Promoting the European way of life: Migration and asylum in the EU

Migration and asylum elicit intense debate in the EU. The Commission's New Pact for Migration and Asylum 2020 sought to diffuse some of the divisive issues among Member States by proposing a series of measures, mainly directed at diminishing asylum arrivals. In this article I argue that there is a profound incoherence at the centre of this policy, which is its embrace of the nineteenth-century theoretical framework of migration as driven by push and pull factors. While EU statistics provided by Frontex and Eurostat reveal that hundreds of millions of third-country nationals are welcomed to the EU each year as tourists but also as students, workers, etc., and a few hundred thousand are treated as unwanted, EU policy is still dominated by a framing of people as pushed and pulled to the detriment of the host state rather than as an essential element of the European way of life.