The Migration Crisis, the Irregular Migrant and the Global Governance Response. Interrogating the Identity Formation Process in Programmatic Documents

The migration crisis has become a chronic phenomenon, testing the institutional limits of the migration governance framework at the international and regional level. As the crisis became more and more embedded in certain hotspots (the Mediterranean region, the US-Mexico border), the places of migration – in their various capacities as sending, transit, destination, return places – are transformed into ideational laboratories of struggles over identity and belonging, awakening dormant illiberal reflexes that, in turn, led to the development of a framework of separation between the Self and the Other. On the ground, walls are the physical manifestation of this animus and, as a result, an entire "ecosystem" of border fortifications emerged as a vallum-sphere began to haunt the polities. The present article analyses how international actors have developed instruments in response to the migration crisis and how these governance frameworks contribute to processes of identity formation. Using policy document analysis, the research examines the global governance regimes on migration, reviewing the positions of the International Organization for Migration and of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In identifying the instruments developed to manage the migration crisis under these governance settings, the article seeks to explain how they contribute to the construction of the irregular migrant identity in all their polyvalent complexity.