Normalising the extreme 2024

Over successive volumes of the Mixed Migration Review, a depressing pattern has emerged: a migration-related action or policy that inspires outrage or condemnation today may, in the space of just a year or two, become accepted practice. This phenomenon of “normalising the extreme” means that some of the most egregious acts and policies documented this year, far from being disturbing anomalies, may instead serve as a tideline for what may soon be regarded as unremarkable or mainstream. Bearing that in mind, the incidents documented in this section – while reprehensible in themselves – also offer a wider warning of worse to come.

The politicisation of migration

With an unprecedented number of people going to the polls this year, it is not surprising that anti-migrant rhetoric reached a new low in 2024. Perhaps, the most egregious instance of this occurred in the United States (US), with former president Donald Trump and other senior members of his campaign team spreading false claims that Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio, had eaten people’s pets. This misinformation only served to exacerbate communal tensions and, reportedly, left many Haitians in the town fearful to leave their homes out of fear of attack. Trump has also weaponised other accusations to frame migrants as a security threat, describing them in the presidential debate with the Democrat candidate Kamala Harris as “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.”

The politicisation of immigration for electoral advantage is hardly unique to the US, however. In Europe, ahead of the European Union (EU) elections, the resurgent far-right in countries such as France and Germany achieved sweeping gains on the back of anti-migrant campaigns. But, while xenophobic sentiments have been leveraged by parties such as Alternative for Germany (AfD) for years, there was a marked shift in the willingness of centrist parties to mobilise similar language themselves. In Germany, back in October 2023, chancellor Olaf Scholz stated that “we must finally deport on a large scale those who have no right to stay in Germany” – a position that has further hardened following a number of widely publicised attacks by foreigners in the country, including the killing of a policeman by an Afghan national in June 2024 and the deadly stabbing of several people in August by a Syrian asylum seeker. The increasing hostility towards immigration was not only reflected in the AfD’s record gains in the European elections, but also in calls from established parties – such as the centre-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany – for asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Syria to be denied entry to the country.

In France, Emmanuel Macron sought to position himself as a sensible moderate between the “extremes” of the left and right-wing: with this in mind, he attacked the progressive-leaning Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) as “totally immigrationist”, a term previously used by the far-right to denigrate Macron’s policies. The attack was used on the basis of the NFP’s proposals to expand rights and protections for asylum seekers. Studies have demonstrated, however, that efforts by mainstream parties to woo voters by mimicking anti-immigration positions are more likely to entrench support for the far-right.

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi – whose Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has long targeted the country’s Muslim minority with language presenting them as immigrants or outsiders – appeared to escalate his attacks ahead of national elections, describing them variously as “infiltrators” and accusing the opposition of committing “vote jihad” by mobilising “a certain community” against him. What was notable was that, while this rhetoric previously tended to emanate from his associates, this time it came directly from Modi himself. Strikingly, though the BJP won the election, Modi lost the majority he had held before – though this loss of support was likely driven by the country’s economic woes.

A particular flashpoint in India’s deepening communal divisions is the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), passed in 2019 but only formally implemented just before the elections took place. The CAA provides for an accelerated pathway to citizenship for migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, provided they are either Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Christian, Parsi or Jain. Muslims, on the other hand, are not included. The legislation, besides potentially violating the country’s constitutional guarantee of religious equality, poses a further complicating factor in the entanglement of India’s communal domestic politics and its asylum and migration policy. While the CAA has been justified in humanitarian terms, it is in marked contrast to India’s summary detention and deportation of the predominantly Muslim Rohingya population seeking refuge in the country.

Rohingya also found themselves scapegoated in Indonesia ahead of national elections there. The number of Rohingya travelling from Bangladesh or Myanmar, though still relatively modest, has increased since November 2023. While originally welcomed in the Muslim-majority country, given their persecution in Myanmar, public opinion has become increasingly hostile, with reported pushbacks by coastguards and mass protests in Aceh. This animosity has in large part been sustained by a coordinated online hate campaign targeting Rohingya. While disagreement had occasionally flared up in previous years, these were usually easily managed, but the recent spread of misinformation had escalated tensions to unprecedented levels in the build-up to national elections in February 2024.12 Analysts feared that the failure of the Indonesian government to effectively challenge these toxic narratives could result in the presence of Rohingya becoming a “ticking time bomb” in future.

