In recent years, several states have incorporated human mobility into their foreign policy strategies as a tool of pressure against the European Union. The strategy consists in deliberately manipulating flows of people — facilitating, organising, or suspending their containment — in order to extract concessions, retaliate against sanctions, or raise the bloc’s internal political costs. Europe therefore faces not only a humanitarian and administrative problem, but a problem of inability to deter and coerce in its immediate neighbourhood. This emerges at a moment when the EU is undergoing a reconfiguration of its strategic environment. The trade tensions reopened by the Trump administration, the pressure on Greenland, and Ursula von der Leyen’s own acknowledgement that Europe can no longer rely exclusively on the “rules-based” order form the framework within which the bloc appears increasingly unable to structure its neighbourhood and increasingly exposed to the decisions of external actors. In that context, the instrumentalisation of migration constitutes a direct expression of the asymmetry of power.

The specialised literature offers precise analytical categories for this phenomenon. Kelly Greenhill described coercive engineered migration as the deliberate use of migrant populations to generate political pressure on destination states. Fiona Adamson and Gerasimos Tsourapas developed the concept of migration diplomacy to show that cross-border mobility can be integrated into strategies of negotiation, retaliation, or extortion. The value of these frameworks does not lie in cataloguing migrants as a threat — the threat lies in the states that use them instrumentally — but in identifying that, where there is a deliberate will to manipulate flows, the phenomenon acquires a strategic dimension that purely humanitarian or policing responses cannot resolve on their own.

The precedents of this pattern are not recent. Libya had already turned migration cooperation into a bargaining chip before the collapse of the Gaddafi regime, threatening to open the central Mediterranean routes if European pressure increased. In May........

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