European Border Control Research Articles

Criminal synergies: Human smuggling and illicit organ removal on the Central Mediterranean route

The externalisation of European border controls in North Africa is represented and justified by European leaders as the antithesis to the business model of human smuggling and human trafficking. Rather than being in an antithetical relationship, I argue that the European Union is in a symbiotic relationship with criminal groups exploiting the (im)mobility of migrants for profit. My analysis is informed by 37 interviews with African migrants, organ brokers, migration brokers and humanitarian organisations. Their experiences reveal how the convergence of crime and immigration controls along the Central Mediterranean route has led to the development of criminal synergies between different illegal markets, i.e. human smuggling and illicit organ removal.

Rischio e vulnerabilità nel modello europeo di intelligenza artificiale

The contribution explores how the European model on artificial intelligence addresses the relationship between risk analysis and management of automated systems and its impact on the vulnerability factors that the use of certain deceptive techniques determines or increases. The article draws some reflections on the European model that illustrates how risk assessment and management are logically related to data governance choices. Some data governance choices can lead to mitigation of the risk by combining market needs with an anthropocentric approach. As a result of general considerations on the European approach to artificial intelligence systems, the contribution offers the analysis of a case related to the interoperability of European information systems for purposes of security, migration and European border control, focusing on the impact that these systems have on the real life of third country nationals.

‘European bays of hope’: Trans-Mediterranean fatalities and African migration crisis in selected migritude poems

This article discusses the tragic deaths of African migrants on the Mediterranean Sea, especially the 2013 Lampedusa migrant shipwreck where close to 400 African migrants drowned. Apart from the Lampedusa tragedy, other migrant shipwrecks occurred in Malta in 2007 and 2014; Mediterranean in 2009, 2011, and 2015; Libya in 2009, 2014, and 2015; Catania in 2015 as well as Crotone in 2015, leaving thousands of Africans fleeing privation, violence and wars in their respective countries dead. The article uses Everett Lee’s push-pull and Chris Brown’s centre-periphery models to expound the hypothesis that migration from developing countries is primarily induced by their enforced integration into the capitalist world market economy and the dependency roles assigned to their population. It argues that the capitalist world system is skewed to engender inequality among countries of the world, thus creating a dominant, wealthy core and a subservient, impoverished periphery. Using selected poems of established and up-and-coming African poets, it interrogates literary representation of African migrant crisis, the politics of European border control, complicity of family remittances and the role of effete leadership in African migration crisis.

Borderwork in the Grey Zone: Everyday Resistance within European Border Control Initiatives in Mali

ABSTRACT EU externalised border control has become a bone of contention in EU–Malian relations. Based on fieldwork among Malian state officials, migrant associations and EU staff in Bamako, the article explores readmission agreements and border police collaboration. By examining the often-underestimated agency of national authorities, the article shows how EU border interventions aimed at producing control and confinement deep within the EU–African borderlands are contested and shaped by Malian state actors’ ‘borderwork’ (Rumford 2008). It argues that the contentious border politics produce ‘hidden acts’ through which moments of ‘sovereign exception’ (Agamben 1998) are produced in the ‘grey zone’ (Feldman 2019) of Europe’s externalised migration–security apparatus. Meanwhile, in the grey zone state actors’ everyday tactics of resistance are constitutive of new forms of sovereignty that is agency enabling.

The Humanitarianization of Child Deportation Politics

ABSTRACT This article develops a multidisciplinary analysis of the Northern European policy drive to deport unaccompanied minors (UAMs) to so-called reception facilities in Kabul, Afghanistan. These policies and practices are traced through the analytical frameworks of deportation corridors and humanitarian borders, and relying on archival material and interview data from Nordic and afghan public bureaucracies, the ERPUM project, the UNHCR and the IOM. The article conceptualizes the Afghan deportation corridors as one variant of “humanitarianized borders.” It is examined how European deportation politics for unaccompanied minors from 2000 to 2018 has shifted from portraying unaccompanied minors as being “a risk” to being “at risk” within an overarching political ambition of turning them deportable. European states increasingly do this through appeals to child rights and seemingly compassionate concepts like “family tracing,” “family reunification,” “reintegration,” and “care and education facilities” inscribed within narratives of vulnerable, irrational children and the universal family paving the way for humanitarianized care and control. This inscription re-constructs the agency and identity of both displaced children and of humanitarian practice. The article help establish a dialogue between the studies of deportation, humanitarian borders and child life in European border control.

