Kelly M. Greenhill

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Migrants seeking to enter Greece from Turkey, March 2020 Dimitris Tosidis / Xinhua / Eyevine / Redux

In the fall of 2021, the leaders of several European countries announced that they were being confronted by an entirely new security threat: weaponized migration. Over the course of a few months, Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader of Belarus, enticed thousands of migrants and would-be asylum seekers, primarily Kurds from Iraq and Syria, as well as some Afghans, to his country with promises of easy access to the European Union. Flown into the capital, Minsk, on special visas, they were bused to Belarus’s western border, where they were left in large, unprotected encampments as winter approached and temperatures plunged. Despite EU legislation and UN treaties guaranteeing humanitarian protections for asylum seekers, border guards from Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland pushed those attempting to enter their countries back into Belarus, employing tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets.…  Seguir leyendo »

Migrants are surrounded by Spanish police near the border of Morocco and Spain, at the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, on May 18. (Bernat Armangue/AP)

On May 17, more than 6,000 people swam, floated or scaled a pair of 32-foot-high border fences to cross from Morocco into neighboring Ceuta, an eight-square-mile Spanish-owned city on Africa’s northern coast. Critically for those seeking to enter, Ceuta is inside European Union territory. According to Spanish authorities, it was the largest single-day influx of unregulated migrants in the country’s history. At least 2,000 more followed the next day.

This wasn’t an accident. Apparently, Morocco engineered this mass cross-border movement to punish and coerce Spain. Video footage appeared to show Moroccan border guards opening fences to the Spanish enclave and allowing people through.…  Seguir leyendo »

In the early days of what grew into the Libyan uprising, Muammar el-Qaddafi summoned European Union ministers to Tripoli and issued an ultimatum: Stop supporting the protesters, or I’ll suspend cooperation on migration and Europe will be facing a human flood of from North Africa.

Given Libya’s history as an attractive transit point for North Africans seeking entry to Europe, it was a credible threat.

For one thing, it has worked to varying degrees at least four times in the last decade alone. Indeed, it was only the European Union’s promise to lift the last remaining sanctions against Libya in the fall of 2004 that persuaded Qaddafi to staunch what was then viewed as an alarmingly large flow of North Africans onto the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa and, from there, onto the Continent.…  Seguir leyendo »