Introduction
The project of European integration has traditionally understood itself as being driven by the ideas and aspirations of liberal internationalism (Habermas Reference Habermas2012). The normative self-image of the EU has been defined, especially after the end of the Cold War, by its (nominal) commitment to rules-based multilateralism, liberal democracy, and the fostering of post-national, cosmopolitan values (Lavery & Schmid Reference Lavery and Schmid2021, 1333). This was built on the belief that a world with “more liberal democratic capitalist states will be more peaceful, prosperous, and respectful of human rights” (Ikenberry & Deudney Reference Ikenberry and Deudney2018, 16)—and that the EU had a major role to play in this. The notion of the EU as a “force for good” has also been integrated in its external relations through the embedding of the aims of democracy promotion and peace in its neighborhood and enlargement, as well as trade and security policies (Whitman Reference Whitman2011).Footnote 1 The appeal to “European values,” in sum, is ubiquitous in EU policymaking.
How the ideology of European integration relates to the practice of EU policymaking—and to the question of “who the European Union is for”—is rather more complex and ambiguous. This is especially the case in the domains of bordering and the management of migration, which have emerged over the past decade as some of the most politicized and contested areas of EU policymaking. The rule of law has been used as an approach to justifying not only the sharing of European values but also as a “legitimizing moral function,” as saving lives through the protection of borders—not necessarily by actually saving the lives of people approaching EU borders but rather by protecting the borders themselves and treating the irregular arrival at them as in violation of the law (Fine & Lindemann Reference Fine and Lindemann2024, 1; Isakjee et al. Reference Isakjee2020). Migration is also at the heart of so-called populist challenges mounted by insurgent right-wing parties across the continent, as well as being increasingly central to the civilizational discourse of protecting a “European way of life,” which is being embraced by the European Commission (Kundnani Reference Kundnani2023, 141–146).Footnote 2 At the same time, labor migration and the attraction of skilled workers to fill specific shortages and gaps across European economies have emerged as key priorities for European capitalism as it seeks to rebound from the impact of the COVID pandemic and the inflationary crisis of 2022/23 (Schmid & Bird Reference Schmid and Bird2025). Concerns about long-term demographic decline in Europe further exacerbate this (European Commission 2022).
European bordering and migration management therefore sit at the confluence of a range of political, economic, and social forces and interests, generating a number of conflicts and tensions. This is often expressed through what Hollifield termed the “liberal paradox” of immigration policy, when “an economic logic of openness comes into conflict with a political logic of protective closure” (Hollifield Reference Hollifield1992; Goodman & Schimmelfennig 2020, 1106). More broadly, we argue that bordering and migration policy represent a key political site at which the fundamental questions of what the European Union is and who belongs and does not belong to it are negotiated. In other words, the question of “who the European Union is for” is contested at its margins and settled at its border.
In this article, we address these broader questions in relation to a specific dimension of EU migration policy and discourse: that which refers to the categorization and management of different forms of mobility into the European space. Examining the ways in which individuals and groups are categorized in legal and moral terms as “good” and “bad” migrants and “genuine” and “deserving” asylum seekers vis-a-vis “undeserving” economic migrants, we argue, is key to better understanding both how the various forces and interests that shape European migration policy are negotiated in practice and how European identity and belonging are framed in reference to an external, racialized, and disposable other. Our main research question is therefore: how is the categorization of migration in EU policymaking and discourse changing, and what does this tell us about who is constructed as belonging and not belonging in Europe? To answer this question, we develop a critical political economy perspective that draws on the literature on racial capitalism and emphasizes the role of disposability as central to the categorization and governing of different forms of mobility, organized through the changing construction of the racialized figure of the “good” and “bad” migrant. In particular, we focus our analysis on two key figures of migration, which are at the heart of contemporary European border and migration policy and discourse: the economic migrant and the asylum seeker. Both figures, we argue, are constructed and defined by the production of distinct forms of disposability and are being reshaped in the present European conjuncture, leading to an unsettling and remaking of established understandings. Based on this, we develop our overarching argument: that a reconfiguration of the categories of migration is unfolding in the present conjuncture, which responds to changes in the political economy of Europe and unsettles established moral binaries, reframing them into a dichotomy of “legal” and “illegal” migration. This, we argue, implies a further restriction of the bounds of who belongs, and importantly, who is constructed as not belonging, in Europe.
The article proceeds as follows. In the first section, we review the existing literature in migration studies, which focuses on the role of categories in the ordering and management of different forms of mobility. From this, we draw a series of relevant insights. These refer to the ambiguous, fluid, and moralized character of the categories into which different individuals and groups are ordered, as well as to their functioning as key techniques of government through which different groups are constituted and managed. In the second section, we present our theoretical approach, which consists of a critical political economy analysis that draws on the concept of racial capitalism and foregrounds the production of disposability as central to the making and operationalization of the categories of migration. We then outline the methodology used in the paper, consisting of the analysis of documents, including EU and member state documents, NGO and activist reports, and broader media coverage between 2018 and 2024, through which we trace the discursive and policy changes in the construction and categorization of different forms of mobility. In the analysis, we focus on two specific figures of migration, that of the economic migrant and the asylum seeker, to explore the ways in which the construction of these categories relies on particular ideas of disposability. Regarding the first, we discuss how the label of economic qua “undeserving” migrant is being reshaped under the pressure of changing economic conditions and transmuted into the binary figure of the “high-skilled” talent and the “low-skilled” unwanted and “illegal” migrant. In relation to the second, we examine how the securitization of bordering, particularly in the Mediterranean, is producing a necropolitics of neglect that plays out daily, justified on the premise of legalistic (Fine & Lindemann Reference Fine and Lindemann2024) and securitizing narratives around people smugglers and the need to protect people lured into their traps (European Commission 2023). Through both areas, we show how the production of disposability and the shifting categorization of “bad” and “good” migrants are shaping and reshaping the boundaries of Europeanness and the self-image of the European project itself, to the point where there are in fact no “good” migrants. We conclude with a reflection on the role that race and racialization play as a perennial presence in European bordering—a ghost that is ever-present but rarely made explicit—often mediated by categories such as skills, desirability, country of origins, and vulnerability (Lindberg Reference Lindberg2024).
