Frontex Headquarters in Warsaw (Theo Schneider/Demotix)As media and politicians have declared a ‘refugee’ or ‘migration crisis’ this summer, EU Member States are scrambling for a common response to recent events. Amid attempts to redistribute refugees across EU Member States, familiar calls for strengthening the EU’s border agency Frontex resurfaced once again. Frontex is conspicuously absent from the media stories of families, women, and men taking risky journeys in the hope of reaching safety and peace, yet it is at the centre of debates about how to reshape the EU’s asylum, border, and immigration policies.
Less controversial than the reception of asylum seekers, the redistribution of refugees among Member States, or the opening of legal entry routes, demands for ‘more Frontex’ have become a common answer to a perceived need to ‘do something’ in relation to migration policy in the European Union. Similar calls have already been made: at the time of the revolutions of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011, in response to the 3rd of October 2013, when at least 363 individuals lost their lives off the coast of Lampedusa, and last summer, when Italy urged ‘Frontex plus’ to take over its military-humanitarian Mare Nostrum operation in the Mediterranean.
Apart from occasionally issuing press releases on how many people have crossed into the EU irregularly which are then recited by news outlets to point to the scale of the movements we are currently witnessing, not much is seen or heard about what Frontex actually does in the present situation. Seeking answers, the Bureau of Investigate Journalism recently published the results of an investigation. It suggested that Frontex is overwhelmed, understaffed, and not as powerful as people might have thought. Again, the logical conclusion seems to be that there is a need for strengthening Frontex.
