When borders kill

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Matilde Perotti, PhD Candidate in Social and Political Sciences at Università Bocconi.

This paper studies pushbacks, defined as illegal cross-border expulsions conducted by border authorities, as a case of institutionalised deterrence along the Western Balkan route. The author (Matilde Perotti) ask whether deterrence-oriented border policies increase the occurrence of migrant deaths. Using a monthly region-level (NUTS-3) panel across twelve Eastern European countries from 2017 to 2024, she combines two-way fixed effects, Poisson, and counterfactual estimators to identify the causal effect of pushbacks on migrant fatalities. Regions experiencing pushbacks record an average increase of 0.10 deaths per month, with effects concentrated in transport-related incidents rather than direct violence. She finds no evidence of spatial displacement toward neighboring regions. To test the robustness of these results, she exploits Croatia’s 2023 Schengen accession as an exogenous policy shock, which coincided with a decline in both pushbacks and deaths. The findings provide causal evidence that deterrence-based border enforcement increases mortality among people on the move.

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