The Jungle vs. the Garden: The Concepts of “Care” and “Control” in EU Asylum Policies and Migration Governance

The European Union’s accommodative and coordinated response to the arrival of Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion of the country on February 24th, 2022, was vastly different from its restrictive and fragmented response to refugee fleeing conflict in Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and other conflict zones. To elucidate the differences between the 2022 and 2015 responses, this paper examines two key policy documents: the European Commission’s European Agenda on Migration from May 2015, and the Council Decision from March 2022, which activated the Temporary Protection Directive. This study employs discourse analysis to underscore how refugees are legitimized as people in need who are deemed eligible for access to asylum procedures or are delegitimized as supposed economic migrants whose country of origin determines their inadmissibility to asylum procedures and justifies their channeling into detention and subsequent return procedures. The dichotomy of the mass influx of “migrants” from the Global South vs. the mass influx of “displaced people” from Ukraine illustrates the hierarchization and categorization of asylum-seekers into undeserving and deserving individuals. This categorization, in turn, justifies the deployment of securitarian European migration management, which contains the movement of asylum-seekers and grants access to international protection in accordance with constructed racialized hierarchies, as demonstrated in the Hotspot Approach established in Italy and the Greek islands. This two-tiered biopolitical differentiation and temporal/spatial control of asylum-seekers is in stark contrast to the policy of accommodation, solidarity, and repeal of the restriction of movement for Ukrainian refugees or, more specifically, for white Ukrainian nationals. Furthermore, this paper draws on Williams’ safety/security nexus, as well as Pallister–Wilkens’ concept of care and control as manifested in what she terms the EU’s “humanitarian borderwork.” It reveals the EU’s call of “saving lives” of those crossing the Mediterranean as a political opportunity to deploy an exclusionist response towards poor and racialized asylum-seekers, consolidating illegal border practices and institutionalizing the categorization of asylum-seekers into “desirable” or “undesirable” species.