The Surprising Success of European Union Migration Policy: An Analysis of Greece, Italy, Spain and France’s Border Control

Abstract

The public incorrectly believes that the European Union has been unable to control its borders from illegal refugees and that cohesive migration policy at the international level cannot be created. However, while the Member States within the EU have confronted an astronomical number of refugees during the recent migratory crisis, they have largely been able to effectively control their borders. This thesis demonstrates that the Member States were able to restrict their borders from illegal refugees and then attempts to discern how they did so. To assess the Member States’ success at controlling their borders from illegal refugees, I developed and employed my own theory grounded in two integration theories: Liberal Intergovernmentalism and Neofunctionalism. My theory consists of three parts: first, the EU cannot centralize migration policy for its Member States as heterogeneous migration patterns at the national level make it impossible to do so; second, the Member States as sovereign nations are willing and able to control their borders at the national level; and third, the Member States independently cooperate with the EU to gain its support and substantiate their respective national policies. I then derived three hypotheses from the existing integration theories to test against my research and to help substantiate my theory. Hypothesis One helps substantiate the first portion of my theory and asserts that the EU cannot centralize migration policy if Member States are unequally impacted by the refugee crisis and are therefore not equally motivated to create cohesive policy to control their borders. Hypothesis Two substantiates the second portion of my theory and asserts that if a Member State is capable of doing so as a sovereign nation, it will act outside the EU, at the national level, to control its own border. Hypothesis Three substantiates the third portion of my theory and asserts that if it serves them to do so, the Member States will independently cooperate with the EU to gain its support. Using this theory as my framework, I then tested these hypotheses against the migration policies of four Member States: Greece, Italy, Spain and France. I choose these states because they all reside on the Mediterranean Sea, have been largely impacted by the recent refugee crisis and have all been able to effectively control their borders. Ultimately, my thesis validates all three hypotheses, but indicates that the latter two more strongly demonstrate how the Member States effectively controlled their borders. The Member States were able to employ national level mechanisms—such as physical borders, technologies, third-party agreements and national policies—to control their borders from illegal refugees; however, they also independently converged with the EU, when they needed to, to substantiate their policies and gain its support. Nevertheless, Hypothesis One is also significant for border control as the Member States’ recent appeals for more EU aid in mitigating the migration crisis demonstrates the potential centralization of migration policy in the future. Thus, this thesis concludes with policy implications that suggest the future of EU border control may depend upon centralized migration policy that creates cohesive third-party agreements with non-EU countries.