Jordan: How the EU is using trade deals to curb migration

Migrants drowning in the English Channel and freezing to death at the Belarus-Poland border have captured public and media attention across Europe, but these events only tell part of the story of EU attempts to block migration to its member states, says researcher Zoe Jordan.

The impact of EU migration policy now stretches far beyond the Union’s actual territorial borders, with millions of euros invested in efforts to control and curb mobility from and between African and Middle Eastern countries – also known as border ‘externalisation’. Such initiatives are profoundly impacting the lives of migrants themselves as well as entire political and policy-making landscapes within the countries from which they move.

In this interview with Alice Troy-Donovan, Zoe Jordan, a researcher on the interdisciplinary project Effects of Externalisation: EU Migration Management in Africa and the Middle East (EFFEXT), explains how the EU is externalising its borders into Jordan.

Over the last 10 years, Jordan has hosted one of the largest per capita refugee populations in the world. The World Bank estimated that there were over 3 million refugees living in Jordan in 2020 – compared to over 2.6 million in the whole of the European Union in the same year. Around two thirds of Jordan’s refugees are Palestinians, while the Jordanian government estimates there to be 1.3 million Syrian refugees living there.

Read the whole interview here.

Migration

Project

Effects of Externalisation

Nov 2020 - Dec 2024