In South Africa, meanwhile, where the issue of immigration has become increasingly divisive in recent years amidst growing hostility to Zimbabweans and others living in the country, the build-up to national elections was characterised by the deployment of anti-migrant rhetoric from across the political spectrum. This arguably reflects the troubling emergence of an anti-migrant consensus, with no major party appearing to champion their rights. Well before the election season began, in November 2023, the government announced that it would be withdrawing from the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol while it undertook a sweeping reform of its immigration system, including the repatriation of refugees to countries it deems safe. While South Africa has made clear its intention to rejoin the conventions once this process is completed, it will likely opt out of certain clauses so it can restrict the right of refugees to employment, education and citizenship.

Border violence and pushbacks

Border violence has long served as the blunt end of migration management, often carried out covertly or with a measure of deniability (for example, through the use of masked or plainclothed vigilantes rather than uniformed security forces). A shocking feature in recent years, however, is the increasing silence that abuses, including pushbacks, appear to inspire from countries and organisations that were once far more vocal in their condemnation.

This is certainly the case in the European Union, where reported abuses by border forces in certain countries led, in the past, to official expressions of concern and calls for these practices to end. Now, however, the offending countries are able to carry out these acts with little in the way of consequences, even when major abuses have been exposed. While surveillance has only increased in many respects, protection monitoring of those travelling towards and through the region remains opaque. Many of those who die along the route are buried in unmarked graves; recent research by The Guardian found that, in the last decade, at least 1,015 people who had died along the EU’s borders had been buried without ever being formally identified. The absence of a formal system to support relatives seeking to determine their loved ones’ fate means that many families of migrants are never able to find out what happened to them.

For instance, though Greece has been accused of carrying out illicit pushbacks for more than two decades, the practice has evolved in a number of ways in recent years. Besides increasing in scale – the number of suspected incidents taking place is far greater now, with the organisation Aegean Boat Report claiming that almost 26,000 people were pushed back by the Greek coastguard in 2023 – it has also reportedly extended to include not only new arrivals intercepted close to the land border or at sea, but also migrants apprehended further inland who have been transferred and then pushed back towards Türkiye. Perhaps most fundamental, however, is the increasing impunity with which Greek security forces and armed proxies are now able to operate. The significant condemnation that emerged from the EU from 2015 onwards in response to various reports of gross and systematic human rights abuses being carried out at the border – from theft and humiliation to beatings and abandonment of migrants in the ocean – has become notably more muted. While reputable research and media outlets have repeatedly documented the deaths of dozens of migrants who drowned after being thrown into the sea by security forces or masked individuals, Greek authorities continue to deny that these abuses are taking place in the face of mounting evidence. In August 2024, a vessel carrying migrants that reportedly failed to stop in response to orders from the Greek coastguard was shot at, with one migrant on board killed by a bullet.

In this context, it is not surprising that other countries have also been implicated in violence and mistreatment of migrants at their borders, including in the Balkans, since the region became a popular place of transit. Croatia, for example, has been accused of egregious abuses at its border for some years, but neighbouring countries appear to be adopting similar tactics as policies of containment have spread eastwards. While Hungary has pushed back tens of thousands of migrants into Serbia, for instance, Serbia has itself been guilty of pushing back migrants into Bosnia Herzegovina and, more recently, into North Macedonia. In February 2024, video footage emerged of dozens of men who had been stripped down to their underwear in near-freezing temperatures and forced back across the border. The Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights condemned the footage and identified it as “indicative of a wider, worrying trend” – but despite this, in June the EU signed a formal agreement with Serbia on migration management.

