A crise da Fortaleza Europa

This study aims to analyze the European migration crisis from an immigrant perspective, placing “Fortress Europe” as a crisis in human displacement in the Mediterranean region. To this end, a qualitative approach was employed, of an exploratory-analytical nature, grounded in the theoretical-critical-documentary triangulation of the externalized management of European borders, the ultra “Politics of Exhaustion,” and the crisis of Fortress Europe, based on academic works and institutional documents, and as illustrated by the maps of Rekacewicz (2013). This is because externalized management refers to “containment practices” at the external borders of the European Union, even in countries of departure or transit in the African coast, which curb certain migratory flows through a Politics of Exhaustion. Such a concept, coined by de Vries and Guild (2019), starts from the subjectivity of the immigrant as a political agent whose movement is repeatedly fractured by physical and bureaucratic obstacles that lead him to resort to clandestine and, therefore, dangerous means of crossing borders. Therefore, a focus on the experience of immigrant displacement is proposed instead of the security approach given to it by the European Union in its border management, in order to humanize him in the face of its reification as a mere threat or victim. As a result, it is indicated that it was the violent, preventive and containment character of European externalized management that, in reality, elevated the scenario to a state of crisis, however, caused by Fortress Europe and not by human displacement, which was relegated to clandestinity.