Categories and Figures of Migration
Questions over the role of categories in the management of migration, how they change over time, and the overall significance they hold for European bordering and the governing of mobility have been addressed by a vast scholarship in migration and border studies (Zetter Reference Zetter1991; Karakayali & Rigo Reference Karakayali, Rigo, De Genova and Peutz2010; Crawley & Skleparis Reference Crawley and Skleparis2018). In this section, we provide an overview of the most significant insights generated by this scholarship, as well as consider its relevance to the question of who the EU is for.
A first point, which is generally shared across the literature, is that the use of labels such as refugee, asylum seeker, economic, or irregular migrant is both highly consequential in terms of its legal and practical consequences and entails a high level of ambiguity and fluidity due to the often-blurry boundaries on which these categories are established. The distinction between refugees and migrants, for instance, is at the heart of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and is central to the entitlement of special legal status and the right to protection to some and the disentitlement of others (Scheel & Squire Reference Scheel, Squire, Qasmiyeh, Loescher, Long and Sigona2014; Crawley & Skleparis Reference Crawley and Skleparis2018, 59). Other related distinctions, such as that between voluntary or forced, regular or irregular migration—or between different statuses of migrant workers—determine the degree of criminalization or support, inclusion or exclusion, that individuals are subjected to. As Erdal and Oeopen (Reference Erdal and Oeppen2018, 982) note, “bureaucratic distinctions and labels have discursive power, and the labeling of individuals as forced or voluntary impacts their migratory experiences.” Yet these categories themselves and the boundaries between them are not “natural” or “fixed” but rather “in a constant state of change, renegotiation, and redefinition” (Crawley & Skleparis Reference Crawley and Skleparis2018, 52). Despite their appearance of legal clarity, they remain fundamentally ambiguous as they seek to organize into straightforward binaries a set of cases, experiences, and motivations that are complex, ambivalent, and blurred (Scheel & Squire Reference Scheel, Squire, Qasmiyeh, Loescher, Long and Sigona2014; Zetter Reference Zetter1991). Categories of migration and the distinctions between them are also historically contingent in terms of their definition, significance, and consequences. The 1951 Refugee Convention, for instance, is itself rooted in a particularly Eurocentric and colonial history that imagined some groups as genuinely in need of protection, originally those fleeing persecution in Europe, and others as beyond its scope (see Mayblin Reference Mayblin2014; Krause Reference Krause2021). In sum, the categorical distinctions between political and economic, regular and irregular migrants are at the same time an “illusion” and of central significance to the functioning and outcomes of bordering practices (Scheel & Squire Reference Scheel, Squire, Qasmiyeh, Loescher, Long and Sigona2014). It is therefore important to avoid falling into the trap of ‘conceptual fetishism’ (Apostolova Reference Apostolova2015)—treating as fixed and natural labels and categories that are in fact historical, ambiguous, and changing.
A second point relates to the hierarchical and moral dimension of the categorical distinctions on which border regimes are based. In constituting “ordering systems,” which attribute different levels of rights, categories, and labels, they also ascribe degrees of “deservingness” and “undeservingness”—and therefore moral worth—to individuals and groups (De Coninck Reference De Coninck2020, 1679). Legal categories such as refugee or economic migrant, no matter how seemingly objective or neutral their wording, give rise to complex “moral hierarchies” that ascribe victimhood to some and deceitful agency to others, thereby shaping public attitudes towards different groups (Squire Reference Squire and Squire2011, 2–3; De Coninck Reference De Coninck2020, 1679). As Gutiérrez Rodríguez (Reference Gutiérrez Rodríguez2018, 20) notes, the “categorization of refugees into different statuses… produces a hierarchical order, a nomenclature reminiscent of the orientalist and racialized practices of European colonialism and imperialism.” The practice of categorization is fundamentally shaped by racialized and gendered understandings, often built around understandings of vulnerability and victimhood in which, as per Spivak’s (1985, 93) formulation, “white men [are] saving brown women from brown men.” Such understandings not only undermine the agency of the women being “saved” by establishing them as “victims” but also criminalize racialized men who are portrayed as without need of help or support (see Turner Reference Turner2019). These binaries, then, serve less to clearly identify who belongs to Europe and more to categorize those beyond the scope of membership, constructing them as either victims to pity or criminals to be protected from. The functioning of categories of mobility as a system of moral hierarchy became particularly pronounced with the politicization and securitization of migration from the 1970s onwards (Karakayali & Rigo Reference Karakayali, Rigo, De Genova and Peutz2010, 130). In the context of a broader restructuring of bordering and the increased salience of migration in European politics, existing labels such as guest workers gave way to new sets of figures—first asylum seekers, then illegal refugees—which are explicitly moralized (Ibidem, 129–130; Castles Reference Castles1986; McFadyen Reference McFadyen2016, 604–605). Dichotomies of “genuine” and “bogus” asylum seekers becoming prominent during this period testify to the fact that categories of mobility are not mere bureaucratic or legal devices but also shape public discourse around migration, becoming central to the mounting of political projects of white European nativism (Danewid Reference Danewid2022, 22–23).
