The EU's approach to the current refugee crisis, between strengthening of external borders and the slow emergence of solidarity

The EU’s approach to the so-called ‘refugee crises’, and more in general to the governance of irregular migration, is one of most politically debated and challenging domains of the EU. This chapter deals with EU’s response to the crisis on the basis of the EU’s Agenda on Migration of 13 May 2015 and its implementation. It will map the evolutions of the different policies in questions and their main legal innovations: which ideas and solutions have been developed in order to manage a phenomenon whose morphology has radically changed in the past couple of years? If indeed the arrivals of migrants were so far confined to the Southern European States (mainly Italy and Greece), the reality of manySyrians fleeing their torn-war country and the emergence of the Balcanic route have brought the phenomenon at the heart of Europe. The EU’s response is centered around several axes: first of all, the EU acknowledges that some of the migrants landing the European shores are persons fleeing persecution and, as such, in need of international protection; another component of the EU’s approach is concerned with strengthening border surveillance; a third one consists in externalizing migration control policies to Third Countries (TC): the EU-Turkey Agreement of 2015 is a prominent example of this trend. This chapter deals with some of the policies concerned with this societal challenge: first, it focuses on the system of border management and its reforms (2), looking -secondly- as well at the militarization of border management (3); third, it discussesthe main reforms of the asylum system (4), before concluding on questions on how to move forward (5).