Devaluing personhood: The framing of migrants in the EU's new pact on migration and asylum

Abstract

The latest EU policy initiative to regulate migration to the European Union is called the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. Compared with previous policies, the New Pact promotes and normalises multiple procedures that can have far-reaching consequences on migrants' agency, dignity, personhood, and vulnerability. As the EU's migration and asylum policies set the parameters for the governance of forced migration and access to asylum in the Member States, they also provide framings for the practical encounters between asylum seekers and the migration regime. These framings legitimise certain approaches to the management of asylum migration and the related interpretations of international human rights treaties both in the Member States and in the EU. By examining how migrants and their encounters with the EU are discussed and represented in the New Pact, we join the critical scholarship that has questioned the EU's supposed turn towards a more humane approach to migration. Examining the official voice of the EU, we conduct a critical policy analysis with a focus on terminology and framing, exploring three major frames through which the New Pact characterises migrants as part of its attempt to transform European asylum and migration governance. These frames relate to human classification, spatial coordination, and temporal control, each of which is linked to the management of encounters between migrants and the migration regime. We conclude by discussing what the New Pact's framing reveals about the EU's approaches to human vulnerability, dignity, agency, and (de)valued personhood.