Double standards in the EU migration and asylum policy?

Abstract

Nowadays, one of the most critical issues the European Union (EU) must deal with is forced migration towards Europe. While after the Second World War international migration was perceived by political leaders in European countries as something desirable because additional workforce was needed, starting from the 1970s but in particular after the end of the Cold War international migration started being perceived as a threat for the receiving country because political leaders started fearing the consequences of “unwanted” immigration. Therefore, over the last decades the EU migration and asylum policy has been progressively “securitized”, meaning that, at EU level, migration has been drawn into the security field by using narratives that describe migration as a threat and a danger for the internal stability of European states in order to justify the adoption of extraordinary measures which aim at reducing or blocking the flows of arrival. However, not only did the security-oriented approach prove inappropriate to positively manage situations of forced migration towards Europe, but it has also been criticized by political authorities, scholars, human rights defenders, who claimed that, even though it is suggested that external borders have been fortified for all third country nationals, immigrants and refugees are in fact often treated differently according to more than one criterion. The aim of this thesis is to assess whether the accusation about the existence of double standards in the EU migration and asylum policy is well-founded. In order to answer this question a comparison will be carried out between the response of the EU to two recent migration crises, namely to the 2021-2022 Belarus - European Union border crisis and to the 2022-2023 Ukrainian refugee crisis. This analysis entails a comparison between the main measures adopted by the EU to face each crisis to verify whether there have been differences in the treatment of refugees on the basis of their nationality. In addition, political and media discourses will be examined in order to see whether the framing of migration was similar in the two cases or whether refugees of different nationalities have been perceived in different ways by the receiving societies.