The Migration Machine

Abstract

Europe's technological borders Anyone travelling to Europe these days comes across not only barriers but also an increasing amount of technology. Bona fide travellers are offered high-tech initiatives (such as iris scans) in the hope that the desire for safety can still be combined with freedom of movement for all citizens. As a result, the borders of Europe are changing into an 'e-Border'. Behind the scenes, various government services are draw-ing up risk profiles for all kinds of aliens. If migrants risk crossing the Mediterranean to Europe illegally, there are boats, helicopters, aero-planes and satellites on the lookout for them. In harbours and at country borders ship containers and lorry cargo space are searched using heat sensors and carbon dioxide detectors to check for the presence of human beings. Globalization is taking place but is not making travel any eas-ier. The EU has removed its internal borders but has fortified its outer boundaries. The abolishment of the internal borders of the EU has increased the need for controlling the borders of the Schengen area, currently covering approximately 8000 km land borders and 43,000 km sea bor-ders. There are approximately 600 airports with extra-Schengen flights. About 250 million passengers a year pass these borders over land, about 70 million over sea and about 390 million through the air. The member states supposedly have a mutual interest in strengthening the control of the external borders. After all, 'a border is only as secure as its least well guarded area' (House of Lords 2008: 15). In order to manage the flow of migrants and asylum seekers to Europe, governments are forced to make complicated and often controversial 1 PROOF December 11, 2010 6:23 MAC/HUUB Page-2 9780230_278462_02_cha01 2 Huub Dijstelbloem, Albert Meijer and Michiel Besters choices. Migrants who, according to rules that are applied, are not entitled to settle are becoming more and more inventive in circumvent-ing the procedures. Big risks are not avoided. However, it is doubtful whether strict border control does have the intended effect (i.e. decrease of illegal immigrants). Quite often the extraterritorial surveillance leads to the so-called 'waterbed effect' or the 'squeezed balloon syndrome', the displacement of migration flows. The fact that the safe itineraries are blocked does not imply that people abandon their plans to enter Europe. Rather, these people take more dangerous routes. Since these alternative routes expose immigrants to even greater risks, the tightening of the external borders leads to an increasing number of fatalities among irreg-ular immigrants. Between 1993 and 2006, more than 7000 deaths have been documented of people trying to reach the European border. More-over, the number of deaths increased significantly after controls were applied to the extended borders in 1995 (Spijkerboer 2007). Meanwhile, governments continue looking for effective measures and even exceptional solutions to translate political decisions into a policy that limits traffic across borders. Examples are bone scans for investi-gating the age of minor asylum seekers, speech-recognition technology for administering civic integration examinations in the country of ori-gin, the use of biometrics and the construction of European databanks to store data on illegal migrants. The financial costs are considerable: as well as national budgets of the member states the European Commis-sion has reserved almost ¤4 billion for migration affairs in its financial programme for the period 2007–13. Migration policy does not consist solely of laws and policy mea-sures, but increasingly of technology. Notwithstanding, the resources that have emerged are debated only incidentally. In this context, technology in the form of a new border literally functions as an 'obligatory passage point' (Latour 1987) that works as a selection mech-anism for newcomers. However, whether this selection process fulfils all the conditions that are normally taken into account when inhab-itants of the state are confronted with technologies that affect their position as citizen, is doubtful. The risk is that technology in migra-tion policy and border control is deployed in a 'state of exception' where the power of the state overrules the position of the migrants (Agamben 1998; Neal 2009). Technology, however, is not just the 'means' that allows political and administrative aims to be carried out; technology creates its own possibilities and limitations which implies that any targets that are thus achieved are always 'mediated' (Latour 1999). The border, as Salter (2005) has noticed, opens a kind PROOF