European Governance of Migration in the Age of the Global Compacts A Perspective from Migration Theory

That European Migration Governance (EMG) needs fixing, especially with respect to refugee admission and distribution, can be easily proven to anyone: even the recently elected President of the European Parliament considers reforming the Dublin System an absolute priority (quoted in Valentino 2019). More generally, the European public decries migration and what has been denounced as the “grand delusion” of multiculturalism (Modood 2015): in 2018, 52% of Europeans saw them in a negative light (Chetail 2019, 22). It is also an all-too-known fact that EMG has become an existential issue for the EU: it played a prominent role in Brexit and is vocally protested by Hungary, which went to the point of speaking with an independent voice in international institutions (Lavenex 2018, 1209). Yet it still might be the case that Europe is the world region where integrated migration governance is most developed (Lavenex 2019) and, according to many, the only one which could realistically establish and enforce distribution schemes in adherence to justice rather than institutionalizing chance and blindly following the divides of political power and interests (Bauböck 2018). It is thus unsurprising that political theorists, including in recent times, have used the possible futures of the EU as a “thought experiment” for migration governance, and have sketched detailed and realistic distribution schemes and architectures of governance (Holtug 2016, Miller 2019, and Dziedzic 2019). In my paper, I build on this debate and add a close consideration of the normative requirements of the Global Compacts for Migration and Refugees, whose impact has so far been almost completely neglected by political theorists.