This paper analyses the decisions of the EU leaders to respond to the migration crisis in the last five years through actions for rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, controlling the Southern EU borders, providing settlement to refugees in the EU countries, and returning the non-refugee migrants to the country of origin. In the first section, the paper adopts the process tracing method to study how the European policy-makers recognized the crisis and how they presented it to the publics. In the remaining sections of the paper, the effectiveness and legitimacy of the decisions to play the aforementioned actions for the management of the crisis are assessed with the analysis of official documents and with survey data collected by the author.
