Mainstream Humanitarian Organizations Depoliticizing the Border Management System

Most of the discourses and practices carried out by mainstream third-sector organizations (TSOs) countered the tightening of border management. However, they remained within the legal framework preexisting the reinforcement of border policies. TSOs’ interventions focused on ensuring that the state respects the rights of those who are already entitled to them at least in principle. From this perspective, the TSOs’ borderwork did not promote a radical political agenda. The TSOs’ emphasis on vulnerability and the focus on asylum seekers’ rights contributed to counter the deterioration of these rights and to contrast the increasingly restrictive turns. However, vulnerability discourses and practices legitimized—and fitted within—the preexisting order based on the distinction between people in need of protection and so-called economic migrants to be rejected. This chapter describes how TSOs fell short of contributing to a radical change of the current border management and how they contributed to the perpetuation of processes of stratification of migrants’ rights, of migrants’ incarceration and of migration securitization.