The crisis of the European migration regime: how we got here and which ways forward?

The European migration regime as it has been developing over the last three decades was based on the presumption of clear socio-economic distinctions between three types of cross-border movements: mobility within the EU, voluntary immigration from outside, and forced migration. This allowed neatly differentiated legal and political approaches to each of the three phenomena: freedom of movement vs. discretionary state control; securitization vs. international protection. The radical economic and geopolitical changes of the last decade have made these dichotomies increasingly blurred and hard to manage, throwing the EU migration regime into an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy and effectiveness.