Migrants or refugees? The evolving governance of migration flows in Italy during the "refugee crisis

The need to escape persecution and search for better living conditions has pushed people to migrate for decades, and not only to Europe. At the global level, the number of forcibly displaced people has increased over time, passing from 37.3 million in 1996 to 65.6 million in 2016 (UNHCR, 2017). If we focus our attention on recent years, the numbers are even more impressive: 35.4 million in 2011, 42.8 million in 2013 and 54.9 million in 2014. In the Mediterranean area, this trend is mainly due to the Arab Spring, which increased instability in the region and progressively led to the Libyan and Syrian crises. In 2016, 710,400 asylum seekers were granted protection by member states of the European Union (EU), more than double the number for 2015. The largest groups of beneficiaries of asylum in the EU member states are citizens of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Border fortification and the securitization of migration have been the main policy approaches, confirming a consolidated policy routine at EU level. It has been argued that framing migration as a "crisis" served the EU so that it could consolidate routine policy practices, such as tight border control, with the direct consequence of preventing people from seeking safe and legal routes into the EU (Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins, 2016). This fortification has manifested itself through various forms: the erection of walls across member states, the "hotspot approach", resettlement and intra-EU relocation schemes (around 14,000 refugees have been resettled among the EU member states) and, finally, a multilateral policy on cooperation and development with the migrants' origin and transit countries (externalization or extra-territorialization of migration movements and policies).