A third point made in the critical literature and relevant to the argument of this paper explores how categories of migration are actively constructed and deployed by states to create, govern, and discipline populations. As de Noronha (Reference de Noronha2019, 2417) argues, “bordering practices produce a range of legal statuses and social positionings which fundamentally concern questions of power, inequality, and state violence.” The point is that legal and moral categories such as those discussed above do not merely have certain effects on the populations they describe. Rather, they constitute these populations as objects of regulation, containment, and monitoring. This perspective foregrounds the “state’s power to actively illegalize non-citizens through legal categorization and coercive power” (de Noronha Reference de Noronha2019, 2416–7). The state’s capacity to constitute and differentiate different groups of migrants is particularly important in labor market policy, where it “supplies a crucial disciplinary mechanism for managing all labor through a multiplication of the categories of difference that serve to decompose and fragment labor into competing rival factions riven by racialized antagonisms” (De Genova Reference De Genova, Vidal, Smith, Gotta and Prew2018, 14). Furthermore, the construction of “illegal” migrants is not just consequential for the creation of different disposable populations. It also performs a crucial role in the making and remaking of the boundaries of citizenship and nationhood, especially in racial terms (De Noronha 2019, 2427–8). As El-Enany (Reference El-Enany2020) has shown regarding British border and citizenship policy in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, changes in legislation regarding the rights and status of postcolonial migrants played a key role in the construction of the UK as a “bounded” national space after the end of empire. The critical literature on bordering, then, emphasizes how the regulation and categorization of migration also play a crucial role in the constitution of national and European identity and sense of self by ensuring “that the Other of the nation/Europe/the Occident is reconfigured in racial terms” (Gutiérrez Rodríguez Reference Gutiérrez Rodríguez2018, 24).
These three points provide a useful starting point to interrogate the role that the categories of migration play in defining “who the EU is for.” To further explore this, we expand on the insights discussed above by integrating them into a broader critical political economy account of the figures of migration. In doing so, we advance the existing literature in two ways.
First, we highlight how shifts and reconfigurations of the categories of migration are often driven by broader changes in political-economic conditions and by the emergence of new constraints and impulses derived from the requirements of capital accumulation and the articulation of new hegemonic projects. We argue that the racialized and moral hierarchies of “genuine” and “bogus” asylum seekers and “legal” and “illegal” migrants, as well as the shifts in their definition, need to be situated in a broader critical account of the political economy of European integration, both in terms of the tensions and needs of capitalist development and the mounting of different political projects at the national and European levels.
Second, we emphasize the centrality of disposability as a technique of governing surplus or edge populations. The production of disposability—understood as the making of “edge” populations that are denied full political and civil recognition and exposed to exploitation, various forms of discrimination, and even loss of life—is an essential dimension of the politics of categorization (see Bhagat Reference Bhagat2020).
In the next section, we outline the theoretical framework of racial capitalism, define the concept of disposability, and explore the role it plays in the making of racialized surplus populations.
Theorizing Racial Capitalism and Disposability
Bordering occupies a complex role in contemporary European politics. It sits at the intersection of key areas of policy interest for both member states and European institutions, from security to labor market regulation, as well as being an issue of increased political salience amidst a rise in nativist and anti-immigrant parties across the continent. Beyond its operation as a set of technical policy instruments and rules, bordering therefore performs a fundamental function for Europe as a project of racial hegemony and capitalist accumulation.
Regarding the former, migration control and bordering are key sites for the making of racial identity and the setting of the boundaries of community, as testified by the way in which European border policy is increasingly framed in terms of “promoting our European way of life” (European Commission 2022). Borders, in other words, are where the meaning of what it is to be European is made and remade (Bilgin Reference Bilgin and Panebianco2022). In the face of social and economic crisis, European political actors see in the securitization of bordering and racialized exclusion of migrants a way of forging a new consensus and racial hegemonic bloc around what Kundnani (2021) terms “Eurowhiteness” (see Narayan Reference Narayan2017; Danewid Reference Danewid2022).
As for the latter, borders and migration policy play a crucial role in securing the conditions for the reproduction of European capitalism, most notably by providing a fix to its contradictions in the form of a flexible supply of super-exploitable labor (Bird & Schmid Reference Bird and Schmid2021; Schmid & Bird Reference Schmid and Bird2025). As the specter of labor shortages reappeared in the 2020s, the question of attracting migrant workers has gained prominence in the thinking of political and business elites.
To make sense of this complex picture—and how it shapes the categorization of migration—we put forward a perspective informed by the literature on racial capitalism, which foregrounds the racialized production of disposability as a key mechanism.
Racial Capitalism
The concept of racial capitalism originates in debates around the political economy of apartheid in South Africa (see Levenson & Paret Reference Levenson and Paret2023) and is developed in the work of Black radical theorist Cedric Robinson (Reference Robinson1983). Over the past decade, it has attracted growing attention and is at the center of a body of critical scholarship interrogating the interaction of race and capitalist development historically and in the present conjuncture (see Bhattacharyya Reference Bhattacharyya2018; Virdee Reference Virdee2019). At the heart of this literature is the insight that race and racialization, far from being mere leftovers or legacies of old prejudice, play an active role in the reproduction of contemporary social and political structures and in the operations of global capitalism, through the production of racial distinction and the construction of different populations as disposable and surplus, for the purposes of their exclusion, selective integration, or further exploitation (Bhattacharyya Reference Bhattacharyya2018; Shilliam Reference Shilliam2018). Rather than positing a stable and unchanging relation between race and capitalism, the literature on racial capitalism emphasizes their historical and ever-shifting interaction across different spatio-temporal conjunctures. In this regard, critical scholars in border and migration studies have taken up the concept and applied it to the analysis of contemporary border regimes in Europe, North America, and beyond to examine the ways in which the racialized categorization of displaced people as “bogus” or “authentic” refugees and “deserving” or “undeserving” migrants is a key mechanism in their exploitation, exclusion, and control (Bhagat Reference Bhagat2020; Rajaram Reference Rajaram2018). In turn, the creation and management of these surplus and disposable populations plays an increasingly central role in the contemporary global economy, both by creating a supply of exploitable labor and by feeding white nativist rhetoric in the face of prolonged economic and social crises (Narayan Reference Narayan2017; Danewid Reference Danewid2022). Through the lens of racial capitalism, then, border regimes are conceptualized as institutional complexes that are pivotal to the reproduction of contemporary order through the enacting of racialized narratives of belonging and not belonging and the deployment of a range of border policies of illegalization and selective integration of migrant labor (McNevin Reference McNevin2022, 998).
