Externalization (migration)
[10] Examples include visa restrictions, sanctions for carriers that transport asylum seekers, and agreements with source and transit countries.
[14] FitzGerald argues that "keeping refugees at a distance is a public relations scheme to render them invisible so their plight can be ignored", and a strategy to evade legally binding human rights obligations.
[15] Externalization policies are often "specifically designed to avoid any direct jurisdictional links to the sponsoring State, at whose behest controls are carried out".
"[22] Several studies have found that "perhaps the key single determinant of smuggling at sea, and the deaths that result from dangerous transport, especially across the Mediterranean, is the closing down of legal options for air travel and entry to Europe" and visa restrictions.
[26] Empirical studies in several countries have found that anti-migration policies increase the number of people residing irregularly.
Efforts to make border crossing more difficult may promote permanent settlement in place of earlier patterns of temporary migration.
[37] Cooperation in externalization can be voluntary, but it often involves the coercive and neocolonial exploitation of power imbalance by Global North countries.
Another obstacle is that many African and Latin American countries support freedom of movement for economic and political reasons and therefore complying with externalization policies can threaten their core interest.
[42] During the 2010s, externalization policies increasingly extended beyond neighboring countries to those farther away in Africa, the Middle East, and Central America.
[45] He notes that "paying and training undemocratic buffer states to carry out abusive policies, are less effective when their secret violence becomes public knowledge" via exposure by journalists and human rights activists.
[46] The irregularization of migrants in transit countries leaves them more vulnerable to violence including extortion, robbery, rape, and murder; systematic human rights abuses have been reported.
[49] An example of human rights violations occurring in third countries at the behest of immigration-restricting states is the establishment of camps at Manus Island and Nauru at Australia's request.
[17][50][51] A 2021 United Nations fact-finding report found that abuses against migrants in Libya by state and non-state actors, including the Libyan Coast Guard, are likely to amount to crimes against humanity.
[57] Many Africans oppose deportation because it is considered inhumane, threatens their access to remittances from family members living abroad, and exacerbates already high youth unemployment.
[59] Australia's migration-control externalization policy, called the "Pacific Solution", dates to 2001 when the Australian navy began interdicting migrants on the high seas.
[61] The signing of the Schengen Agreement in 1980s, forced some countries to, such as Italy to started drafting its first laws to legislate the "integration" of immigrants.
However, as integration proved complicated and with political instability rising in the former Yugoslavia, Africa and the Middle East, things started changing.
[60] By the end of the year, Spain had managed to convince Morocco to criminalize irregular migration, and they began joint naval patrols around the strait of Gibraltar and the Canary Islands.
[63] In the early 2010s, there was a new wave of solidarity, with Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel promising a permissive approach to immigration and Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi supporting an ambitious program called operation Mare Nostrum, which rescued at least 150 thousand migrants, while Italy provided legal assistance for asylum claims.
In addition to the political deals, Italy’s then-interior minister Marco Minniti also performed a series of negotiations with militias and other non-state actors, effectively turning smugglers into coastguards and detention center managers,[63] and the EU pressured Niger to adopt serious border controls.
[53] At the Valletta Summit on Migration, the EU launched the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, which included hundreds of millions of euros to law enforcement agencies and border controls in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
[63] The deals appeared to yield results at first: by 2018, year-on-year arrivals on the central Mediterranean route had fallen by almost 100 thousand, and countries such as Turkey and Morocco significantly cut irregular migration to Europe over the medium term.
It also allowed leaders in partner countries to extort Europeans by threatening to open the migratory floodgates: Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan regularly blackmails the EU by threatening to scrap the deal; Morocco has facilitated migrants towards Spanish territories seemingly to influence Spain’s Western Sahara policy; and Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi leverages migration to attract ever-greater amounts of European funding to aid his economic crisis.
The deals have also created significant reputational damage – as the EU and member states appear complicit in their partners' human rights abuses.
Up until 2001, South Korea had not granted asylum to a single applicant, slightly atoning for this behavior in the following two decades, but still keeping low acceptance rates.
[78] In 2003, when still part of the European Union, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet worked on a policy paper called "A New Vision for Refugees", which proposed that the European Union establish Regional Protection Areas near refugee-producing countries, where refugees would be processed for possible resettlement in the EU, but, finding insufficient support, the proposal was withdrawn and never formally considered.
[60] In 1993, the US Coast Guard intercepted a ship 200 miles off Honduras carrying 200 Chinese people trying to reach the United States.
In the 2010s, Obama then asked Congress for an emergency supplemental appropriation of $3.7 billion, expanding the deal to other Central American countries.
