When aid becomes a tool for migration control

The EU increasingly relies on poorer countries to manage migration on its behalf. But when development funding becomes conditional on migration cooperation, is Europe still providing aid, or buying compliance?

What the European Union is willing to keep secret is revealing.

Statewatch recently reported that the European Commission had identified 11 documents concerning proposals to make access to development funding conditional on countries cooperating with the EU's migration agenda. The documents were not released. The Commission cited the need to protect international relations and its own decision-making process, while acknowledging the possibility of disclosure where there is an “overriding public interest”.

Statewatch deserves credit for asking the obvious question: what, exactly, is in those documents that cannot withstand public scrutiny?

We should not pretend that their refusal proves the most sinister interpretation of what is being discussed. It doesn't. But it is difficult not to notice the contradiction. If these are simply discussions about funding development projects or improving migration management, why would revealing the negotiations damage international relations?

And what is particularly interesting is the role that development aid appears to be playing.

This is an issue I have spent a great deal of time thinking about. My Master's dissertation examined the EU's Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, and the way development aid has increasingly become entangled with migration management. The problem is not simply that Europe wants fewer people arriving at its borders. The problem is what happens when the money supposedly intended to support development becomes conditional on helping Europe achieve that objective.

The EU has been doing this in various forms for years. Its migration policy explicitly links cooperation with countries outside the EU to return and readmission, while EU funding supports migration management, border controls, return and reintegration. The Commission's own migration strategy now talks openly about using “leverage” across areas including financial support, trade and visa policy to encourage cooperation from third countries.

There is a fundamental difference between development as capacity-building and development as a mechanism for securing compliance.

The first should give a country greater ability to determine its own future. Give a government the technology, training, infrastructure or resources to build renewable energy, for example, and it has acquired something it can use independently. It has gained capacity.

The second gives resources in exchange for an outcome the donor wants.

This is the distinction that gets blurred when migration control is dressed up as development. My dissertation found that programmes under the Emergency Trust Fund, including the Better Migration Management programme and the Regional Development and Protection Programme, presented themselves through the language of development, protection and capacity-building while simultaneously aligning migration policies in African states with European security interests. The result, I argued, was a relationship in which European funding could reinforce economic and political dependence while limiting the policy autonomy of recipient states.

The new Statewatch investigation appears to ask what happens when that logic is taken a step further: not merely funding migration management, but potentially making development funding itself conditional on cooperation with Europe's migration objectives.

There is another problem here. Where, exactly, are these people supposed to go?

The EU's migration system increasingly depends on countries of origin and transit cooperating with returns and readmission. Its own rules recognise both categories. Countries of origin may be expected to readmit their own nationals; transit countries are also drawn into managing migration flows and supporting returns. The EU has even introduced the possibility of return hubs in third countries.

But a transit country is not a warehouse. A person who is prevented from continuing towards Europe does not cease to exist. They remain somewhere. They need accommodation, food, healthcare, security and eventually some kind of future.

That is particularly important in regions such as the Horn of Africa, where the EU has spent years funding programmes intended to improve migration management. The Khartoum Process, for example, explicitly brought together migration management, development, anti-trafficking measures and the supposed “root causes” of migration. The Emergency Trust Fund subsequently funded programmes intended to strengthen migration-management capacity in the region.

“Most importantly, you cannot keep calling something development if its real purpose is to make another country’s behaviour useful to you.”

But there is a circularity to this. If conflict, poverty and instability continue to produce migration, preventing people from reaching Europe does not remove the conditions producing migration. It relocates the pressure.

A country which is already struggling to provide services for its own population can hardly be expected to absorb an indefinite population of people who have been stopped from travelling onwards simply because Europe has paid it to do so.

And this is where the Morocco example becomes particularly interesting. The relationship between Europe and a transit country is not as straightforward as “Europe has the money, therefore Europe has the power”. Morocco has demonstrated that migration cooperation can give transit states leverage too. Academic research has examined how Morocco has used its position within Europe's externalised migration system to pursue its own political objectives, including during the 2021 Ceuta crisis.

That should complicate the idea that Europe can simply outsource its borders. The EU needs these countries. It needs their cooperation to control borders, prevent departures, accept returns and manage people who would otherwise arrive in Europe. That creates a dependency in the opposite direction.

Europe may think it is buying cooperation. The country receiving the money may understand that its cooperation is something it can negotiate.

This is why the secrecy surrounding the Statewatch documents matters. What are these negotiations actually about? Are European governments discussing countries of origin accepting their own nationals? Are they discussing transit countries accepting people who are not their nationals? Are development packages being negotiated alongside readmission agreements? Which countries are being asked to take on these responsibilities? And what are they demanding in return? We do not know.

The EU has an obvious interest in securing cooperation on migration. But countries on the other side of these agreements have interests too. They can ask for trade concessions, political recognition, visas, investment or other forms of support. The relationship is not simply Europe dictating terms to poorer states.

This is one of the things that a postcolonial understanding of international relations forces us to confront. The global system is not a collection of equal states entering negotiations on an entirely level playing field. European powers possess enormous financial and political leverage. Historically, they have also helped create many of the inequalities that they now describe as the “root causes” of migration.

But power does not only flow in one direction.

Migration itself creates leverage for the countries through which people move. The more dependent Europe becomes on another state's cooperation, the more valuable that cooperation becomes. The countries being treated as instruments of European migration policy can, and sometimes do, use that position for their own purposes.

Perhaps that is the part of this debate that Europe still fails to understand. You cannot solve migration simply by moving the border somewhere else. You cannot make a conflict disappear by paying another government to contain the people fleeing it. And you cannot indefinitely ask countries with limited resources to absorb the consequences of problems that extend far beyond their borders.

Most importantly, you cannot keep calling something development if its real purpose is to make another country's behaviour useful to you.

Development should leave countries with more capacity, more autonomy and more choices than they had before. If aid instead comes with an instruction attached — control these people, accept these returns, prevent these departures — then we should at least be honest about what it is.

It is not simply development assistance. It is foreign policy.

And if the European Commission is negotiating that kind of foreign policy behind closed doors, the public has every right to ask what, exactly, it is negotiating.