Over the past month, as thousands of migrants gathered on Belarus’s border with Poland and tried to cross into the European Union, some European leaders accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of engaging in a “hybrid war.” In an effort to put pressure on the EU, they asserted, Lukashenko intentionally sent the migrants to the border with Poland and left them exposed in a freezing forest. Ylva Johansson, the European commissioner for home affairs, called it a new way of “using human beings in an act of aggression.” But if the strategy was extreme, the forces driving it have long been in play. What EU leaders failed to acknowledge was that Lukashenko was drawing on a dynamic of state-manipulated migration that has become common in many parts of the world—and which the EU itself has helped shape.
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