A migration panic that never materialized still produced lasting border controls and far-right rise

Evidence

One consequence was an upsurge in racist violence and extreme-right mobilization. Another was the politicization of migration issues. Refugee-receiving countries like Germany and Sweden tightened up their entry rules. A series of intergovernmental meetings were held to find ways of controlling migration. The most important was the Schengen Agreement through which Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain dismantled border controls for people moving between these countries, but set up tougher control measures at the external borders of the “Schengen area.” By the mid-1990s it was clear that the “human floods” from the East would not come. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3867

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A stark, compressible example of how anticipatory panic — predictions that proved entirely false — locked in permanent institutional responses (Schengen’s external border regime).
• CANDY: The predicted ‘50 million migrants’ that never came still created the Schengen border system — a great dinner-party fact.