Photo: Australian Customs & Border Protection Service. This poster issued as part of Australias Operation Sovereign Borders campaign has been published in 18 languages.

 As the CEO of the Refugee Council of Australia told The Guardian in April, “What Australia has done is just displace the issue away from the shores of Australia, by promoting an attitude of deterrence and harsh responses. They have, almost without doubt, made the situation worse for people who have tried to find safety in Europe.”

Different destinations, similar story. Israel – also keen to extol its border control model – completed a fence along its border with Egypt in early 2013, and around the same time, draconian new detention provisions were put in place. As IRIN reported at the time, until then “about 1,000 asylum seekers, mainly from Eritrea and Sudan, were reaching Israel every month.” Soon after, that figure was almost zero. Meanwhile, border reinforcements in Saudi Arabia and growing hostility towards foreigners in South Africa have made refugees and migrants from the Horn of Africa recoil from those destinations too. During this period, detections of Eritreans at the EU’s external borders shot up, from 2,604 in 2012 to 34,586 in 2014, while the number of Somalis arriving at Europe’s borders more than doubled between 2011 and 2014. 

In short, irregular migration routes are globalising, as most recently seen with the Rohingya boats pushed back and forth in southeast Asia’s seas. As the callous response to the Rohingya’s plight showed, routes have globalised in parallel with a punitive “border security” model that generates ever larger risks for border-crossers without reducing overall numbers. As this security model has been exported from its western heartland, it has simply empowered and fed the security forces, corrupt regimes, defence contractors and human smugglers variously involved in the trade, from Mexico to Turkey to Thailand. A “not in my backyard” approach has occasionally reaped short-term rewards for national governments, yet internationally, this one-eyed approach spells disaster.

We are still only beginning to understand the globalisation of irregular migration, to be sure; and we also need much more evidence of global displacement effects. If our leaders were serious about addressing the migratory “crisis”, they would push for precisely such evidence-gathering, and then apply the lessons. They could even try to come up with a global architecture for human movement, now that migration and refugee routes are every bit as globalised as our trade and capital flows. Yet our leaders are doing none of this. Instead of an evidence-based policy, we get political point-scoring. With more and more funds poured into migration controls in Europe and elsewhere, and record fatalities at borders, it is time for a rethink - and for a truly global approach to mobility. Ahead of World Refugee Day on 20 June, no task could be more urgent.    

Ruben Andersson

A more nuanced look at this European dimension is largely absent from the migration debate in Hungary. For the government, the EU is the source of “permissive” migration policies. For those like MigSzol who oppose the government’s policies, the EU is also not  a source of hope given that the Union is the architect of the very policies that have created this “buffer zone” at Europe’s Southern and Eastern borders. Indeed, beyond criticizing the government’s fear-mongering rhetoric  - which harnesses xenophobia and islamophobia in order to engineer a moral panic in Hungarian society - we also have to target the even bigger culprit: the Dublin Regulation. 

The Dublin Regulation forces people to apply for asylum in the country where they have first entered the European Union, and consequently forces recognized refugees to stay, work and integrate in that country. It is very difficult for migrants and refugees to find a place to live in Hungary. So difficult that an increasing number of them, regardless of legal status, choose living in Western Europe without papers over being homeless on the streets of Budapest. 

At the same time the Dublin Regulation effectively robs migrants of the kinship- and friendship-networks they have in other European countries. Searching a refuge is in most cases an unpredictable journey, not a planned-out trip. Given the precarious routes available to them, refugees are unable to choose their country of entry and, given the regulations, stay. In short: if there was no Dublin, there would be no excuse for the fence as there would be no buffer zones, and Hungary would not be the factory of sans papiers that it is now.

Thus, we face a struggle on two fronts: against the outrageously racist policies and rhetoric of the Hungarian government and Jobbik, as well as against the Dublin Regulation. The latter is a struggle that has long been staged by fellow activists in other European countries. As Migszol, we think that it is high time for Hungary to think and talk about Europe’s involvement in perpetuating a life-endangering regime of access to asylum. 

All this said, let’s end on a positive, if challenging, note. Following the extremely successful counter-campaign by the Hungarian Two Tailed Dog Party and Vastagbor, a campaign that mobilized thousands of Hungarians, we simply refuse to see Hungary as a xenophobic and racist society. The challenge, then, is the following: how do we mobilize all this energy to fight against the government's policy as well as the Dublin regulation?