Disposability
The attribute of disposability, we argue, is central to the ways in which border regimes create, order, distinguish between, and govern different migrant groups. Understanding European bordering in its multiple forms as related to the production of disposability is key to making sense of how seemingly contradictory elements, related to the selective encouragement of labor migration to fill shortages, on the one hand, and the enactment of state-sanctioned border violence against irregular migrants, on the other, can coexist. Disposability is a condition that is produced through the enactment of racialized and gendered categorizations that, in ever-shifting ways, run through the making and remaking of the European border regime.
Regarding the EU-Turkey deal, for example, Oktem (Reference Oktem2016) discusses the role of the EU and Turkey in rendering refugees and other groups made surplus by these policies as disposable, suggesting that this has contributed to a situation “wherein refugees have become bodies that can be disposed of in the waters of the Aegean.” Yet, we argue that disposability is not only relevant to understanding these most extreme situations in which those approaching borders are treated only as partial lives, as necropolitical (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2019), but also in the context of being partially welcomed into a state on the condition that one is of economic use.
To account for the complexity of the forms in which disposability is produced in contemporary European bordering, we therefore call, building on Bhattacharyya (Reference Bhattacharyya2018, 123), for an understanding of disposability not as a singular experience but rather as a plurality of conditions of varying intensity and modality. For instance, in the management of migrant workers through various statuses of legal, illegal, and semi-legal work, disposability manifests as a condition of precarity and removability and the exposure to dangerous, underpaid, and often irregular work (Kapsalis Reference Kapsalis2019). It is, in essence, a mode of disposability that consists in the creation of exploitable workers (De Genova & Roy Reference De Genova and Roy2020, 355). A more extreme mode of disposability is that which consigns individuals and groups marked as undeserving of protection and who are denied legal routes to claim asylum to extreme harm, to perilous journeys, and often death. Disposability, in this case, is expressed in the exposure to different forms of violence—from the active violence of pushbacks, deportations, and border policing to what Davies, Isakjee and Dhesi (Reference Davies, Isakjee and Dhesi2017) term a necropolitics of abandonment and “violent inaction,” which is routinely on display in the Mediterranean and in formal and informal camps throughout Europe.
To give a further example of the different and intersecting ways in which disposability is deployed, one can look outside of the EU at the UK’s now scrapped approach to using the Bibby Stockholm barge as a place to house asylum seekers. Official meeting notes obtained by the Guardian (2023) in June 2023 show that the Home Office considered (although later decided against) issuing visa waivers to workers to support their policy of detention of asylum seekers on the Bibby Stockholm. A plan was devised that would provide visa waivers to overseas workers who were willing to work on the Bibby Stockholm in a situation of infectious disease outbreak (Guardian 2023).
Such a plan highlights the disposability of migrants in two distinct ways, which we consider in this article. First, it shows the underpinning assumptions that asylum seekers must be detained in border zones and not allowed to enter fully within a state, constructing them as a security threat to be contained. Second, it presumes that, when citizens are unwilling to work in a situation of increased health risk, migrant workers can be relied upon to fill those roles with the offer of legal stay—even knowing that the visa waiver will likely be withdrawn after the end of employment. Such a policy both erects and removes borders, but in both instances does so relying on an assumption that the people involved are disposable. Two modes of disposability are thus simultaneously on display: on one side, those detained on the barge, categorized as asylum seekers awaiting decisions, are confined and exposed to harmful conditions; on the other, migrant workers would be offered legal status on highly precarious conditions and placed at high health risk while being expected to fill short-term labor shortages, after which they too may become surplus to the needs of the UK and expelled.
To further develop our understanding of disposability, we also contextualize it in relation to the concept of grievability. Butler (Reference Butler2020, 59) argues that “to be grievable is to be interpellated in such a way that you know your life matters; that the loss of your life would matter; that your body is treated as one that should be able to live and thrive, whose precarity should be minimized.” To be ungrievable is to be treated as having a life whose flourishing is unimportant, a person whose life, or the loss of it, does not matter “and does not need to be memorialized or remembered” (Bird & Obradović-Wochnik Reference Bird and Obradović-Wochnik2024, 236). To be ungrievable is to be, in fact, forgotten (Boudreaux Reference Boudreaux2016) or forgettable. Dehumanization, which is built on racialized and gendered underpinnings (Agathangelou 2004), means that one’s life either does not matter at all or, as we will argue in relation to labor policies, only matters insofar as it provides an economic contribution.
Through a theoretical framework informed by racial capitalism and the concept of disposability, we critically contribute to the literature on the figures of migration and trace, at the heart of European policy and discourse, the shifting boundary between who is deemed to be “deserving” or “undeserving” of access to Europe and who constitutes a “good” or “bad” migrant. In particular, we focus on the production of new moral dichotomies of “legal” and “illegal” migration and how these reconfigure the established binaries of asylum seekers and economic migrants. This, we argue, has important consequences for the question of who does and does not belong in Europe.
Before we explore these dynamics empirically, we discuss our methodological approach.
Methods
The thinking for this paper originated in observations occurring in the previous work of the two authors and from the first author’s 8 years of experience working in EU border zones. During this time, the first author has made use of patchwork ethnographic methodologies (Günel & Watanabe Reference Günel and Watanabe2024), working with grassroots NGOs and solidarity movements in Greece, as well as over 100 interviews with displaced people, NGOs, officials, and residents in the Greek Aegean islands and the city of Athens. Through these interviews, observations, and broader engagement with relevant documents and materials, it became apparent that the categorizations of “good” and “bad” migration were becoming messier and more contested and that questions of disposability were central to these discourses. It is from these empirical insights that the initial themes and patterns of change referenced here started to emerge, and as such, they provided the inductive starting point for the research that followed.
