The refugee crisis: destabilizing and restabilizing European borders

ABSTRACT

Drawing on fieldwork among irregular migrants in Norway, this article examines how borders are constructed, reproduced and contested by a variety of actors, using techniques, institutions, laws, policies and social interactions at different scales. It indicates the shifts in border regimes following the alleged weakening of national borders after the Cold War. The implementation of European integration, for instance through the Schengen Agreement, has made it increasingly difficult for undocumented travellers to cross the external Schengen borders, and within the nation-states, internal boundary processes facilitate, obstruct and set yardsticks for migrants’ entrance to society. Drawing on scholars who have explored the spatial dimensions of border controls (delocalization), the temporal dimension, and the role of non-state actors in shaping border policies (denationalization), I investigate borders through three critical moments for migrants: the movement to Europe, the waiting in Europe and the (potential) return.

KEYWORDS:

• Irregular migration
• borders
• boundaries
• Europe
• mobility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-is-new/news/news/2016/20160202_2_en.htm. Accessed February 2, 2016.

2 https://www.bundeskanzlerin.de/Content/EN/Artikel/2016/02_en/2016-02-29-merkel-annewill_en.html. Accessed March 6, 2016.

3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPm1ECI2-7U.

4 http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/02/turkey-open-border-syrian-refugees-160207113555928.html. Accessed February 2, 2016.

5 For an extensive overview of studies of borders, see Green (2013).

6 An agency which is only partly conscious and intent-driven.

7 The construction of the Schengen area was first integrated into the EU acquis with the signing of the Treaty of Amsterdam (1999), which obliged Member States to adopt legally binding instruments in asylum and immigration policies. Some years earlier, the Maastricht Treaty (1992) incorporated migration in the EU’s “third pillar” of justice and home affairs.

8 According to Brekke (2012), the introduction of the Eurodac identification system in 2002 is viewed by people in the Norwegian Ministry as a key factor in bringing down the refugee numbers in Norway and the rest of Europe.

9 The Government’s website containing the December 2015 bill describes it as consultation on a number of proposed measures to impose restrictions and make it less attractive to apply for asylum in Norway, see: https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/horing--endringer-i-utlendingslovgivningen-innstramninger-ii/id2469054/. Accessed February 1, 2016.

10 The recent discussion, particularly in the UK, about the limitations on social benefits for non-national EU workers in UK may be indicative of such a direction.

11 The Hollywood movie from 2004 featuring Tom Hanks tells a story about Victor Navorski, who gets stuck for several months at JFK Airport. The movie is inspired by the true story of Iranian refugee Alfred Mehran (previously called Mehran Karimi Nasseri) who was stuck at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris from 1988 to 2006.

12 In Dubai all foreigners must have a sponsor, also called a guarantor, and this might be an individual, a company or an institution.

13 People who for various reasons were unable to use legal routes have used what we today call smugglers as long as borders have existed. For example, in the 1920s Japanese migrants made use of smuggling expertise to get to Canada despite the restrictive measures targeting them. Movies have been made about well-known smugglers during the Second World War and those helping people cross the Berlin Wall (van Liempt and Sersli 2013).

14 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/europe/article4678348.ece. Accessed February 25, 2016.

15 By introducing this definite responsibility of a particular Member State, the EU sought to avoid a situation of which refugees are in orbit, with multiple applications for asylum, avoid the duplication of Member States’ resources, and reduce backlogs and delays in the examination of asylum applications.

16 The Dublin Convention replaced the Schengen provision on asylum. The Dublin system came to be viewed as neither fair nor efficient. The development of Dublin II and Dublin III aimed to reassess the responsibility-sharing procedures within the EU/EEA (Hurwitz 1999).

17 Asylum seekers are provided with an identity card that is only valid for a set number of months. If the card has expired and the asylum application is rejected, the card will not be renewed. While some irregular migrants told me that the police withdrew their expired card, others had managed to hold on to the card by arguing that it was the only form of identification they had, and in case something occurred to them, others would need to be able to identify them.

18 Schuster and Majidi (2013) found that 80% of the deportees from the UK to Afghanistan whom they interviewed left Afghanistan again within two years of their return.

19 If a migrant signs up for a voluntary return programme, they will be offered a lump sum (usually between 1200 and 2400 Euros) depending on the return destination and whether they are single or in a family – in addition to the other assistance (including a return flight). The amount of money provided also depends on the period of time that has elapsed after the asylum application was rejected and before the migrant applied for the programme.

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this article was made possible through the project “Denaturalizing difference: Challenging the production of global social inequality” at the University of Bergen, funded by the Research Council of Norway. Thomas Hylland Eriksen provided valuable comments on early drafts which were helpful in clarifying aspects of my argument.