Making Illegal People: Following the European Path of Crisis Creation

The EU has intensively securitized its borders for the last three decades, building on a discourse of securitization and illegality (Aas, 2011). For politicians, evoking “migration crisis”—referring especially to people seeking international protection, fleeing war or insecure circumstances—has been particularly useful to push a particular agenda (Majcher et al., 2020). These have been facilitated by persistent discourses of irregular migrationImmigration discourse as flooding Europe, regardless of the reduction in the number of entries (Hage, 2016; Majcher et al. 2020). In spring 2024, political discussion in Iceland characterized the Icelandic asylum system as in crisis due to a massive increase in the number of entries, where it was proclaimed necessary that Iceland would “regain control over its borders.” In this chapter, we analyze this proclamation of a migration crisis. We briefly discuss the development of the asylum system in Iceland (Ingvarsson et al., 2016) and recent changes. We then look at the situation in 2024, asking in what ways it can be characterized as a crisis and what the crisis was depicted as being about. Our analysis shows the importance of looking critically at the use of the concept crisis and its use in the migration context (Fradejas-García & Loftsdóttir, 2024).