At the initiative of the European Commission, Frontex personnel – only deployed at the borders between Western Balkan partners and the European Union’s external borders – will be deployed at non-EU borders in the Western Balkans in order to better address the issue of irregular migration. Part of an Action Plan proposed by the European Commission, the new scheme aims to curb illegal border crossing from the Western Balkans into the EU, since 2022 recorded more than 130,000 irregular arrivals from the region, “a 168% increase from the same period in 2021” (data source). The European Commission’s plan also includes improved visa alignment between the Western Balkan states and the EU to ensure that “foreign nationals who travel to the Western Balkans visa-free do not then cross into the EU”, since Serbia, for example, maintains visa-free arrangements with more than twenty countries across the world, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia, and Turkey. Serbia’s stance over the war in Ukraine is another cause for concern since it has refused to impose restrictive measures in Russia.
It is possible that Russia exploits migration trends from North Africa and the Middle East into the EU in an effort to bring about instability in Europe, as per a recent ICMPD Migration Outlook 2023 report published by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development. Since Russia “opened the Kaliningrad airport to foreign airlines as part of the ‘Open Skies’ policy in October 2022” and increased the number of flights from those two regions, Kaliningrad – an exclave of the Russian Federation located between Lithuania and Poland – may well serve as an entry point into the EU. Poland has already announced its intention to erect “a 2.5 metre high and 3-metre-deep barrier would be built along the Russian enclave.” Before the war in Ukraine, “Moscow encouraged thousands of migrants, mostly from Middle Eastern and African countries, to cross into Poland from Belarus, a close Russian ally. During the crisis, Polish and other European leaders accused Belarus of masterminding mass migration to create chaos and division between EU countries.” At the same time, the possibility of a new wave of Ukrainian migrants entering the EU cannot be dismissed, as the war continues in their country, with some 8 million having already fled to Europe.
In the Mediterranean, Frontex is “expected to take a greater role to boost the number of returns of irregular migrants.” Some 500,000 foreign nationals that have either entered the EU illegally or are staying there illegally are ordered to leave every year. Yet only a third of those illegal migrants return to their country of origin and “Frontex is responsible for the coordination of return operations, but the decision about who should be returned is always taken by the judicial or administrative authorities of the member states.”
Christos Kassimeris, PhD
Professor Christos Kassimeris heads the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at European University Cyprus and is coordinator of the BA in European Politics and Communication. Before joining European University Cyprus, he was teaching European Integration Politics and International Relations of the Mediterranean for three years at the University of Reading. He is the author of European Football in Black and White: Tackling Racism in Football (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), Greece and the American Embrace: Greek Foreign Policy Towards Turkey, the US and the Western Alliance (I.B. Tauris Academic Studies, 2009) and Football Comes Home: Symbolic Identities in European Football (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2010), editor of Anti-racism in European Football: Fair Play for All (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), The Marketing of War in the Age of Neo-Militarism (Routledge, 2011) and The Politics of Education: Challenging Multiculturalism (Routledge, 2011), and has several publications in political science journals. He is also Visiting Research Fellow at the University of De Montfort.
