The EU as a Gated Community: Contextualising Events on the Poland-Belarus Border

It is worth analysing the migrant crisis on the Belarus–Poland border apart from the tension between the EU and Minsk.

It is not the first time that we see a humanitarian migrant crisis on the EU border. There have been more than 1,600 deaths in 2021 and it is estimated that more than 26,000 migrants have lost their lives since 2014 in the waters off the EU. Thus, it is worth analysing the migrant crisis on the Belarus–Poland border apart from the tension between the EU and Minsk. This paper will advance a frame that puts the EU migrant crisis in a broader picture. In this regard, it will explore three crucial overlapping paradoxes: the paradox between neoliberal economics and borders increasingly closed to migrants; the selective migration policies of the EU and the EU’s strategy of ‘outsourcing the problem’.