Cyprus has also been accused of pushbacks, primarily of Syrians departing by boat from Lebanon. Cypriot authorities have been accused of intercepting vessels and forcing back hundreds of migrants towards Lebanon, often without food, water or fuel and, in some cases, allegedly at gunpoint – charges that government officials denied. In June, authorities also refused to allow in dozens of migrants stranded in the buffer zone between its territory and Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus, arguing that it could become another avenue for irregular migration. Cyprus has also been accused of collaborating with Lebanon’s coastguards, with the latter reportedly engaging in “pullbacks” of migrant vessels and subsequently deporting Syrians on board across the border from Lebanon into Syria. Notwithstanding these abuses, in May 2024 Lebanon received a €1 billion package of financial assistance from the EU. Some of it was allocated to basic service provision towards refugees, IDPs and other vulnerable groups, but the package also included funding to support border and migration management.

The use of pullbacks is also symptomatic of the increasingly pervasive outsourcing of migration management by the EU to partner countries in North Africa who, in return for various financial and political concessions, intercept migrants departing from their shores towards Europe and forcibly return them to their own territories (in most cases, either to be detained in brutal conditions or violently expelled). This is especially the case with Italy, whose much-vaunted reduction in migrant arrivals during 2024 has been attributed to the EU’s agreements with Libya and Tunisia. Both deals have resulted in an extraordinary uptick in the number of migrants en route to Italy apprehended in the Central Mediterranean.

Border violence is often enabled by a raft of technologies, such as drones and thermal cameras, as well as the hard infrastructure of walls and fences. The latter, in particular, serve symbolic as well as practical functions as a signal of tightened immigration policies. In the US, the most extreme expression of anti-migrant policy is being played out on the southern border between the state of Texas and Mexico. Texas governor Greg Abbott, who over a number of years has overseen the militarisation of the border and the introduction of a variety of harsh preventative measures such as serrated metal buoys, announced that he would be tripling the length of the state’s concertina wire fence – including, controversially, at the border with the neighbouring state of New Mexico. Coming at a cost of billions of dollars, the extreme violence of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star has resulted in the reported injury of hundreds of migrants. Human rights groups have reported, from mid-2023 onwards, a disturbing pattern of “less-than-lethal” violence being carried out against migrants without any provocation. Various reports have documented accounts of US border security firing rubber bullets, gas balls and pepper spray through the wire at groups of migrants, including children, and engaging in verbal and physical mistreatment of apprehended migrants.

Perhaps the most blatant use of violence, though, continues to take place at the border of Saudi Arabia. The government’s systematic expulsion of undocumented migrants in the country, carried out over an extended period, is well documented: since 2017, at least 21 million migrants have been deported from the country, including around half a million Ethiopians. However, organisations including the Mixed Migration Centre, Human Rights Watch and Mwatana for Human Rights have documented a more recent, even more disturbing pattern of violence at the border. Dating back to August 2022, evidence suggests that more than 10,000 migrants may have been killed as a result of these actions, ranging from large-scale and indiscriminate mortar attacks on groups to point-blank shootings and violence. While attracting significant attention in the international media, these reports appeared to do little in the way of halting the abuse, with a follow-up report published by the Mixed Migration Centre in June 2024 documenting further intentional killings and maiming of migrants by border guards, in some cases involving the use of heavy weaponry. A key factor in this may have been the somewhat circumspect response of the US and the EU, limited in public to calls for an investigation into the allegations, while the UN’s response has been limited to isolated expressions of concern rather than a concerted push for justice. It has been suggested that the muted response to these widespread, egregious abuses may be rooted in ‘cynical realpolitik’, with Saudi Arabia simply too important geopolitically to be meaningfully held to account.

Detention and forced returns

The dynamics of deportations and forced returns are often rooted in a range of factors, from deep-seated issues such as geopolitical rivalries or historical discrimination to recent shifts in policy or public opinion. In some cases, a crackdown may represent the continuation of a long-held approach towards the migrant population or a radical departure from previous policies, triggered by a particular set of events. As with other components of a country’s migration policy, the function can be highly performative – for example, if authorities wish to signal the beginning of a “hostile environment” or deter other potential migrants. Irregular migration has also been used to justify increasingly draconian policies, including the rollback of protections for minors intercepted in the EU. The passage of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum prompted the UN to call for member states to ensure that the rights of children were not undermined, given the apparent weakening of safeguards preventing the detention of underage migrants. Leaked internal documents ahead of the passage of the pact suggest that some countries, led by France, were lobbying for its provisions to explicitly allow child detention, even from birth.

