal equivalent of this natural right in the EU with a theoretical study. In order to examine the migration figures and the experiences in the historical process, document analysis was focused on with the "secondary source research" method. As a result of the study, it would not be wrong to state that the EU's security approach is sometimes on a fine line that enforces internationally recognized human and refugee rights, while social policy production is left behind according to discourses. Within the scope of security measures, inhuman actions such as pushback are unacceptable, and it should be taken into account that directing the expenditures made under the name of border security to the right social policies will support more accurate and permanent solutions.