The EU’s migration strategy in the MENA region has become increasingly defined by a logic of containment. Through a growing number of bilateral agreements with countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon, the EU has sought to externalize its borders—outsourcing migration control in exchange for financial and diplomatic incentives. While publicly framed as cooperative solutions to irregular migration, these deals have carried a steep and largely unacknowledged cost: the entrenchment of labor informality and economic precarity across entire societies.
Rather than addressing the structural drivers of migration, EU migration agreements are exacerbating the socioeconomic fragilities that compel people to move. By prioritizing border securitization and short-term deterrence over rights-based development and labor market reform, these policies are suppressing wages, eroding protections, and expanding informal labor markets—not only for migrants and refugees but for local populations as well. These dynamics are particularly pronounced in Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon, where informal economies long preceded the EU’s bilateral agreements with these countries, but have since been further destabilized by these migration governance frameworks that overlook ground realities.
As the EU doubles down on externalization, a critical reassessment of its impacts is urgently needed. Examining the labor market consequences of migration deals across these three countries reveals a pattern of deepening exclusion and economic fragility. What emerges is a cautionary tale: policies designed to stem migration are, in practice, reproducing the very conditions that drive it. A sustainable alternative demands a shift away from containment toward inclusive, rights-based approaches that recognize migration as both a structural outcome and a shared governance challenge.
The rise of EU-MENA migration agreements
In recent years, the EU has steadily expanded its portfolio of migration agreements with countries across the MENA region, positioning these deals as pragmatic responses to the so-called migration crisis. These agreements—ranging from formal partnerships to more opaque political arrangements—are rooted in the EU’s externalization agenda: a strategy designed to shift border enforcement responsibilities beyond Europe’s territorial boundaries and onto neighboring states. Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon have emerged as key players in this architecture, not only due to their geographic proximity to Europe but also because of their roles as countries of origin, transit, and prolonged displacement.
In effect, these agreements reframe migration management as a matter of security and statecraft, rather than a question of rights, development, or structural inequality
The EU’s motivations are clear. Faced with internal political pressures and a growing backlash against asylum seekers and irregular migrants, European leaders have sought to curtail arrivals by outsourcing migration control. Financial packages, development aid, technical support, and political legitimacy have been offered to MENA governments in exchange for stricter border surveillance, cooperation on deportations, and efforts to deter migrants from embarking on journeys toward Europe. In effect, these agreements reframe migration management as a matter of security and statecraft, rather than a question of rights, development, or structural inequality.
In Egypt, a partnership agreement offered financial and technical support for border control in exchange for commitments to prevent departures across the Mediterranean. Tunisia’s more recent 2023 deal—brokered amid surging arrivals in Italy—has mirrored this logic, with EU officials pledging hundreds of millions of euros to a government increasingly reliant on repression and anti-migrant rhetoric. Lebanon, meanwhile, has been a focal point of EU containment efforts since 2017, when the EU-Lebanon Compact deal tied aid disbursement to the country’s willingness to host over one million Syrian refugees under conditions of encampment, restricted mobility, and limited labor access. This approach was further entrenched in 2024, when Lebanon secured a standalone agreement framed as a financial assistance package, solidifying its role as a frontline host state in exchange for tighter migration controls.
While these agreements differ in their political context and implementation, they share a foundational logic: migration is a threat to be managed at the source, and neighboring countries are instrumentalized as Europe’s unofficial border guards.
Comparative scenarios: Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon
A closer look at Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon reveals strikingly similar patterns: long-standing reliance on informal labor markets, followed by worsening economic precarity under the weight of EU-backed migration governance. Each of these countries entered into migration agreements with the EU while already facing deeply entrenched informal economies, shaped by limited state capacity, unemployment, and political volatility. Rather than stabilizing these labor markets, EU containment strategies have only deepened their informality, creating adverse ripple effects for both migrants and local workers.
Across the three countries, informal labor has historically served as both a survival strategy and a structural feature of the economy. In Egypt, informal employment has dominated sectors such as construction, agriculture, and domestic work for decades. It has absorbed large swaths of rural labor, urban youth, and, increasingly, migrant workers—often under exploitative conditions with no access to legal protections. Tunisia, similarly, has long depended on its informal sector to accommodate those excluded from formal employment, including working-class Tunisians and Sub-Saharan African migrants who face discrimination, lack of legal status, or limited work permits. In Lebanon, informal labor is not merely a parallel system, it is the backbone of a post-crisis economy. Following the 2019 financial collapse and subsequent currency devaluation, the formal labor market has all but disintegrated, leaving Lebanese citizens, Syrian and Palestinian refugees, and migrant domestic workers to compete for underpaid, unregulated work in sectors like construction, caregiving, and services.
In each context, EU migration agreements have not mitigated these vulnerabilities; they have intensified them. In Egypt, heightened cooperation with European border enforcement agencies has translated into increased police raids and surveillance targeting migrants, informal workers, and those perceived as “irregular.” This has pushed both Egyptian and non-Egyptian informal workers deeper underground, reducing their bargaining power and heightening exposure to abuse. Tunisia’s 2023 agreement with the EU has led to similar outcomes: in anticipation of tighter scrutiny on migration flows, employers have increasingly resorted to informal hiring arrangements that avoid paperwork, registration, and legal liability. Sub-Saharan migrants—many of whom now fear deportation or racialized violence—are especially vulnerable, often accepting short-term or seasonal work in agriculture and services under unsafe and precarious conditions.
