Weaponized Mass Migration: A Security Risk to Europe and the United States

"Chairman Self, Ranking Member Keating, and distinguished Members of the Subcommittee:

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Europe Subcommittee. My name is Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, and I am the Deputy Director of the International Program at the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan, independent research institution focused on practical and effective policy options for managing immigration in ways that serve all elements of society.

The weaponization of migration for political purposes has been increasingly recognized in countries around the world as a threat that demands a strong yet proportional response. So we appreciate the subcommittee’s focus on this issue and the opportunity to testify today.

The concept of “instrumentalization” or “weaponization” of migration is a term applied to a wide range of scenarios involving actors using migration as a coercive tactic or negotiating tool. Countries such as Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Libya, and Morocco have used the threat of uncontrolled migration as leverage with the European Union to extract concessions, retaliate for sanctions, or divert policy attention away from other issues (with these tactics being replicated as far away as Nicaragua engineering irregular migration from Libya and other countries to the United States). This has sparked a variety of policy responses from the European Union and its member states, from short-term border closures to restrictions on asylum processing that linger well beyond the end of the specific crisis.

The threat of manipulating immigration flows across shared borders is being used—increasingly explicitly—to subvert traditional power dynamics amounting to what the European Union has referred to as “hybrid warfare.” Belarus, with Russian support, has systematically orchestrated migration flows toward European Union borders since 2021. This practice has involved incentivizing migrants from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen to fly into Belarus as tourists, including by relaxing visa regulations, working with state-owned tourism companies to arrange visas and transport, and even providing equipment to cross the border into Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. The goal is to destabilize these countries (and the European Union more broadly) and retaliate against earlier-imposed EU sanctions. But the term weaponization also captures many incidents that are driven by different objectives. There are numerous examples where states that regularly cooperate with the European Union on border enforcement, returns, or hosting refugee populations may weaponize migration (or threaten to do so) in order to extract political or economic concessions. This underscores the importance of understanding who is using this tactic and for what end.

In turn, not all responses to weaponization are created equal. This testimony describes the tradeoffs of the traditional tools that the European Union and its allies have at their disposal but also recommends a broader lens through which to view potential policy responses. Because weaponization grows in the cracks of migration mismanagement—when high levels of public anxiety about migration create fertile ground for these tactics to work—critical investments are needed to reduce opportunities for bad actors to exploit these gaps. This entails making immigration systems and partnerships more stable and resilient—not just fortifying the cracks as they appear—which often includes creative and strategic expansion alongside strategic restriction. [...]"