For more than two decades, migration policies in most countries of the so-called Global North have undergone a sustained process of securitisation. Immigration is no longer primarily addressed as a social, economic, or rights-based issue, but is instead presented as a threat to national security, the welfare state, and even collective identity. This discursive shift is significant: it transforms migration management into a matter of exception.

As these securitised frameworks have become normalised, public discourse has accepted the adoption of extraordinary measures in the name of control and protection as legitimate. Exceptionality has become the rule. Gradually, legal and political boundaries that once seemed inviolable have been crossed: the externalisation of borders, the expansion of administrative detention, the restriction of the right to asylum, and the erosion of procedural guarantees are just a few examples of this drift.

The problem is that these policies do not only transform migration governance; they also alter the very nature of the State. As exceptional practices are consolidated, the principles of the rule of law are strained, and the foundations of the welfare state—characteristic of liberal democracies—are weakened. Thus, in the name of security, the very things claimed to be under protection are ultimately put at risk.

This trend is evident in Donald Trump’s migration policy, but also in the implementation of the European Union’s Pact on Migration and Asylum. Mechanisms such as border screening, accelerated asylum procedures, or returns to “safe countries” (recently approved by the European Parliament) prioritise a logic of containment and control that reinforces the security dimension of migration management. Borders thus become the stage for an increasing paraphernalia of surveillance in the name of European “protection”.

Something similar occurred during Trump’s first term, symbolically marked by the promise of the border wall. In its subsequent evolution, that logic of exceptionality expanded inwards, extending suspicion and persecution to increasingly broad groups that did not fit into a WASP identity conception of the country. This is precisely one of the main drifts of securitisation: the normalisation of exceptional measures that begin by eroding the rights of those perceived as ‘the others’ or those on the margins, and end up weakening guarantees for everyone.

Within this increasingly securitised framework, the Spanish proposal to regularise persons in an irregular administrative situation introduces a dissonant note. To be sure, it does not propose structural reforms to prevent the reproduction of irregularity once the process is concluded—especially while a segment of the labour market demanding precarious and easily exploitable labour persists. However, it constitutes a symbolic and political turning point in a European context marked by containment and hardening. It is unlikely that the Spanish initiative will set a trend across the European Union, but it does represent a breathing space in terms of the protection of rights and the recognition of the social reality of those who are already part of our societies.

In the short term, two logics are in confrontation: one of a liberal-humanitarian character, focused on rights and inclusion; and another, securitised, oriented primarily towards control and exclusion. Currently, it is the latter that is imposing the narrative framework and conditioning the architecture of public policies. Recovering the former is not merely a normative option, but a condition for preserving the system of rights that emerged after the Second World War and for aspiring to its deepening and expansion.

These (and other) issues are addressed in greater depth in the Inter-university Master’s/Postgraduate Degree in Contemporary Migration, a space for critical analysis of migration governance, multi-level cooperation, and current challenges regarding migration, integration, inclusion, asylum, and refuge. The construction of better public policy instruments requires a plurality of perspectives, including the active participation of the students who are part of this programme.