Guest post by Prof. Ana Margheritis & Dr. Berfin Nur Osso. Ana Margheritis (PhD, Political Science, University of Toronto) is Research Professor at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Her expertise is in transnational migration, international political economy, and foreign policy. Her most recent work focuses on migration policy and governance, diaspora engagement policies, and migrant political rights. A short bio and link to her publications are available at her institutional profile. Berfin Nur Osso is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki. She holds a Doctor of Laws degree (with distinction) in international and EU refugee law and migration and border studies from the same university. Her current research involves migration governance in the EU, EU migration and asylum law and policy, migrant workers in the context of green transition, and visual research methods. Publications are available at her personal portfolio. 

 

The assumption that we live in a time of multiple migration crises has had a significant impact on how international migration is understood and addressed. While the concept of ‘migration crisis’ is often poorly defined and overstretched to characterize a wide range of migration-related phenomena, we highlight here the value of a precise definition. It is essential to define the concept of crisis precisely in specific contexts and attribute specific qualifications for a more refined and accurate analysis of recent regional developments widely framed as ‘migration crises.’ Drawing on a collaborative project, we illustrate this analytical strategy through a succinct analysis of two distinct approaches to migration crisis management. Firstly, we focus on the European Union’s (EU) efforts to cope with the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ and its aftermath, which have transformed crisis management into a ‘creeping migration management crisis.’ Secondly, we turn to the multilateral response to the massive, prolonged, and complex movement of Venezuelans throughout Latin America which, rather than a discrete migration crisis, is better understood as a ‘protracted displacement crisis.’ 

Refugees from Syria arrive at Stockholm Central Station by train through Denmark and Malmo in September 2015. Photo: Frankie Fouganthin.

A ‘Creeping’ Crisis in the EU’s Migration Management 

In 2015, the arrival of over 1.8 million people from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa at the EU external borders to seek international protection was initially framed as a ‘refugee crisis.’ Officials and media later used the term ‘migration crisis’ to reframe these individuals as ‘irregular migrants’, treating them as a security threat rather than a humanitarian matter while undermining the legal protections of many who were actually refugees (including asylum seekers). 

The EU’s framing of any disorderly migration from developing countries as a ‘crisis’ has stripped the term of its meaning. Indeed, 2015 was not a migration crisis, but a more fundamental ‘migration management crisis’ within the EU. It exposed the structural failures of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), which, despite decades of development, proved unable to effectively address this situation. This management crisis is now ‘creeping’ because the EU’s response exemplifies a gradual deterioration rather than a sudden failure: its policies create irregular migration by limiting safe, legal routes and then, in a vicious cycle, attempt to solve a predicament of its own making with increasingly harsher measures. 

To systematically analyse this phenomenon, we compared key official responses from 2015 to 2024 based on a theoretical-analytical framework on the EU’s physical, legal, and social borders. We illustrated these responses as symptoms of a management crisis surfacing in the encounters between refugees and state authorities. Physical borders are the immediate land borders, managing access to EU territory. Legal borders expand within and beyond this territory to manage access to protection. Finally, social borders describe attitudes and discourses towards migrants of non-Western origin, often underlying the production of physical and legal borders. 

The institutional focus on managing the ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015–2016 disproportionately targeted all populations deemed as ‘irregular migrants’. This dynamic became even more entrenched with the reform of the CEAS instruments in 2024, which effectively formalised many measures introduced earlier. These reforms transformed emergency tools, such as the hotspot approach and fast-track border procedures, into long-term governance mechanisms across the EU. Such exceptional and restrictive measures are no longer isolated to external borders but extended into the legal and social domains, producing layers of exclusion that block refugee access not just to EU territory, but to protection systems and broader social inclusion. 

The shift from reactive and temporary crisis management to a proactive and continuous one reveals how the EU’s migration management evolved into (what we call) a creeping crisis. This creeping nature is characterised by the spatiotemporal expansion of bordering practices: new fences, stricter visa policies, legal loopholes, fast-tracked returns, reinforced externalisation measures akin to the EU–Türkiye Statement (such as Italy–Albania Protocol, EU–Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding), and deeply racialised narratives that construct certain individuals as perpetual threats. Thus, the EU does not merely respond to a ‘migration crisis’. Its migration management creates a ‘creeping crisis,’ built into institutional logic and sustained through policies that make migration governable only by casting it as crisis. 

Managing a Protracted Displacement Crisis: The Venezuelan Case 

Since 2016, when Venezuelan emigration to neighbouring countries reached new highs, Latin America faced the daunting challenge of managing an unprecedented level of displacement. As it is well documented, this represented an overwhelming task for relatively young migration governance arrangements. Without supranational organisations, regional organizations with low institutional capacity made calls for coordination, but did not become directly involved. While dealing with domestic instability and social unrest, destination countries turned to diverse ad hoc measures. Given the decline of interstate cooperation, international organisations (IOs) took central stage, namely the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). A regional approach only emerged in 2018 when the UN Secretary-General charged the UNHCR and IOM with co-leading a coordinated response.  

A new form of transnational partnership was created then: the Regional Inter-Agency Coordination Platform (R4V), involving today around 250 intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations, international donors, and national and local governments in 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries. The nature of the problem at hand did not fit neatly into the traditional models of humanitarian responses developed by the IOs in other regions. The Venezuelan case fits the UNHCR’s definition of a protracted migration crisis in terms of the number of magnitude of flows and extended timeframe. However, it also involved mixed flows, continuous outflows, returns, circularity, relocation across several countries, increasing migrant vulnerability, and a political controversy around the status those on the move and whether the category of refugees applies. Therefore, qualifying the situation as a ‘protracted displacement crisis’ helps provide a more precise account of such complex phenomenon and explain the type of institutional response implemented. The R4V indeed represents a unique form of innovative adaptation in terms of its large number of partners, strategic goals, geographical scope, intense use of virtual means, and formal co-leadership. 

The R4V has re-created dialogue and cooperation across sectors related to migrant needs (e.g., food security, health, transportation, shelter, etc). By facilitating information diffusion and negotiations, the platform has structured relations among and within nation-states, between governmental offices and non-governmental organisations, and between these actors and international donors. The size, internal organisation, and rationale for the partnership has evolved not only to attend to the protracted nature of the displacement and related issues but also to extend assistance to migrants and refugees of other nationalities who merge with Venezuelans in some corridors. With short- and long-time considerations in mind, the R4V is setting standards for managing flows not only within Latin America but also those that aim to reach North America. Such intervention feeds a narrative that justifies a wide regional approach, implicitly encouraging further growth of the partnership under IOs leadership. 

In sum, as we explained elsewhere, the R4V has gone well beyond coordinating a response to the emergency. Attending to the complex nature of the protracted displacement crisis, it seized the opportunity to reshape multilateral migration management in Latin America through multilevel, intersectoral arrangements not driven by nation-states but IOs. 

Conclusion 

In both Europe and Latin America, migration has been associated with crisis, but responses diverged sharply. Rather than a direct comparison, we argued for precisely defining and qualifying the notion of ‘migration crisis’. This analytical strategy avoids overstretching the term and providing an oversimplified view, but permits to accurately analyse specific regional situations and the politico-institutional responses they trigger. By offering a more refined framework, our approach also provides a valuable tool for illuminating under-appreciated attributes of migration dynamics in other parts of the world. 

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