Libya has been notorious for years for the systematic use of violence, torture, sexual assault and extortion in its various detention centres by security forces, militias and smugglers. Many of those being held in these facilities are migrants who have been intercepted at sea by the coastguard and returned to land. Besides providing continued financial assistance to Libya to support these activities, the EU and various member states collaborate directly with the country through surveillance and coordination to ensure migrant vessels are apprehended: according to a report by Lighthouse Reports published at the beginning of 2024, the EU migration agency Frontex had communicated the location of boats on no fewer than 2,000 separate occasions over the previous three years. Extraordinarily, it has even been accused of sharing coordinates with a notorious militia, Tareq Bin Zayed, to enable pullbacks to Libya, despite the fact that the group is widely accused of egregious human rights abuses. Interception by its vessels, in the words of one expert, is “more of a kidnapping than a rescue”.

However, while Libya has long been an outlier in the degree of abuse suffered by migrants in the country, this appears to be changing as migrants in Tunisia have also been exposed to a dramatic escalation in violence. As in Libya, the EU has been accused of being complicit in these abuses due to the considerable amounts of money it has channelled into funding ‘migration management’ in the country. Particularly disturbing were the recent reports of systematic torture and sexual assault being carried out against migrants in Tunisia’s detention facilities by members of its national guard, who receive funding directly from the EU. The scale and systematic nature of these abuses have prompted Tunisian opposition groups to file a case against the government with the International Criminal Court, while the EU faces growing pressure to launch a formal investigation into these alleged abuses.

Since the crackdown first began in 2023, hundreds of migrants in Tunisia have also been abandoned at the border with Morocco or Libya, including dozens who have died or disappeared in the process. While Tunisia is not alone in carrying out these “desert dumps” – Algeria, for instance, has carried out expulsions to Niger for years, with thousands of migrants abandoned during the year at ‘Point Zero’, resulting in a number of deaths and disappearances – its adoption points to a troubling normalisation of this practice in North Africa and beyond, with countries such as Morocco and Mauritania (all recipients of EU assistance to support migration management) also recently implicated in similar abuse. Meanwhile, Egypt, though hosting an estimated 500,000 people who crossed the border from Sudan following the outbreak of conflict in April 2023, has also been accused of launching a crackdown against Sudanese in the country. According to a report by the New Humanitarian, authorities have established a covert network of detention facilities where Sudanese are being held before being expelled back into Sudan.

Violent expulsions, arbitrary detention and other abuses towards migrants are often motivated and enabled by structural racism. In the case of the Dominican Republic, the history of the mistreatment of migrants from neighbouring Haiti goes back decades, but has raised further questions since the latter’s descent into civil disorder and gang-orchestrated fighting. Despite the clear dangers in the country, the number of confirmed deportations picked up pace in 2024, with almost 100,000 Haitians (including 5,000 children and adolescents) deported in the first eight months alone. The expulsions, which have frequently been accompanied by degrading treatment, beatings and detention in squalid conditions, appear to have escalated as a result of the government’s announcement, in October 2023, that all visas for Haitian nationals would be suspended, closing off a key pathway for regular migration. The Dominican president, Luis Abinader, vowed ahead of national elections in May 2024 to build a wall at the border with Haiti and impose checkpoints to prevent an “avalanche” of Haitians from entering the country.

Both Pakistan and Iran have offered sanctuary to millions of registered refugees, residency card holders and undocumented migrants from Afghanistan for decades, even if deportations have taken place repeatedly throughout this period and have periodically threatened the imposition of tighter restrictions. However, both countries appear to have entered a new phase in their treatment of their Afghan populations. Pakistan, in particular, with the launch of its Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan in October 2023, has signalled a substantive policy shift towards what could eventually lead to the return of the large majority of Afghans in the country. The plan is scheduled to be rolled out in several phases, beginning with the deportation of undocumented Afghans by 1 November 2023 and the introduction of penalties for anyone who offered employment or housing to this group. By May 2024, at least 600,000 Afghans had left Pakistan and the estimated one million others in this category still in the country face severely circumscribed conditions. Despite official claims that most returns were voluntary, evidence suggests that the majority were coerced to varying degrees, with Human Rights Watch reporting “widespread abuses” including mass arrests, dispossession and destruction of documents. In many cases, returnees were forced to divert their assets, leaving them with little to bring back to Afghanistan. A second and third phase, targeting first the 800,000 holders of government-issued Afghan Citizen Cards (ACCs) and then the estimated 1.3 million holders of UNHCR-issued Proof of Registration (PoR), have been delayed but are still expected to take place, according to officials.

