Border controls within the Schengen area are meant to be a thing of the past. Yet, since the refugee crisis of 2015, “temporary” border controls have become quasi permanent in several European Union Member States. Although these controls are against the letter and spirit of the Schengen Borders Code, the Commission has not taken any measures to enforce these rules. One of the reasons for the dismal state of the Schengen area is the one-sided focus on the abolition of internal border controls as primarily functional for the establishment of the internal market. This comes at the expense of Union citizens’ rights and disregards the fundamental role that the abolition of border controls has on how citizens see the Union in political terms and conceive themselves as Union citizens. Against this background, we argue that from its beginning the objective of the project to abolish border controls was to foster a supranational political identity of Union citizens by transforming citizens’ spatial experience. Union citizenship in the current EU Treaty framework constitutes the legal expression of that historical connection between the abolition of border controls and free movement. Emphasizing the citizenship dimension of an area without internal frontiers provides a different perspective on current controls at the Schengen internal borders.

In response to the political turmoil surrounding the recent refugee crisis, destination countries swiftly implemented new immigration and asylum policies. Are such countercrisis policies effective in mitigating political instability by reducing anti-immigrant backlash and support for radical-right parties? The present study exploits two surveys that were coincidentally fielded during significant policy changes, sampling respondents right before and immediately after the change. I employ a regression discontinuity design to identify the short-term causal effect of the policy change on public opinion within a narrow window of the sampling period. The findings show that both Swedish border controls and the EU–Turkey agreement significantly reduced public opposition to immigration in Sweden and Germany, respectively. In Germany, support for the AfD party also decreased following the new policy. Public opinion time trends suggest that the policy effects were short lived in Sweden but durable in Germany. These effects are similar across different levels of proximity to the border and are accompanied by increasing political trust and a sense of government control over the situation. The findings have implications for understanding the impact of border controls on international public opinion, as well as for assessing the electoral effect of policy responses to global refugee crises.