Much has been written and said about the ‘New Pact for Migration and Asylum’, proposed by the European Commission only a few weeks ago. Within days, expert opinions were shared, with some echoing the EU’s optimism on this supposed “fresh start on migration”. Others were much more critical, arguing that this “pact against migration” would not address major architectural flaws in the migration and asylum system but instead exacerbate Europe’s de facto hostile environment policies, not least by facilitating returns and deportations, by militarising and externalising borders, and by further curtailing legal and safe migration routes to the union.
Besides the immediate commentary, scholarly takes on the ‘new pact’ will come in time. Presumably in about one or two years, the first peer-reviewed articles will appear in academic journals with assessments of these European policy propositions and their possible implementation and impact. Among them there will be an array of articles that seeks to offer, besides an analysis of policies, insights relevant for policy.
Policy-relevant migration scholarship has boomed since the ‘migration crisis’ five years ago, similar to the scholarly field of terrorism research following 9/11. Even if the aphorism ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ may contain some truth, the figuratively used notion of 2015’s ‘migration wave’ has disproportionally lifted a form of scholarship that purports to generate ‘actionable’ knowledge on migration for ‘evidenced-based’ policymaking. Once a rather modest academic sub-field, suddenly, migration scholarship has burgeoned in unknown popularity and whole new migration institutes, teaching and funding programmes, journals, and academic networks have surfaced.