Second wave COVID-19 pandemics in Europe: a temporal playbook

A second wave pandemic constitutes an imminent threat to society, with a potentially immense toll in terms of human lives and a devastating economic impact. We employ the epidemic Renormalisation Group (eRG) approach to pandemics, together with the first wave data for COVID-19, to efficiently simulate the dynamics of disease transmission and spreading across different European countries. The framework allows us to model, not only inter and extra European border control effects, but also the impact of social distancing for each country. We perform statistical analyses averaging on different level of human interaction across Europe and with the rest of the World. Our results are neatly summarised as an animation reporting the time evolution of the first and second waves of the European COVID-19 pandemic. Our temporal playbook of the second wave pandemic can be used by governments, financial markets, the industries and individual citizens, to efficiently time, prepare and implement local and global measures.

Turbulences of speeding up data circulation. Frontex and its crooked temporalities of ‘real-time’ border control

ABSTRACT In the last decade, various information systems have been created to process data in ‘near to real-time’ across agencies to ‘improve situational awareness and to increase reaction capability’ at the external borders of the European Union. While the policing of mobilities is increasingly discussed in terms of instantaneity, speed, and real-timeness, little has been said about the temporalities of data mobility. This paper focuses on the socio-technical architectures that are generative of data mobilities and analyses the temporality of data circulation as the outcome of a contingent formation of various actors, sites, and materials. Based on an indepth analysis of the Frontex information system Joint Operation Reporting Application (JORA), it works out several sources of turbulence that turn data mobility into a ‘crooked’ process of patching multiple temporalities and paces together. It will show how the implementation of JORA faces data frictions, issues of data quality, the synchronization of multiple orderings, and the clash of temporalities of border control practices on the ground. Thus, the infrastructuring of data circulation has effects on interorganizational forms of collaboration and knowledge production as well as on border work in the field of European migration and border control.

The Ariege ‘Refuge’: Advantage and Diversity of a Host Topography

Alexander von Humboldt wrote that ‘the arrangement of mountains… divide the surface of the earth into basins or vast cirques…and influence the range of cultures, habits, institutional forms and national hates’ (Debarbieux, 2012, p.13). While this formulation may seem outdated, von Humboldt’s reflection remarkably still resonates more than a century and a half later with recent events in mountainous areas affected by European migration policies and border control. Drawing on the life histories of refugee activists in the French department of Ariège, we reveal a complex territoriality that, depending on the spaces considered, produces singular and distinct forms of mobilisation, inherited from past migratory experiences, the engagement of neo-rurals and the social networks linking mountains, valleys, piedmont towns and the Toulouse conurbation. We highlight the uniqueness of the Ariège ‘refuge’, where mechanisms of migration control are relativised through a distancing enabled by both the topography and the social space of exile activism.

Papel de Frontex en la problemática migratoria europea contemporánea

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo mostrar un panorama sobre la situación de la migración masiva europea que dio paso a la creación de una agencia de control fronterizo (Frontex) como la responsable de coordinar los esfuerzos de los estados miembros para la securitización de las fronteras externas. Se trabajará en el estado del arte sobre la discusión de la migración y el control de fronteras, el panorama europeo en la cuestión migratoria y la forma en que la ue ha establecido sus políticas de migración interna (Schengen) y sus políticas enfocadas al control de las fronteras (Frontex).