There is a consistent lack of political will to enforce human rights conditions tied to these agreements, allowing repressive practices to continue unchecked
In Lebanon, the consequences of migration containment intersect with already repressive systems such as the kafala sponsorship regime, which governs the status of migrant domestic workers, and longstanding restrictions on refugee employment. The vast majority of Syrian refugees are denied formal work permits and instead find themselves trapped in hyper-precarious forms of informal labor. Palestinian refugees, excluded from dozens of professions, fare no better. Even vulnerable Lebanese workers—especially women and those in rural areas—have been pushed into informal jobs as inflation and unemployment skyrocket. EU support for border control, deportation cooperation, and containment of refugees has done nothing to address these conditions. Instead, it has reinforced these exclusions—creating a multi-tiered system of labor discrimination based on nationality, race, and legal status. This happens through concrete mechanisms: increased funding and equipment for border and coast guards, tighter surveillance and enforcement capacities, and political praise for regimes that reduce migration through crackdowns. At the same time, there is a consistent lack of political will to enforce human rights conditions tied to these agreements, allowing repressive practices to continue unchecked.
The common consequences across these countries are sobering. Wage suppression has become the norm in informal sectors where workers compete under fear of dismissal, arrest, or deportation. Labor protections have eroded, as informal and often non-negotiable contracts replace formal ones, and as legal enforcement bodies become increasingly politicized or absent altogether. Irregular work has risen, both in volume and in vulnerability, as migrants and nationals alike turn to survival economies in the absence of sustainable alternatives.
In Egypt, this has meant significant unemployment and underemployment, particularly among youth and newly arrived migrants who find themselves priced out of both formal jobs and informal networks. Tunisia has seen a surge in short-term, insecure labor arrangements that disproportionately affect women and seasonal workers. And in Lebanon, migration governance policies are exacerbating an already severe socioeconomic collapse, fueling informalization not as a choice, but as the only viable option for those excluded from both protection and opportunity.
Long-term damage
The cumulative effects of these dynamics extend far beyond the individual labor markets of Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon. Together, they point to a broader regional pattern of economic destabilization and social fragmentation, exacerbated by the EU’s externalized migration agenda. By exporting the task of migration control to neighboring states without addressing the root causes of economic vulnerability, the EU has not only entrenched informality but also amplified the very conditions that drive migration in the first place.
One of the most pressing implications is the regional destabilization of labor markets. As more people work informal jobs instead of formal ones, governments collect less in taxes and have less control over the economy. This makes it harder to protect workers, plan for the future, or support public services—especially in countries that are already politically and financially unstable. It also places immense pressure on state institutions, ill-equipped to manage both domestic unemployment and cross-border migration flows.
This erosion of labor protections also fuels a deepening of socioeconomic inequalities, both within and across national borders. In all three countries, the poorest and most marginalized—whether local citizens, migrants, or refugees—are disproportionately affected. Gendered and racialized hierarchies within the informal economy mean that women, Black and brown migrants, and stateless populations often endure the most exploitative and least visible forms of labor. Meanwhile, wealthier elites and middle classes, who benefit from cheap, disposable labor, are rarely impacted by the very migration containment policies that claim to serve national interests. For migrants and refugees in particular, rising precarity is not only increasing their vulnerability, it is also heightening their sense of insecurity and accelerating the likelihood that they will eventually seek better living conditions, including through migrating to new countries.
As the gap between promises of reform and lived realities continues to widen, public discontent is deepening across the region. In Tunisia, political elites have actively stoked anti-migrant sentiment to deflect attention from mounting economic failures. In Lebanon, tensions between host communities and refugees have escalated in the absence of inclusive economic planning or meaningful social protection—exacerbated by government scapegoating and the mainstreaming of anti-refugee rhetoric. In Egypt, the state’s crackdown on informal labor organizing has further narrowed the space for dissent, leaving workers with limited avenues for redress. These dynamics fuel political volatility, as both citizens and non-citizens grow increasingly disillusioned with governments that appear more accountable to European migration priorities than to the needs of their own populations.
Without structural reform, the EU’s approach will continue to generate precisely the instability it claims to prevent
Crucially, these outcomes reveal a paradox at the heart of EU migration deterrence strategies: in attempting to prevent irregular migration through containment and securitization, the EU is fostering the very dynamics—informality, economic exclusion, and instability—that drive people to migrate. As survival becomes more precarious and formal pathways remain blocked, migration is not deterred, it is pushed further underground. The cycle repeats, each time with greater human and economic costs.
In short, migration governance framed around deterrence and containment does not lead to less migration. It leads to riskier, more desperate migration, and to labor markets that are more exploitative, unequal, and volatile. Without structural reform, the EU’s approach will continue to generate precisely the instability it claims to prevent.
Toward sustainable alternatives
The growing disconnect between the aims of EU migration policy and its real-world impacts demands urgent reconsideration. Migration cooperation must be tied to economic inclusion strategies that tackle the structural roots of informality. This means moving beyond securitized aid packages and toward long-term investments in employment generation, vocational training, and entrepreneurship—especially in marginalized regions and sectors. Inclusive economic growth requires that migrants and refugees are seen not as burdens, but as contributors with skills, networks, and ambitions that can enrich host communities. Crucially, this also involves supporting grassroots and migrant- and refugee-led organizations already doing this work on the ground, rather than relying solely on state-centered or EU-driven mechanisms.
In sum, if the EU’s goal is to address irregular migration in a durable and humane way, it must shift its emphasis from containment to cooperation—one rooted in shared responsibility, equity, and the dignity of work. The path forward lies not in hardening borders, but in transforming the conditions that make borders feel like the only way out.
Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab (she/هي) is a Senior Inclusive Economies Associate at TIMEP, focusing on migration. She is the director of the Institute for Migration Studies (IMS) at the Lebanese American University (LAU), where she also serves as an assistant professor and coordinator of migration studies at the Department of Communication, Mobility and Identity.