For several years, and against a backdrop of increasing hostility towards Afghans, the Iranian government has conducted systematic expulsions across the border, reaching a total of 651,000, in 2022. Of these, close to half were carried out in the last three months of 2023, in the wake of official warnings of an imminent crackdown. This was accompanied by the imposition, from December 2023, of a work, travel and residency ban for Afghans in 16 of Iran’s 31 provinces. In this regard, Iran’s migration policy appears to be following a similar pattern to Pakistan’s. The situation of the Afghan population became even more politicised in the build-up to the presidential elections in July 2024, when immigration and border management were key issues.

In the context of a repressive environment towards migrants, the application of concessions or exceptions may be as telling a reflection of a government’s official hostility as its crackdowns. In this regard, an example is Israel’s reported recruitment of African asylum seekers – repeatedly described in recent years by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “infiltrators” – to fight in Gaza in return for permanent residency. Despite being a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the country has granted refugee status to very few people over the years, with less than one percent of asylum claims from Eritrean and Sudanese refugees approved. In this context, the recruitment raises an array of ethical and human rights concerns around the possible exploitation of asylum seekers who are desperate to regularise their status, particularly as it is not known whether any of those who have been recruited have yet received what they had been promised.

Containment and forced immobility can also serve as an insidious alternative to deportation in contexts where authorities are unable to expel migrants due to legal constraints. In Mexico, following an apparent entente with the US to prevent migrants from reaching the border between the two countries, security forces have launched a crackdown on migrants transiting through its territory. However, since authorities are now prevented by law from detaining them indefinitely or deporting them en masse, officials are instead opting to move them away from the border by forcibly relocating them to the interior or down towards its southern border with Guatemala. As a result, hundreds of thousands of migrants are effectively trapped in limbo, unable to move on or return. Besides the threat of depredations from criminal gangs, migrants have been repeatedly exposed to violence and extortion from police officials and, in some cases, abandoned in the desert.

Policy and legislative developments

Four years in the making, the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum was finally passed in April 2024 by a narrow majority of 300 to 270 in the European Parliament. Among other provisions, it contains a controversial measure permitting member states to “apply derogations from the common procedure” (that is, suspend its usual asylum functions) in the context of overwhelming “mass arrivals”, particularly in contexts where migration has been weaponised by another state actor; this appears to legitimise the forced returns and containment evident at the Poland-Belarus and Finland-Russia borders, as discussed above. The pact contains various elements that have been ‘pandering’ to the far right, including provisions permitting migrants in certain conditions to be detained for up to six months.

Migrant advocacy groups have condemned the pact for undermining fundamental protections, with Human Rights Watch labelling it “a disaster for migrants and asylum seekers”, while the European Council on Exiles and Refugees described the new provisions as “Byzantine in their complexity and Orbán-esque in their cruelty”. However, Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, continues to advocate against the pact, specifically its provisions around mandatory resettlement quotas for asylum seekers. These tensions were highlighted further following the European Court of Justice’s imposition of a €200 million fine on Hungary for its protracted refusal to accept asylum seekers, deemed to be a serious violation of EU law. In response, in September 2024, officials in Orbán’s administration threatened to bus migrants from the Hungary-Serbia border to Brussels.

