Borders in the future: policing unwanted mobility through entry bans in the Schengen area

ABSTRACT

Despite their prominent role in the Return Directive and the constitution of the common European border regime, entry bans and their role in the governance of unwanted mobility remain largely unexamined in migration research. Entry bans accompany removal decisions for non-compliant or criminalised non-citizens, applying by default in the whole Schengen area, excluding EU citizens and legally residing third-country nationals, who receive national bans. In this article, drawing from my research on the immigration detention system in Finland, I discuss how entry bans sanction and irregularise movement mainly inside Europe, complicate non-citizens’ regularisation, and affect their mobility strategies. Despite also being intertwined with crime control in Finland, national entry bans seem largely ineffective in preventing unwanted mobility inside the Schengen area: many Estonian citizens, in particular, are detained and removed from Finland several times a year. Notwithstanding the Europe-wide effect intended in the Return Directive, national entry bans issued alongside Schengen bans reintroduce borders inside Europe. Furthermore, by prolonging the duration of removal orders for years, entry bans establish individual borders that may be faced in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Borders
• deportation
• entry ban
• migration management
• Schengen area

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example, the Return Directive does not stipulate the length of entry bans, other than their being subject to individual assessment and that they ‘shall not in principle exceed five years’ (Art. 11.2), and it leaves their imposition in other cases for the consideration of the Member States.

2 While Turnbull and Hasselberg (2017, 151) presented a similar conclusion regarding deportable foreign offenders, the United Kingdom could only impose national entry bans due to its special provisions in the European border regime.

3 Here, I use differential exclusion in a different way than ‘the differential exclusion model’ introduced by Castles (1995).

4 For the research on the detention units, I obtained a research permission from the Helsinki Social Services and Health Care Division and the detention unit directors, whereas the National Police Board granted the permission for the detention records.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under grant 323149.