The Criminalization of Immigration – All Around the World

The world is increasingly on the move, with more forced migrants on earth than ever before. As a result, destination countries around the globe are frantically working to enact policies and practices to keep them out – at all costs. 

To better understand the vast machinery of our own border policies, we must sometimes look overseas for a comparative view. ILD’s staff advocates for and provides direct representation to immigrants trapped in the throes of the U.S. immigration system, but a number of our staff have also worked in the European context. 

When the refugee crisis in Greece first began, ILD’s Executive Director, Eleni Wolfe-Roubatis, and ILD’s Managing Attorney, Helen Lawrence, traveled to the refugee camps in Greece (where Eleni was born and raised) to support local NGOs to provide legal support to asylum seekers. Lauren Markham, ILD’s Communications & Partnerships Manager, has spent the past several years reporting from Greece, looking at the country’s shadow “pushback” policies, as well as the case of the six young Afghans accused with burning down Moria Refugee Camp. Other staff members worked on this comparative study early on in their careers: Managing Attorney Misha Seay researched European asylum law and policies while in law school; Managing Attorney Christina Lee studied comparative human rights in Germany and interned at the World Organization Against Torture in Geneva; and Founding Managing Attorney Alison Pennington studied EU immigration law and policies while on a fellowship in Germany.   

Through this work, our staff have seen first-hand that the parallels between immigration exclusions in the United States and those in Europe are rather astonishing. 

For instance: the United States continues to warehouse asylum seekers in Mexico via the nefariously-named “Migrant Protection Protocols”, requiring that they remain in Mexico while awaiting their asylum interviews – a process that can take many months or even years, and that puts the lives of asylum seekers in grave danger. This practice, which violates the rights of migrants under both domestic and international laws, appears to be becoming more of an international norm. Last year, the UK announced a pilot program that would send asylum seekers from all around the world to Rwanda – a country over 4,000 miles away – to undergo the UK asylum process there. These policies are mirrors of one another: in violation of international and domestic laws, they turn poor sovereign countries into effective detention centers.

Meanwhile, within their borders, Europe (and Greece, in particular) is building more and more closed, repressive refugee camps in the prison-like model of US detention facilities. They are also building walls. Throughout Europe and the Schengen zone–from Hungary to Bulgaria to Serbia to Poland to France and even in arctic Norway – countries have scrambled to seal up their borders since refugees began arriving in 2015. Greece even seriously considered building a floating wall across the sea. 

There is ample evidence that walls do nothing to stop immigration, but only enrich human smuggling rings (which, in the US context, are aligned with drug cartels) and push migrating people into more deadly topography. This is perhaps the most clear and devastating link between the immigration policies in the U.S. and those in Europe: they are murderous in their impacts and their intent. 

Between January 2021 and October 2022, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) recorded more than 5,000 deaths of migrants attempting to make their way to Europe, most of them at sea. And these are just the deaths that have been recorded, for many more go missing along the way. Likewise, the IOM’s Missing Migrants project has recorded nearly 3,000 deaths of people trying to cross the US-Mexico border since 2014 (many more die south of the border in their northward journey). In FY 2022, over 800 people died attempting to cross into the US – an all-time high – making the US – Mexico border “the deadliest land crossing in the world.” 

These deaths are not mere happenstance, nor are they tragic inevitabilities. While immigration policies have become key campaign talking points around the world widely exploited for political gain, they have real, grave consequences for people on the move. The world’s immigration enforcement policies, detention systems, asylum application processes, and borders resemble one another more and more each day, in structure and in deed. And they kill. 

Migration is a human right, and movement is – and has always been – a condition of being alive. As a globalized world, we must stop looking at migration as a crime to be punished, and as a problem to be stopped. What must be stopped is not migration, but the murderous immigration policies sweeping the globe.