Our next step was to engage the critical literature on the categories of migration, in dialogue with which we built our framework of analysis, based on the scholarship on racial capitalism and the concepts of disposability and grievability. Having formulated our critical political economy approach, we turned to document analysis to assess whether our hypotheses were recognizable within a corpus of UN, EU, and member state texts as well as grey literature, including activist reports and media articles. We explored what moral categorizations of “good” and “bad” migration were traceable within it, whether these were changing, and how this was shaped by the increasing salience of white nativist politics and the need for economic migration to stabilize the labor force of the European Union.
The first stage of the analysis involved the collection of relevant documents. Our corpus consists of 65 documents from the period 2018 to 2024 and was assembled with the aim of capturing the multiplicity of discursive sites where European migration and border policy are articulated, contested, and legitimized. The decision to focus on the 2018–2024 period arose out of conversations taking place during time spent in the “field” and was driven by the intention to capture the key shifts and recalibrations in European migration policy and discourse that characterized the aftermath of the 2015 migration “crisis,” the rise of European civilizational discourse, and new labor market dynamics following the COVID pandemic. The corpus includes 2 UN documents and 17 official European Union-level documents, including speeches, policy documents, and reports from the Commission, Council, EU Parliament, Frontex, Eurostat, Europol, and OLAF. It also contains 6 grey literature reports from NGOs, grassroots, and activist movements, as well as 24 news reports from global and national media outlets, which were included to account for the public mediation and contestation of official migration discourses. Lastly, 16 state-level documents from Germany, Greece, and Italy, including official government documents and think tank reports, were also selected to examine national-level discursive variations. In selecting the member states for our discussion, it was important to include both EU border or “shield” states (European Commission 2020) and one thought of as “core.”
While document analysis alone may not always yield sufficient depth to answer complex research questions, when combined with complementary methods, such as interviews, observations, and ethnographic methodologies, it provides a strong basis on which to track “change and development” (Bowen Reference Bowen2009, 30). The decision to analyze documents from a range of sources, including state and EU sources but also NGO and activist research outputs, was key in ensuring an analytical breadth. These documents were contextualized using prior research and wider knowledge of the situation (Bowen Reference Bowen2009). In engaging with documents beyond simply policy papers, we build on the understanding that “documents of all types can help the researcher uncover meaning, develop understanding, and discover insights relevant to the research problem” (Merriam Reference Merriam1988, 118). This broad understanding of what constitutes relevant material is key to our approach.
The documents were analyzed by hand, beginning with a skim-read by both authors, followed by close reading and interpretive analysis. This approach combined content and thematic analysis to draw out key themes and patterns relevant to our study. The texts were analyzed in relation to our core analytical categories: disposability, categorization, racialization, white nativism, and the changing constructions of the “good” refugee and “bad” economic migrant. These themes were examined across the corpus in the period between 2018 and 2024 in discussions of labor market migration and border securitization (Bowen Reference Bowen2009). What follows is a discussion of our findings and what this means for the construction and categorization of people crossing borders to access the EU.
The Remaking of the “Good” and “Bad” Migrant
In the analysis that follows, we note that new dichotomies and discourses are gaining prominence, chiefly that of “legal” as opposed to “illegal” migration, which cut across and disrupt previous moral distinctions, such as that between “good” asylum seekers and “bad” economic migrants. While we recognize and acknowledge Mayblin’s (Reference Mayblin2014) argument that a discriminatory, racialized, and colonial approach is built into the international refugee regime, specifically the 1951 Refugee Convention, from the outset, we suggest that within political discourse the moralized language of the “genuine” asylum seeker and the “bogus” economic migrant is increasingly being replaced with a focus on “legal” migration that benefits the economy and “illegal” migration that deserves no empathy and needs to be combated. To give a stark example, Ylva Johansson (then European Commissioner for Home Affairs) argued in 2024 that “legal migration should grow by more or less 1 million per year” to meet the needs of the EU economy (AP 2024). Such a comment is in stark contrast to Matteo Salvini (Italian Deputy Prime Minister) arguing, only a few months prior, for an end to search and rescue for people who have paid for “organized trips” to Europe as “[search and rescue] implies a rescue for an unforeseen event” rather than a planned, assumed illegal, journey (cited in El Pays 2023). These very different claims highlight the role that the notion of legality plays in defining not only who can and cannot be inside Europe, but also whose life is and is not worth saving. The category of legality now sorts between those whose lives can be understood as grievable and those who, because they are already assumed to have a lesser life, having made a choice to act outside of the law (regardless of whether they are actually in violation of international or national law), are not worthy of saving (Butler Reference Butler2020). Under a logic of border protection and economic prosperity, the primary moral discriminant has less to do with the reason for migrating (political or economic) than with the ways in which borders are crossed. In a context of closing legal pathways to claim asylum, asylum seekers are increasingly pushed into irregular transit and classed by politicians as “illegal” migrants (von der Leyen, cited in EUNews 2024); whereas economic migrants, where they fit into the talent profile of “high-skilled” migration or the various partnerships and recruitment schemes for “low-skill” work, may count as legal migrants. While the treatment of these groups differs greatly, we argue that all approaches are underpinned by racialized assumptions and categorizations informed by a white nativist politics that reflect different forms of disposability, as groups can be recategorized at any moment, drawing on moralized language to justify the most recent migration fix (Bird & Schmid Reference Bird and Schmid2021; Schmid & Bird Reference Schmid and Bird2025) intended to protect and prop up the European space, its economy, and its self-image.
Economic Migrants
The first figure of migration we examine is that of the economic migrant. This category of mobility emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in opposition to the figure of the “genuine” asylum seeker (Scheel & Squire 2014). In a European context shaped by the closure of legal pathways for worker migrations and resignification of refugee status as “a ‘highly privileged prize,’ for which a small minority are deemed to be eligible” (McFadyen Reference McFadyen2016, 604–5), the label of voluntary economic migrant came to denote those undeserving individuals and groups who “exploit” the system of humanitarian protection—in other words, “bogus” refugees (Hollifield Reference Hollifield, Hollifield and Foley2022, 424–425; Apostolova Reference Apostolova2024, 14, 20–21). The distinction between refugees and economic migrants, which, as mentioned above, was already implicit in the 1951 Refugee Convention, has been further enshrined in international agreements and treaties such as the Global Compacts for Migration and Refugees (UN 2018a, 2018b). In the process, and in the context of growing politicization and securitization of migration, it has taken on a moral valence as a key criterion of deservingness of access to humanitarian protection.
