Safety First? The Collective Securitisation of EU Migration Law and Its Implications for Migrants
Current efforts to reform EU migration law are strongly shaped by the portrayal of migration as a security challenge. The New Pact on Migration and Asylum, for instance, prominently strives to dispel the ‘threat’ of secondary movement, whereas changes to the Schengen acquis afford national police forces greater powers to intercept third country nationals in border regions. Analytically, all these changes can be viewed as a form of ‘collective securitisation’ – reforms in EU migration law that are inspired by the shared impression amongst national and supranational actors that migration may, in and of itself, constitute a security risk. This research project aims to investigate the legal implications of this phenomenon, exploring the constitutional prerequisites that shaped collective securitisation in EU migration law and the ramifications that it creates for migrants. Accordingly, the project asks: how does collective securitisation operate within the multi-levelled system of constitutional law in Europe? And which safeguards can migrants infer from constitutional provisions to put to a halt the effects of collective securitisation?
