146 Andrew Geddes
It would, of course, be wrong to conceive of migration as a simple
process of people leaving one country and moving to another. Europe
and its ‘neighbourhood’ are much more complex areas of migration than
such linear perspectives would suggest. There are, in fact, intense and
highly diverse patterns of movement for different purposes and for dif-
ferent periods of time. At the risk of simplifying, it is possible to note that
international-migration relations between MENA states and the EU have
three main components. First, MENA and EU countries are sending, transit
and receiving states. Migrants move from MENA countries to EU member
states (and vice versa, albeit to a lesser extent) in search of economic op-
portunities, to study, to join family members or to seek refuge. Migrants
move across MENA, non-EU and EU countries en route to EU member
states. Morocco and Tunisia, for example, are stop-off points for migrants
from West Africa, while Turkey is a transit country for people from Syria,
Iraq and Afghanistan. It also needs to be noted that migrants move to
MENA countries in search of new opportunities or because onward travel
possibilities may be frustrated by controls in EU member states. This
diversion effect of EU action is important because, if the EU is to seek
to coopt MENA states as part of this migration-control framework, then
this can lead to travel options being limited for people who may f ind that
their f inal country of destination is not an EU state, as they intended,
but a country bordering the EU, such as Morocco. This then places strain
on the capacity and resources of countries such as Morocco to deal with
this new migration. Countries can also acquire leverage because of their
centrality to the external dimension of migration policy. This has been
demonstrated in the cases of both Libya under Gaddaf i (Paoletti 2010) and
Morocco (White 2011), where EU concern about border security was used
to secure funds for border controls, as well as for other infrastructural
projects.
4.3 Europe’s international migration relations
This section analyses the ways in which international migration has be-
come part of the structured and less formal relations between the EU and
non-member states, labelled as Europe’s international-migration relations.
International migration is a key issue in international politics because it
lies along what Rosenau (1997: 4) called the ‘domestic-foreign frontier’, by
which he means that place where