Taking this established understanding of the politics of the categories of migration as a starting point, we observe that a number of discursive and policy shifts are playing out in contemporary European bordering, which complicate the binary between the figure of the refugee and the economic migrant and redefine the latter’s meaning. This is driven, we contend, by a change in political economic circumstances relating to growing labor shortages across the European economies, becoming especially evident in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic (Schmid & Bird Reference Schmid and Bird2025). The supply of migrant workers who can fill shortages in logistics and tourism, agriculture, and social care across European economies is increasingly seen as an essential migration fix to the growing issues of declining workforce, rising wages, and stagnant productivity (see European Commission 2022; Sommerfeld Reference Sommerfeld2023; Schmid & Bird Reference Schmid and Bird2025). This is often reinforced by growing concerns about long-term demographic decline across Europe, pointing towards a gradual aging of the population and decrease in the share of the working-age population (European Commission 2022). This has prompted national figures such as then German labor minister Hubertus Heil (FT 2023a) as well as European politicians like then EU Home Affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson (AP 2024) to warn that “for demographic reasons, the population of working age in the EU will decrease by 1 million per year,” with the shortfall having to be met by increases in labor migration.
This development sets the stage for a significant redefinition of the category of economic migration, which is already manifesting in European policy and discourse. In particular, we argue that a new discourse based on the primacy of skills has taken center stage in European migration policy, aimed at securing the supply of labor necessary for economic expansion (Bonizzoni Reference Bonizzoni2018, 48–49). This takes a variety of forms in relation to different sections of the labor market. Regarding professional occupations in finance, tech, and high-end manufacturing, the notion has become established that the EU is involved in a “global race” to attract high-skilled, globally mobile talent. As stated in a Commission (2022) report, this is driven by the sense that “to remain globally competitive, the EU needs to become more attractive for talent from around the world. Currently, highly qualified nationals from non-EU countries are more likely to choose North America or Oceania than the EU.” This translates, in practice, into initiatives such as the “Blue Card Directive” and “EU talent pool” (European Commission 2023) as well as various “start-up,” “freelance,” and “digital nomad” visa schemes launched by European member states (Sommerfeld Reference Sommerfeld2023, 3). Most significant for our argument, it relies on a distinctive discourse on economic migration, which, as Martel (Reference Martel2025, 4, 10) has shown, is “systematically infused with management jargon, such as ‘talent retention,’ ‘talent management,’ or ‘global competition for talent’” and produces a new figure of migration: an “elite type” of migrant worker, globally desirable, highly qualified, and contributing to innovation and growth (Ibidem). This is not necessarily a moral category understood as being “good” or “bad,” but rather a highly skilled figure representative of the normative goals at the heart of Europe’s self-image as a region able to attract such highly valuable migrants when they are to the advantage of the EU project.
Meanwhile, a related but distinct set of policy instruments are emerging that respond to the need to fill labor shortages in so-called “low-” and “middle-skilled” occupations in tourism, agriculture, logistics, social and health care, and construction, in the face of a rapid increase of unfilled vacancies across the European bloc (FT 2023a, 2024). A combination of policy tools, old and new, is being deployed throughout Europe to direct foreign workers, including those seeking asylum, towards economic sectors in need, complicating the notion of the economic migrant as a “bogus” asylum seeker. This plays out in at least two ways. First, the recognition of the economic need for migrant labor is reflected in a greater emphasis on the benefits of “legal” migration, framed in terms of its positive contribution to European economies, and, as for Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis, an answer to the basic question of “who is going to pick our olives?” (FT 2024). This is then linked to a series of initiatives led by European institutions and member states to establish partnerships with third countries, which include the promise of “mobility agreements” and “talent partnerships,” such as those that have been negotiated with Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt and may be extended in the future to Nigeria and Senegal (Council 2024). These partnerships generally involve legal migration quotas and facilitated access to work visas for specific sectors in exchange for the commitment to greater involvement in border controls and policing of migrant routes. Support for “legal” migration routes is thereby offered in exchange for the increased prevention of “illegal” routes. Within each of these policies, however, the focus is not on the people migrating (who can be disposed of when not needed to “pick our olives”) but rather on the needs of the EU. Second, the figure of the economic migrant is being redefined by the fact that it is increasingly blended with, rather than separated from, that of the refugee and asylum seeker. This is a result of a trend across European member states towards facilitating the integration of refugees and asylum seekers, as well as irregular migrants, into domestic labor markets, with the aim of providing a cheap workforce for sectors in need. Germany, for instance, has over recent years reformed its refugee regime by making immigration status dependent on work, pressuring refugees and asylum seekers to engage in training and gain qualifications relevant to the needs of the German labor market (Maaroufi Reference Maaroufi2017, 24–25; Fontanari Reference Fontanari2022). In Greece and Italy, meanwhile, governments have taken action to “regularize” the status of migrants arriving through the asylum route to address similar shortages in tourism and agriculture, offering short-term work permits that are valid in specific sectors and regions (FT 2023b; Floros & Jørgensen Reference Floros and Jørgensen2020), as well as large companies offering irregular work opportunities to asylum seekers awaiting decisions on their cases in camps (Solidarity with Migrants 2024). Under these new conditions, the “good” refugee—in the view of European migration policy—is the one who is willing and ready to develop the necessary skills to address the gaps in the local economy and work wherever required—in other words, the refugee as an economic agent. This is justified in terms of a novel moral discourse, according to which the facilitation of “legal” labor migration from third countries—of “good” migrants willing to move for work and serve the needs of European capitalism—not only coexists with but reinforces the militarization and externalized policing of “illegal” surplus populations seeking asylum in Europe.
