Multiple Expulsions: A Case Study of the Precipitation of an International Humanitarian Migration Crisis in Europe

• In Event: 2429 - Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Rountable 15

Abstract

In 2015 the UNHCR reported that the world was experiencing the biggest humanitarian crisis since World War II, with 1.8 million people newly displaced as internationally-bound refugees. In January 2015 the crisis reached Europe and by 2016 over a million humanitarian migrants from Western Asia and Subsaharan Africa had arrived by land and sea. This phenomenon is referred to as the 2015 European Migration Crisis. Despite a rich foundation of international migration and refugee studies, refugee crises have been undertheorized. This paper draws on a top-down migration systems framework to analyze how intervening historical and contemporary circumstances in origin, intermediary, and destination countries eventuated in a crisis. Using the 2015 European humanitarian migration crisis as a case study, I argue that multiple reiterative expulsions, such as military interventions and ecological devastation in sending countries in combination with insufficient infrastructure and programming at intermediate points of reception and exclusionary attitudes and ad hoc policy responses in receiving countries, contributed to an unprecedented migration crisis in Europe. Beyond the current case study, a multiple-expulsions framework can be applied more broadly to past and present humanitarian migration issues to better respond to and mediate ongoing and future crises.

Author

• Karin A. C. Johnson, University of California-Riverside