People arriving by boat to Malta during the COVID-19 pandemic were singled out as a threat to the nation and as less worthy of assistance. Their rights were curtailed making material and physical survival difficult. This article traces forced migration governance in Malta, a member state located on the EU's southern frontier, showing how seamlessly humanitarian elements were eliminated from the system. Theoretically, this is conceptualized as a case of "compassionate repression" shifting to a system here characterized as one of "repression without compassion," where both makeshift practices and discursive portrayals of repressive policies as humane are eliminated.

In March 2019, three teenage asylum seekers were arrested upon their arrival in Malta. The government charged them with terrorism and alleged that they had hijacked the El Hiblu, a merchant vessel that rescued the three teenagers alongside over one hundred other people, in order to avoid being forcibly returned to Libya. In this chapter, we use the El Hiblu case to examine the ways in which people on the move and activists working in solidarity with them transgress state boundaries and categories to contest EU borders, despite the increasing state criminalization and violence they face. In doing so, they recreate spaces from the Mediterranean to European cities and enact different visions of our societies. The El Hiblu case allows us to explore the ways in which transgressive acts - from autonomous migration to solidarity practices that occur at sea and within European territory - connect and challenge our conceptualization of borders, nation-states, and citizenship.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) rescued over 110,000 people in the Central Mediterranean Sea between 2015 and 2017. From 2017, EU member states and agencies increasingly criminalized these organizations, accusing them of 'colluding with smugglers' and acting as a pull factor. In this climate, as Italy, Malta and the EU increased cooperation with Libya to stop people from taking to the seas, many suspended their operations. This article explores the search and rescue efforts of NGOs in the Central Mediterranean Sea between 2014 and 2018. We examine the criminalization of this NGO activity and argue that it is made possible through an oscillating neo-colonial imagination of the sea as mare nostrum and mare nullius, our sea and nobody's sea, respectively. We build on the work of other scholars who have pointed to the activation of the Mediterranean as 'empty' in response to migration flows, erasing the historical connections of colonialism, empire, trade, and exchange in the Mediterranean as well as the contemporary legal geographies that govern the space. Here, we go further to develop the idea of a neo-colonial sea, which is alternately imagined as empty and 'European'. We explore how NGOs disrupt these depictions, as well as the disappearing figures of the migrant and refugee amidst the contestations between NGOs and states.

This chapter is about the Libya–Italy migration corridor, which has become emblematic of irregular sea crossings and migrant deaths. Rather than focusing on the statistics, migrant flows, or trends, this article aims to encourage an appreciation of the political and socio-economic causes, dynamics, and actors, which contribute to the production of this migratory corridor. This challenges the superficial representation of this corridor as a fixed or straightforward reality.

In the wake of increasing migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, non-governmental organizations took to the seas to conduct search and rescue operations in 2014. In 2016, this humanitarian fleet rescued 50,000 people in the Central Mediterranean Sea. In the meantime, local solidarity initiatives emerged across Europe, motivated by the arrival of many people in their cities and by deaths and border spectacles in the Mediterranean. Juxtaposing solidarity work in the Mediterranean Sea with solidarity work within the European Union's borders, we examine how the spaces they operate in shape the possibilities and limits of solidarity activism. Despite identifying important differences, we ultimately demonstrate how the solidarity work within Europe and in the Mediterranean Sea fold into each other in complex ways. Moreover, we show how across Europe, people engage in transgressive solidarity work that challenges EU border practices and concomitant categories to reimagine a more welcoming Europe.

The European Union’s external border regime in the Mediterranean is the classic ‘humanitarian border’. It is presented and performed as a humanitarian and caring enterprise, but conceals strong elements of exclusionary border control. Important actors in its daily social construction are territorial borderworkers who are tasked with the implementation of the laws and policies underpinning the humanitarian border. Their narratives are passionate and articulated using emotive language and expressions denoting an intensity of personal feelings, while the moral framing of the issues indicates a moral discomfort. Drawing on multi-sited and long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Lampedusa and Sicily, situated on the external Mediterranean border of the European Union, this article explores the key themes and form of the personal narratives of territorial borderworkers who discuss border processes and deliberate their own roles within it. Their narratives reveal insights about their worldview, and add empirical depth to our understanding of the humanitarian border and the enterprise of constructing it.

Hospitality and hospitality-laden language feature highly among people working in or around structures of first reception in Italy and Malta, two countries at the European Union’s (EU) external border. This is peculiar because hospitality rarely features at first reception, which forms part of the state’s border system. Characteristically, security issues are prioritized, and the first reception system is managed by the member state’s security agents, in collaboration with EU and international security agents. In practice, first reception refers to the processes of identification, registration, and classification that irregular migrants go through after having crossed the border without authorization and, often, without identification. Drawing on long-term and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Italy and Malta, this article examines some of the uses of hospitality language by a spectrum of territorial borderworkers operating with state, non-state, security, humanitarian, and activist entities in the two countries that are the object of this study. Discourse analysis yields interesting insights into how the use of the hospitality paradigm and hospitality terminology in first reception is less about hospitality practices and more about power. It proposes that the hospitality paradigm be conceptualized as a Laclauian empty signifier, and therefore, as a locus of power.

The first reception system for irregular migrants taking the Mediterranean route into the European Union (EU) is dictated almost solely by border control and security concerns. There is no recognition of the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as human rights monitors in first reception, and access is limited, controlled, and dependent on local authorities. Newly arriving migrants are at their most vulnerable during first reception. Traumatization and retraumatization brought by violations of human rights, or alternatively, care and welcome within the first reception system will pave the way for subsequent integration processes, by ensuring migrants’ well-being, decreasing hostility, diffidence and subjugation, and peaceful relations with European host communities. By critically assessing the current system, backed by the author’s long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the links between policy, practice, and mental health consequences for migrants. It shows that there are multiple risks of human rights violations of a vulnerable group of people. The article is critical of the absence of an official role for NGOs as human rights monitors arguing that NGOs have a unique role to play. The article suggests that the dignified conduction of first reception could have a positive influence on integration processes, and concludes that first reception should not be designed within a security framework but within a reception one.