Devious refugees and harmless borders? How Frontex inverts deviance and blame

This commentary demonstrates how the risk analysis reports of Frontex (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency) invert deviance and blame by lumping together smugglers, refugees and migrants and portraying the latter as responsible for their own suffering at Europe’s borders while obscuring the role of restrictive migration policies and border controls in producing irregularised migration in the first place. Showing how this discursive framing furthers the securitisation of migration and displaces accountability for border deaths, the author argues that it is important to question the objectivity of Frontex’s risk analyses since they contribute to normalising securitised border controls in response to irregularised migration.