As people on the move continue to make the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean Sea, and as EU-Turkey relations face imminent meltdown, fears of a European Union ‘flooded’ with desperate refugees and with migrants seeking a better life continue to abound. A key assumption driving this fear is that Europe serves as a place of destination for large swathes of displaced populations.However, research documented in a new report by the project Crossing the Mediterranean Sea by Boat indicates that this assumption is a myth.
Written by researchers from the Universities of Warwick and Malta and the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, the report is based on 257 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted across two periods and two migratory routes. Interviews were first carried out in Kos, Malta and Sicily from September-November 2015 (with additional interviews in Malta until March 2016), and subsequently in Athens, Bern, Istanbul and Rome from May-July 2016. [...]
In sum, rather than ‘destination Europe’ being a ‘pull factor’ as is so often assumed in political and public debates about the European ‘migration crisis’, our research indicates that if we want to understand why people on the move are willing to risk their lives in unsafe boats heading for Europe, much more attention needs to be paid to the drivers of flight and the protections that these demand. [...]
What this woman’s story indicates is that we need a different language from that of ‘mixed migration flows’, which implies that people who flee for differing reasons come together along the same migratory routes. Instead, a language of intersecting drivers of flight is more appropriate in clarifying how individual migratory journeys result from multiple cross-cutting drivers, which render people precarious in ways that compound one another over time. The challenge, then, is how to respond to such a complex challenge most effectively.
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