This paper examines the history of European migration-control practices and how these have influenced relations between Europe – defined here as the EU and its Member States – and Arab states. It analyses these relations through the lens of three interrelating concepts: securitization, externalization and privatization and argues that the combination of these three policy drivers has shaped European and North African/Arab migration-control practices over time and space. Since the 1990s externalized European migration-controls in Arab states have traditionally been understood in spatial terms as resulting from: the process of securitization that has dominated much foreign policy practice and debate and attempts by European actors to avoid their legal obligations under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. However, this paper argues that this fails to adequately relay the complex power relations bound up in and responsible for particular practices of migration-control while also removing all agency from Arab states themselves. By presenting North Africa, specifically as an empty space in which Europe exercises its own policies and in focusing almost exclusively on the spatial externalization of controls as a by-product of wider trends in securitization, previous work on migration-controls has failed to take account of the agency of Arab states and the externalization or outsourcing of controls to private actors. This paper argues that the externalizing of controls to Private Security Companies (PSCs) has a role in shaping the interests of the EU, its Member States and Arab states. In looking at this blurring of public and private interests in determining migration-control policies and practices the paper points to the emergence of a borderscape industry in the Mediterranean, showing how this industry both relies on and transcends state-driven political economies.