Border security and asylum rights: the questionable construction of a European asylum regime

The 2015 European refugee crisis highlighted some inherent shortcoming in European migration and asylum policies. Hundreds of thousands of people moving across the borders of Schengen and seeking international protection were quickly classified by the highest institutional offices of member states as "irregular migrants", they were associated with threats such as organized crime and terrorism and they have been exposed to the risk of being criminalized. These official reactions are both the consequence and the reflection of the European asylum system. A regime that has been created in almost thirty years - from the Schengen agreement to the most recent immigration conventions - on the basis of an obsession for border security which, on the one hand, led to the approval of increasingly restrictive immigration and asylum policies, and, on the other hand, have transformed asylum seekers from victims of political persecution, wars, natural or human disasters to disguised economic immigrants or "false refugees". Two interesting interpretations of this trajectory have been provided by Valluy - who explains it as the result of a competition between three political-ideological views - and Huysmans - who analyzes it in terms of a classical securitization process. In the last part of our paper, we briefly address three main points: 1) the generative power of borders; 2) the need to critically reconsider the vocabulary we as scholars use to analyze human mobility; 3) the link between the European immigration policy framework and the reworking of a European cultural and ethno-racial identity