The Border, the Law, the Social: The Spatiotemporality of EU’s Creeping Crisis of Migration Management and the Refugee Struggles of ‘Access’

The measures that the European Union (EU) and Member States adopted following the 2015 ‘migration crisis’ continue to shape the migratory and life trajectories of refugees in irregular circumstances. Thus, the EU's crisis is that of migration management, and it is ‘creeping’ with ambiguous temporality, gradually constructing certain types of human mobility as a socially perceived threat. This paper proposes a theoretical-analytical framework to investigate the EU’s continuous reproduction of migration management measures with constant reframing of migration crises that target only specific populations and their implications for ‘access’. Theoretically informed by critical border studies and refugee law and grounded in empirical research conducted in the EU’s Greek–Turkish external border in post-2015, the paper addresses how Greece, on behalf of the EU, manages refugees’ access, and with what implications for refugees’ struggles of access. This access management hinges on the targeted, spatial expansion of borders within and beyond EU territory and their temporal extension with the protraction of crisis-driven measures. The issue of non-access transpires at the particular moments when certain refugees are excluded from EU territory through the border (border barriers and expulsion), from protection (asylum and other rights) through the law (containment, detention, deportation), and from society through the social (othering and deterrence). The grounded framework presents a holistic approach to understand migration management as a spatiotemporal and relational bordering process, adapted to certain forms of mobility constructed and politicized as crises, and in return, politicizing the people it affects. The framework addressed in this paper represents only one side of this process, a top-down approach focusing on the practices of states in managing (irregular) migration. The other side of the coin (which this paper was not able to include) necessitates adopting a bottom-up approach that examines the practices of those who are politicized, namely refugees, and their continuous claims-making struggles for ‘access’ (to state territory, protection, and society).