Who says what: members of the European Parliament and irregular migration in the parliamentary debates

Abstract

As migration and its securitisation change the political environment in the EU, we examine whether security speech acts (restrictive suggestions) prevail over human security speech acts (a liberal approach) towards irregular migration in the eighth (EU) parliamentary debates and which structural determinants predict delivering one or the other speech act. To achieve this goal, we first conducted a content analysis by which we selected (human) security speech acts; then, a set of binary logistic regressions followed. We explored whether, in the plenary debates, members of the European Parliament propose human security speech acts towards irregular migration rather than security speech acts. Thus, it seems that the attitudes of the members of the European Parliament differ in plenary sessions from the decision-making process. Based on the set of binary logistic regressions, we argue that the left-right division, attitudes toward European integration, and especially the division between the new and old member states are the crucial structural determinants for delivering (human) security speech acts in the plenary speeches.