Between 2021 and 2024, during the last years of President Macky Sall’s government in Senegal, no less than 60 people lost their lives as a result of the authorities’ bloody repression against opposition groups. The international community repeatedly condemned these actions, but few have pointed out one of their most prominent accomplices: the cooperation programs of the European Union (EU). A recent investigation by the Al Jazeera network and the PorCausa Foundation demonstrated that the Senegalese security forces acted on the basis of the material and training provided by the program GAR-YES (Rapid Action Group for Monitoring and Intervention) that the EU has been deploying for decades in different countries in the Sahel.
The purpose of this program—financed by the Africa Emergency Trust Fund and that uses anti-terrorist techniques developed by the Civil Guard and other European police forces—is to combat cross-border crime, with a particular interest in the control of migratory transit routes.
Senegal is one of the many spaces of abuse, suffering and corruption derived from a human mobility management model determined to stop the movement of Africans to the European region at all costs. This model, known as the externalization of migration control, sells EU citizens the chimera of a Europe impervious to unsolicited arrivals. The price is an expensive game of incentives that guarantees the collaboration of the countries of origin and transit in the “management” of migratory flows.
The model sells the citizens of the Union the chimera of a Europe impervious to unsolicited arrivals
Europe sells order, but offers the opposite. If there is a word that faithfully describes our immigration model, that word is chaos. Europe’s borders have become spaces of disorder that barely fulfill, and with undesirable consequences, some of the functions for which they were created. For public opinion in the migration destination countries, the chaos results in a frustrating feeling of loss of control and constant border emergency that justifies the most extreme responses. For migrants and their families, disorder translates into death, suffering and lifelong debt.
For the immigration industry—legal and illegal—chaos is the source of a fabulous business which they are not willing to give up.
The logic of externalization has reached its paroxysm with the brand new European Pact on Migration and Asylum. Trying not to give arguments to the extreme right, popular, socialists and liberals have written in stone the fearful and xenophobic interpretation of human mobility that they demanded. But the foundations of this model were built much earlier, when the approval of the Schengen Agreement in 1985 established what Josep Borrell has described like a “garden” that must be preserved against the “jungle” that surrounds it.
According to most recent porCausa reportup to 27 legislative and political instruments and nearly 10,000 million euros have supported, over these almost 40 years, a border control project that began within the limits of the EU and has spread throughout Africa and the Middle East throughout of a network of vertical borders (see map).
A project whose ambition is only matched by its incompetence. The great paradox of this system designed and micromanaged by those responsible for security in the EU countries is that the more it demonstrates its ineffectiveness, the more it seems to consolidate itself in the narrative and political imagination of European governments. I agree with you own data of the European border agency, Frontex, “2023 has recorded a significant increase in the number of irregular border crossings, which increased by 17% in the first 11 months to exceed 355,300. This figure has already exceeded the entire 2022 total, marking the highest value recorded since 2016”, in the throes of the crisis due to the Syrian conflict.
Far from the sight of European voters, the outsourcing policy is responsible for tens of thousands of dead, enslaved and tortured in the web of African migration routes. But the budgetary and political magnitude of this effort also has serious consequences for the interests of EU countries. European foreign relations are conditioned in Africa by a collection of autocratic or illiberal regimes that use European migration anxiety to obtain concessions and remain in power.
The cooperation of the Union and its Member States has been trapped in a game of carrot and stick that violates the purposes of development policies and punishes the same populations to whom Europe denies the opportunity for orderly migration. In the worst case, European aid obstructs intra-African mobility itself, encourages corruption and drifts into indirect financing of criminal gangs and non-state armed groups.
If immigration policy were managed by experts in pensions, the labor market or development, and not by gendarmes, we would have long ago stopped shooting ourselves in the foot in the middle of a global race for talent
In any other area of public policy, this accumulation of blunders would have led to a profound reconsideration. Not in the case of migrations, where we dig deeper and deeper into the same hole. Because the most serious thing about the new European Pact is not what it says, but what it omits: the measures that will guarantee the legal, orderly and safe arrival of the tens of millions of migrant workers that we need to sustain our economies and welfare model. The approval of the European agreement has coincided with the publication of various studies and reports that warn about the demographic exhaustion of our region and the difficulty filling millions of jobs throughout the qualification scale. We also know that good management of labor migration is one of the best kept secrets against global poverty and inequality. If immigration policy were managed by experts in pensions, the labor market or development, and not by gendarmes, we would have long ago stopped shooting ourselves in the foot in the middle of a global race for talent. The EU itself is the scene of numerous initiatives – discreet but effective – to rationalize this migration model, as demonstrated by the proposal for the regularization of half a million undocumented migrants currently being discussed in the Spanish Parliament.
For millions of Senegalese trapped between the sea, abuses and lack of expectations, Europe’s response has been to close the doors and arm the repressors. Who can be surprised that many of them seek their escape in a canoe? The good news is that there are alternatives to this collective catastrophe. Its discussion should be a priority in the campaign for the European elections that begins now.
You can follow Future Planet in x, Facebook, instagram and TikTok and subscribe here to our newsletter.
#European #Union #turned #borders #chaotic #spaces #pay #consequences