The politics of big borders: Data (in)justice and the governance of refugees

This article provides an overview of the collection and uses of data in relation to European border regimes. We analyse the significance of these developments for the governance of refugee populations and make the case that within the current policy context of European border control, data functions to systematically stigmatize, exclude and oppress ‘unwanted’ migrant populations through mechanisms of criminalisation, identification, and social sorting. This, we argue, highlights the need to engage with data politics in a way that considers both the politics in data as well as the politics of data, highlighting the agendas and interests that advance the implementation of these technologies, privileging justice concerns on terms that go beyond techno-legal solutions, and positioning those who are most impacted by developments at the forefront of discussions.

Infrastructuring European migration and border control: The logistics of registration and identification at Moria hotspot

This paper examines Moria hotspot in Greece as a logistical site which fulfills two different functions within the European migration and border regime. It locates, contains, and sorts individuals ...

All quiet on the ‘Eastern front’? Controlling transit migration in Latvia and Lithuania

ABSTRACT While much of current debate on European border control focuses on the reinforcements of Europe’s Southern and South-eastern borders, the Baltic States, traditionally countries of emigration to Western Europe, are experiencing their own challenges in adapting their border regime to handle novel transit migration. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in the Lithuanian and Latvian State Border Guard Services, tasked with securing the Europe Union’s Eastern external borders and curtailing migrants’ onward movement to Western Europe, this paper sheds light on the meanings and practices of ‘borderwork’ in an underexplored region. The article asks: How is the Baltic border regime performed by State Border Guards, what meanings do they attribute to these borders, and what can this tell us about the ever-changing nature of the European border regime? For border guards, the complex landscape of de – and reterritorialised Schengen borders primarily serve as tools for manifesting their belonging to ‘Europe’ and their geopolitical distancing from Russia. Only recently did their borderwork become politicised in the context of migration. The Baltic case sheds light on the diverse manifestations and meanings of borders, which go beyond the mobile populations they are declared to be set up to control.

Harmonisation by risk analysis? Frontex and the risk-based governance of European border control

Scholars have highlighted the importance of Frontex risk analysis in the institutionalisation of EU-level border control without, however, sufficiently substantiating alleged harmonisation dynamics. This paper interrogates how and why EU-level actors seek to exploit risk analysis to harmonise European border control. An interpretive policy analysis of three contemporary applications of Frontex risk analysis – the Eurosur impact level assessment, the Schengen evaluation and monitoring mechanism and resource allocation in the Internal Security Fund – indicates that Frontex and the Commission found their harmonisation hopes on the rationalisation promises of risk-based governance – efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency gains and de-politicisation effects. This multi-functional rationalisation of Community decision-making is meant to justify increased EU-level coordination and interventions without challenging member state competencies, thereby enabling soft harmonisation processes in the weakly integrated and much contested domain. Rather than merely adhering to securitisation goals, risk analysis represents a magic bullet in the EU’s own institutional risk management.

Migration and asylum statistics as a basis for European border control

Migration and asylum statistics as a basis for European border control

Will Conflict Tear Us Apart? The Effects of Conflict and Valenced Media Messages on Polarizing Attitudes toward EU Immigration and Border Control

European migration and border control has occupied a prominent spot on the European political agenda. The news media present the topic in a polarized fashion and reports conflicting viewpoints on how the European Union (EU) and national governments should address the issue. We argue that this conflict in news messages can have a polarizing effect on public perceptions regarding the EU’s performance on this topic, and that this effect can be moderated by the valence of news messages. A two-wave online panel survey experiment was conducted on a representative sample of the Dutch population (n = 376). The results indicate that conflict reinforces and thus polarizes policy attitudes, whereas a message’s valence can change people’s attitudes, which reduces the attitudinal gap. The implications of these findings concerning European border control and migration are discussed in the final section of this paper.

Managing illegality at the internal border: Governing through ‘differential inclusion’ in Italy

This article interrogates whether a crimmigration frame could be used to assess immigration control in Italy. It argues that even if crimmigration laws are similar across European countries, the outcomes of European border control depend on the local context. It looks at the interaction between police, judges, and migrants at the internal borders in Bologna, Italy. The article is based on quantitative data (analysis of case files on pre-removal detention in Bologna’s detention centre) and qualitative data (one-to-one in-depth interviews with migrants and justices of the peace, and participant observation). The case study focuses on ‘differential inclusion’ of undocumented migrants informally allowed to remain in the Italian territory. Police manage illegality rather than enforcing removals, using selective non-enforcement of immigration laws as effectively as enforcement itself. The article’s main hypothesis is that, at the local level, the production of borders works as a provisional admission policy to include undocumented migrants, though in a subordinated position.