In the process, the moralized character of border discourse is altered but does not weaken—now being transposed onto the binary of “legal” and “illegal” migration. The mechanism of disposability continues to be central and is visible in two ways: first, in the fact that migrant workers are treated as a disposable source of labor in times of tight labor markets—with the implicit provision that the tap could be closed as soon as those circumstances change; second, in the notion that the opening of pathways for labor migration with third countries can be used as a tool for the further militarization and closure of borders for displaced people, as well as the further externalization of border controls to neighboring regions. This also raises questions of where the border of “legality” lies and what role the international refugee regime plays in this development.
As we show in the next section, changes in the figure of the economic migrant are accompanied by parallel shifts in the categorization and governing of asylum seekers.
Asylum Seekers
The second category of migration we analyze in contemporary European bordering is that of the asylum seeker. This figure, alongside the related one of the refugee, took a central position in migration policy in the 1980s and 1990s, as other legal pathways to mobility were closing and after the geographical restrictions of the 1951 Refugee Convention were lifted by many countries that ratified the 1967 Protocol (Favell Reference Favell2022, 26–27). As Scheel and Squire (Reference Scheel, Squire, Qasmiyeh, Loescher, Long and Sigona2014) note, this change coincided with “a reimagination of the figure of the ‘refugee,’ who was now imagined as a poor and helpless person from the global South,” rather than a politically persecuted Eastern European. As we noted above, the closure of worker recruitment schemes meant that individuals who would previously have been understood as migrant workers took the asylum path (Hollifield Reference Hollifield, Hollifield and Foley2022, 424–425).
This established distinction and moral dichotomy, we argue, is losing salience in the current European conjuncture. As a result of mounting pressure from insurgent parties of the right, campaigning on anti-immigrant and white nativist platforms, and the embracing of more civilizational discourses by European elites around “protecting our European way of life,” the distinction between “good” and “bad” refugees is giving way to a generalized disavowal of the right to refugee protection tout court (with only partial and temporary exceptions, such as for people displaced by the war in Ukraine in 2022).Footnote 3 The growing prominence of the binary of “legal” and “illegal” migration, observed above in relation to labor migration, is again in operation here, cutting across and disrupting the old moral dichotomy. In a context in which the moral worth of mobility is determined not by its motivation but by the regular or irregular character of the mode of entry—and in which legal and safe pathways to claim asylum are rare—there is, in effect, no “good” refugee at all.
As part of this shift, the residual commitment to standards of international law and humanitarian protection is increasingly overshadowed by the commitment to protecting European borders, as shown in the OLAF report, which we will look at in depth in what follows. However, to more fully set the parameters of this discussion, we first assess the role of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) as it is presented by the organization itself. Frontex defines the terms of its mission as being to “address migratory challenges and potential future threats at… [EU] borders, thereby contributing to the detection, prevention, and combating of cross-border crime and to ensuring a high level of internal security within the Union in full respect for fundamental rights, while safeguarding the free movement of persons within it” (Frontex 2021, 8). In framing the Agency’s role in such a way, it speaks to the message at the core of the “European way of life” and addresses the question not so much of who Europe is for but rather who it is not for. The statement—and Frontex’s ensuing approach—differentiates between the need to secure the external border to protect against potential threats—or, in the racialized terminology of Josep Borrell (Reference Borrell2022) in a speech he made in 2022, “the jungle”—and the importance of safeguarding the rights and values of free movement for those on the inside to move around unchecked. Such an approach goes far beyond a declaration of mission; it can also be seen in the actions of Frontex, whose current chief, Hans Leijtens, when asked about the role of the agency in search and rescue missions (SAR), stated that it is an organization tasked with securing borders and not a rescue organization (Euronews 2024). Such an approach is in line with the commentary of Matteo Salvini referenced above and highlights the prioritization of the border as a space of protection and security, a space in which the categorization of “legal” and “illegal” is decided, as is the notion of whose lives are worthy of protection. It is only in exceptional circumstances that a life crosses the threshold of being worthy of grieving, like in the case of Alan Kurdi, the young child whose photograph travelled the world in 2015 as a stark reminder of the risks people faced at EU borders. Yet the loss of life at sea is, tragically, not in fact rare, and organizations such as Frontex and the coast guard agencies of multiple EU member states have been found by numerous investigations to be either actively participating in or wilfully ignoring systemic policies of pushbacks that violate the right to non-refoulement (BVMN 2022).
To develop this argument further and explore the role that the constructed illegality of an act of border crossing plays in the assumption of disposability, we turn to a discussion of the OLAF report focused on the role of Frontex in supporting the Hellenic Coast Guard in the protection of Greek, and thus European, borders. In 2021, OLAF, the European Anti-Fraud Office, investigated Frontex under the offense category of “serious misbehavior” (OLAF 2021). The report found evidence of Frontex being aware of:
“the activities of some Hellenic Coast Guard (HCG) assets while dealing with a rubber boat of migrants intercepted within the Greek Territorial Waters (GTW). In particular, the migrants were taken on board of one of the HCG vessels only to be subsequently transferred back to the rubber boat. The boat was then towed by an HCG asset to the Turkish Territorial Waters (TTW) where it was left adrift with no engine” (OLAF 2021, 20)
This incident, one of a number discussed in the report, took place in April 2020. While it was categorized as part of the Frontex mechanism for the reporting of serious incidents, WhatsApp messages included in the evidence for the report showed senior Frontex officials suggesting that, had their own assets not been present at the scene, the classification of the incident should have been downgraded from a Category 4 to a Category 2—meaning that a lower level of investigation would be required. Discussions about whether this should indeed be the case focused not on the seriousness of the incident itself but rather on the “reputation” of Frontex and on the “geopolitical context at that time” (OLAF 2021, 21–22). The evidence collected by OLAF suggests that Frontex officials were aware of the seriousness of the situation, that asylum seekers who were safe at the point of being within Greek territorial waters (and under the supervision of the Hellenic Coast Guard) were then placed in a situation of distress following their return to Turkish territorial waters in a dingy with no propulsion. Beyond the potential violation of the principle of non-refoulement, the evidence within the OLAF report points towards several different issues relevant to the argument of this paper. First, in carrying out this alleged pushback, the Hellenic Coast Guard prioritized the protection of borders not only over the principle of non-refoulement but also above the protection of human life. What this example also demonstrates is that, in the case of Frontex, the evidence suggests that the recognition of the geopolitical situation faced by Greece and the priority of the state inside the EU’s borders took precedence over the individuals seeking asylum (OLAF 2021).
