Sea of humanity: supporters of Amnesty International and other NGOs marching in Brussels as the EU summiteers met. Flickr / Amnesty International. All rights reserved.
This week an EU-wide control operation to detect, detain and possibly deport irregular migrants has been taking place. Operation ‘Amberlight’ is a collaborative effort between the EU border-control agency Frontex and national police forces, aimed at collecting information and checking third-country nationals’ legal status. Non-European, undocumented migrants are the main target of these controls.
Simultaneously, the worst tragedy yet has occurred in the Mediterranean, with more migrant deaths in the last week than in the whole of 2013—to which the EU’s response is a minimal commitment to expand search-and-rescue operations and mount more border controls. These two parallel occurrences sum up the EU’s current approach to migration: securitisation at all costs, even if it means thousands of human beings, fleeing war and desperation, dying.