Die Ökonomie des Zwischenlandes.

The following article is based on my fieldwork in Morocco and represents anthropological data collected amongst undocumented sub-Saharan migrants in Morocco. They want to enter Europe in search for a better life for themselves and to provide financial support for their families. Due to heavy border security control and repression, they find themselves trapped at the gates of Europe, where they are trying to survive by engaging in various economic activities in the informal sector. The article begins with an overview of the European migration politics in Africa and the geopolitical and historical context of Morocco, in light of the externalization of European border control. I will then analyze the various economic sectors, in which sub-Saharan migrations are active, as well as smuggling networks, informal camps and remittances, on which they largely depend due to the exclusion from the national job market.

Crisis, Routine, Consolidation: The Politics of the Mediterranean Migration Crisis

The current ‘migration crisis’ is framed as a moment of reckoning in the EU’s dealings with its Mediterranean neighbourhood. Yet to what extent is crisis the most useful tool to account for migration and European border control practices in the current context? An exclusive focus on crisis, we argue, is misleading. To a large extent, the current crisis management builds on pre-existing practices and enables their consolidation. For us this is an invitation to discuss the relation between crisis, routine and consolidation in Euro-Mediterranean migration policies and practices. This intervention shows how ‘crises’ are spatio-temporally limited and used to further pre-existing migration control practices and techniques of governing. As such we interrogate what it means to talk of crisis versus routine in the field of Mediterranean security practices.

The effect of Frontex's risk analysis on the European border controls

ABSTRACTThis article examines the effect of the EU border control agency, Frontex, in its use of information. The agency organises information and analyses what is deemed to be a ‘risk’ for EU external borders. According to Barnett and Finnemore [2004 Rule for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Cornell University Press: New York)] such a task can be regarded as ‘a form of power’. Frontex has developed, under the supervision of the European Commission and member states, a particular process of categorising irregular migrants, in order to determine which member states’ external borders should be considered ‘high risk’. This article traces how Frontex has developed a risk analysis and how this has been used in the policy-making process. As this article demonstrates, the financial resources of the European External Borders Fund are distributed to member states based on Frontex's risk analysis. It also discusses that Frontex is now assessing the member states’ internal borders. These cases effectively show that its assessment affects the ability of a member state to get access to EU funding and defines whether a member state is legitimately able to reinstate the border checks at its internal border. Frontex's risk analysis is not a simple aggregation of data for operational border checks and surveillance activities, but that it should be seen as a particular form of knowledge with an important political effect.

Los hundidos y los salvados. Reflexiones sobre movilidad y frontera en tiempo de crisis

The «European Agenda on Migration», whose objective is the unification of the different measures that the European Union will adopt to develop a coherent and integrated approach to migrations and border policy, is paradigmatic of how the European Commission imagines de Mediterranean as a space of migratory flows. This agenda has three main characteristics: usefulness, planning and stratification, and points to a new European mobility governance. This paper explores the implications and consequences of this agenda, including the critical analysis of the so-called «Hotspot approach» and other measures such as the «refugee relocation system». Confirming the trends in the last few years, the main tools in the European border management and control strategy are cooperation, policing, new control and identification technologies for the newcomers, and the «border extended bureaucracies». As a consequence, the most advanced border posts are pushed towards the South and militarized. This paper discusses the underlying racist utilitarianism contained in these European policies. Thus, Mediterranean’s governmentality crystallizes in a series of mechanisms generating new forms of violence, symbolic and direct. In this context, the paper explores the parallel logics of the «will to mobility» of young migrants from the Global South who, in spite of the security web established in European policies wish and try to be part of a transnational cosmopolitan imaginary.