Migrant agency and states’ securitisation of migration: Implications for migrant participation and expanding notions of political inclusion to strengthen integration into host societies

This paper seeks to answer how analysing migrants’ survival strategy on high-risk migration routes helps us better understand states’ moves toward increasingly securitised and extended enforcement regimes. Framed conceptually, it highlights two related elements of migration governance at the supranational and state levels: securitised migration and extraterritorial enforcement. The EU’s securitisation of migration—framing and treating migration as a security threat rather than a set of economic and social processes—provides the conceptual context for understanding EU moves to harden enforcement and extend it into Africa. Research offers a better understanding of how the extension or extraterritorial enforcement of the EU migration regime has contributed to intensifying the risks on the Sahara and Mediterranean migration routes. The fieldwork for this research involved open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 101 persons who were or had been migrants on high-risk migration routes through the Sahara Desert. Participants were nationals of eleven countries, including Benin (2), Cameroon (4), Gabon (2), Ghana (5), Guinea (2), Ivory Coast (3), Liberia (11), Mali (8), Senegal (22), Sierra Leone (14) and The Gambia (28). Data collection took place in two phases and at four locations, Niamey, Niger—Rome and Milan, Italy—and The Gambia. Challenges on the Sahara and North American routes have similarities, including physical hardships from harsh desert terrain to abuse by authorities and human smugglers (Szabo, 2017; Cabrera, 2010; International Organization for Migration, 2020a). Additional factors include intensifying risks and some distinctive Saharan migration dynamics. These six factors include (1) having limited resources, (2) having no contacts at the intended destination, (3) lacking knowledge of migration routes, (4) travelling alone, (5) vulnerability to authorities and (5) vulnerability to human smugglers and other actors. These high-risk migration factors motivate migrants to develop social capital through networks as a survival strategy. There are six ways, including (1) forming groups, (2) humanitarian organisations, (3) human smugglers, (4) informal labour networks, (5) social networking applications, and (6) supporting kinship connections. Migrants face an increasingly securitised integration context in EU destination cities. Securitisation increases their risks, as do some of the factors noted earlier: having no contacts at the destination, limited resources and being vulnerable to authorities. Migrants respond by seeking to maintain ties developed in transit or to form new groups and, thus, to derive horizontally oriented forms of bonding and bridging social capital. In addition, many migrants continued to rely on the linking capital of their vertical ties with smugglers. While there are many contributions this research makes, two fundamental theoretical advances are offered to understand the implications of securitised migration and the closely related extraterritorial enforcement. Highlighted first are critical tensions around theorisations of free movement in regional organisations. Researchers have sought to explain why organisations such as the EU, among others, have developed internal free movement regimes (Heinikoski, 2022). However, there is considerable space for discussion about how the extraterritorial enforcement of migration by the EU has posed challenges to ECOWAS’ principles of free movement among its Member States and the progress toward free movement by the African Union.