These cases point to a broader shift towards a situation in which, to put it bluntly, there are no “good” refugees. The growing prominence of the frame of illegality and the securitization of the practices of Frontex and national border agencies thereby fit into a global pattern of what Mountz (Reference Mountz2020) terms the “death of asylum”: the purposeful and systematic erosion of the standards of international protection. This is evident both in Frontex’s actions and in Leijtens’s statement that the primary role of the agency is one of security, not search and rescue. This is further reinforced by parallel developments in European border policy, such as the creation of new tools of border externalization through the offshoring of asylum processing (Cardwell & Dickson Reference Cardwell and Dickson2023). The combined effect of these practices is to produce extreme forms of disposability at Europe’s borders, in a necropolitics of active violence as well as inactive neglect, which consigns racialized populations to a perpetual status of exclusion, ungrievability, and unbelonging.
Conclusion
“[S]afe and legal migration is beneficial for everyone: migrants help address labour market needs and drive economic growth in their countries of destination. …of course, any country or political community needs to be able to decide who enters its territory. Borders need to be protected, or they are no longer borders. But the walls will never be high enough to just ‘keep people out’. And no one can accept the scenes where people drown while trying to cross the Mediterranean – this goes against our common humanity. So, the real issue is not to stop but how we manage migration, in a manner that is politically and socially sustainable and that reflects both our values and our interests” (Borrell Reference Borrell2023).
This quote, from a speech given by then High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell in 2023, illustrates the tensions that exist within European discourse between different priorities attached to migration policy, as well as to Europe’s self-image as a normative power. Most significantly, it shows how the contradiction between the economic pressure for greater labor migration, the further securitization of borders as essential to “protecting the European way of life,” and the residual commitment to liberal internationalism are driving a reconfiguration of the ways in which mobility is categorized and governed. The established moral dichotomies of asylum seeker and economic migrant are being reconfigured in complex ways through the rising prominence of a discourse of “legal” and “illegal” migration, which often cuts across them.
In this context, what becomes apparent about the categories of mobility is their underlying incoherence and ambiguity. This does not stop them, of course, from having highly impactful effects on the lives of the individuals and groups they sort and govern. The distinction between refugees and economic migrants is as blurred and porous as it ever was, especially as refugees and asylum seekers are increasingly pushed into participating in European labor markets. It is in this context that the distinction of “legal” and “illegal” migration takes center stage as a mechanism through which state and EU policymaking attempts to govern the mobility of migrants for various purposes—channeling workers into areas affected by labor shortages while maintaining a rhetoric of strong and secure borders as well as an outward appearance of conformity to international law.
At the heart of this reconfiguration, we have argued, is disposability as the underlying mechanism through which the European border regime constructs and regulates different migrating populations as “good” or “bad,” “legal” or “illegal.” The production of disposability is expressed, in different modes and with varying degrees of intensity, in the selective integration of foreign workers into domestic labor markets through their legalization and illegalization as well as in the necropolitics of abandonment, which plays out daily in the Mediterranean.
Throughout this, race is at once ubiquitous and continuously concealed—a ghostly presence that runs through the entirety of the European border regime (Isakjee et al. Reference Isakjee2020). Explicit racialization is usually foregone in favor of more indirect and heterogeneous differentiations based on country of origin, “prospect-to-remain,” and labor market potential (Maaroufi Reference Maaroufi2022, 7). The overall effect is both that of producing difference and hierarchy between different migrant groups—racialization as a way of producing and governing surplus populations—and of sustaining an overarching separation between the European self and the external other. In both forms, the question of “who the EU is for,” and more obviously, who it is not for, is increasingly being settled at the border.
In conclusion, what we have found in the corpus examined for this article and witnessed as part of the longer-term research project is that we are moving into a reality in which, for the EU, there are no “good” migrants. At most, some are tolerated, and in some cases temporarily welcomed, based on the political and economic needs of the bloc. These political and economic needs, often coming into tension, are inconsistent and shaped both by racial and civilizational imaginaries of Eurowhiteness and by economistic calculations of labor supply. It is in this context that the ideological attachment to Europe as a normative power, committed to human rights and refugee protection—always questionable in practice but central to the self-image of European integration—is increasingly sidelined and diminished.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the editors of the special issue (Amal Abu-Bakare, Anna M. Agathangelou, and Christian Kaunert) and the other authors for their supportive feedback during preparatory workshops. An earlier draft of this article was also presented at the MPC–GLOBALCIT Conference on Contested Boundaries at the European University Institute. We would like to thank the participants for their helpful comments. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful engagement with our work.
Gemma Bird is a senior lecturer in politics and IR at the University of Liverpool. As an activist-scholar, her research sits at the intersection between political theory and international relations, focusing recently on migration, humanitarianism, and advocating for a radically different approach to global borders and displacement. She has recently published in the journals Geopolitics, Global Policy, Cooperation and Conflict, and the Journal of International Relations and Development.
Davide Schmid is a senior lecturer in international relations at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research sits at the intersection of critical theory, international political economy, and European studies. His first book, “The Poverty of Critical Theory in International Relations,” came out in 2023, and he has published his work in journals such as the European Journal of International Relations, the Journal of Common Market Studies, and Geopolitics.
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