More generally, the EU’s prioritisation of security and containment over protection and safeguarding was demonstrated by the continued criminalisation of journalists, activists, NGOs, doctors, rescue teams and others who are accused of facilitating irregular migration by providing essential, potentially life-saving assistance to migrants. During 2023, more than 100 people were prosecuted for aiding and abetting irregular migration in this way, including dozens who engaged in rescues of migrant boats in distress and others who provided food, clothing and shelter. Planned reforms to the EU’s Facilitation Directive, the criminal legislation that has enabled many of these cases to be brought forward, may make the situation of human rights defenders and humanitarians even more precarious in future.

In September 2024, Germany announced that it would be imposing security checks at all its land borders to prevent migrants from entering its territory from neighbouring countries. The move, besides raising concerns about racial profiling and other types of discrimination, has also been condemned for undermining the founding principle of freedom of movement within the EU’s Schengen Area. There are concerns that other countries could follow suit, leveraging migration-related fears to justify increased border controls.

In the meantime, a resurgent far-right has not only made significant electoral gains in the European elections in June 2024, but has also secured the largest vote share of any party in the Netherlands (in November 2023) and Austria (in September 2024). Both open up the possibility of national governments attempting to circumvent their responsibilities under European law. In the Netherlands, the coalition government which includes the anti-migrant Freedom Party has announced its intention to declare an “asylum crisis” – a measure that it hopes will enable it to suspend asylum applications; critics, however, question the legality of a move that is normally only justified in the context of war, major disasters or other genuine emergencies. Austria’s Freedom Party, meanwhile, campaigned on a raft of anti-migrant pledges including pushbacks at the border and the suspension of asylum claims, making any approved asylum temporary and preventing refugees from accessing a pathway to citizenship over time. Though extreme, in some respects these positions exist on a continuum that also encompasses countries like France, where, in December 2023, the centrist government passed legislation that significantly reduced protections for migrants and asylum seekers.

Sweden is preparing to make law a controversial proposal that public sector workers including doctors, social workers, teachers and librarians would be legally required to report undocumented people to authorities. The proposal – which has been dubbed the “snitch law” by some – was among the many measures included in a 2022 deal struck between four right-wing parties in the country. The agreement paved the way for a coalition government involving three centre-right parties with parliamentary support from the far-right anti-immigration Sweden Democrats (SD).

In July 2024, in the US, the government took the extraordinary step of suspending the right to asylum, meaning that the large majority of those apprehended at the border (with the exception of unaccompanied children and trafficking victims) will be summarily deported to their home country or expelled to Mexico whenever the total number of daily encounters at the border reaches 2,500. Only when the total falls below 1,500 will the asylum system be opened again. Following the announcement, unprecedented numbers of people were deported or returned to their country of origin. While US President Biden’s administration has sought to balance these restrictions with limited options for regular migration pathways (for example, through the creation of Safe Mobility Offices, discussed further in Resisting the extreme, on page 274 of this publication), the move prompted widespread condemnation from UNHCR and other organisations as a violation of the right to asylum.

The US has also initiated a new partnership with Panama, following the May 2024 election of new president José Raúl Mulino, who ran on a strong anti-migration ticket. Record-breaking numbers of migrants have been travelling from Colombia through Panama’s infamous Darién Gap en route to the US, a situation that, in 2023, had already prompted the latter to engage both countries in cooperation to curb irregular migration through the region. Whether the agreement will deliver any substantive impacts, however, is uncertain given that any barriers will likely only push migrants to attempt alternative, and potentially more dangerous, routes north instead or leave them stranded indefinitely in Colombia.

Australia, meanwhile, after seemingly releasing the last asylum seekers detained in its controversial offshore facilities in Nauru in June 2023, resumed transfers there in September 2023 and is now holding more than 100 people again on the island. In November 2023, in the wake of a high court ruling that determined that indefinite detention was illegal, the Australian government announced the Migration Amendment (Removal and Other Measures) Bill 2024. This retrogressive legislation would authorise the incarceration, for up to five years, of former refugees stripped of their status and failed asylum seekers who resisted deportation – a move that could criminalise people even for minor administrative misdemeanours. If implemented, the law could be in violation of international law. Troublingly, the legislation also expands the ability of the government to strip refugee status even to “lawful non-citizens” to expedite their removal. These and other provisions would expose refugees and asylum seekers to significant dangers.