The rhetoric of externalizing migration policies: The cases of British and Italian sovereignty by proxy

This paper conducts a Critical Discursive Analysis of the institutional rhetoric employed by the British and Italian Prime Ministers to legitimize their respective migration externalization policies – the Rwanda and Albania agreements. While both governments primarily rely on securitization and deterrence arguments that intertextually hark back to electoral promises, the British corpus appeals to an imagined post-Brexit British community, whereas the Italian corpus appeals to the imagination of Fortress Europe. These legitimation strategies rely on and reinforce three migration narratives: the fetishization of borders as fixed and inviolable entities, the framing of migration as a threat and a burden, and the stigmatization of migrants as criminals. Ultimately, externalization policies serve exclusionary logics, offloading state responsibility for a humane approach to migration while enabling governments to assert a form of control and sovereignty by proxy over their imagined bounded spaces.