Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration

"This edited volume approaches waiting both as a social phenomenon that proliferates in irregularised forms of migration and as an analytical perspective on migration processes and practices. Waiting as an analytical perspective offers new insights into the complex and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclusion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration. The chapters in this book address legal, bureaucratic, ethical, gendered, and affective dimensions of time and migration. A key concern is to develop more theoretically robust approaches to waiting in migration as constituted in and through multiple and relational temporalities. The chapters highlight how waiting is configured in specific legal, material, and socio-cultural situations, as well as how migrants encounter, incorporate, and resist temporal structures. This collection includes ethnographic and other empirically based material, as well as theorizing that cross-cut disciplinary boundaries. It will be relevant to scholars from anthropology and sociology, and others interested in temporalities, migration, borders, and power.

U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform

The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform was created by Congress to assess U.S. immigration policy and make recommendations regarding its implementation and effects. Mandated in the Immigration Act of 1990 to submit an interim report in 1994 and a final report in 1997, the Commission has undertaken public hearings, fact-finding missions, and expert consultations to identify the major immigration-related issues facing the United States today.LBJ School of Public Affair

The Micro-Politics of Border Control: Internal Struggles at Canadian Customs

This dissertation explores the remaking of Canadian customs from the point of view of border officers tasked with processing trucks and commodities. Historically employed for tax collection, border authorities have gradually been incorporated into security provision and trade facilitation. This has entailed the pluralization of public and private actors who have a stake in border regulation as well as the design of a series of organizational reforms, new customs programs, border technologies and intelligence-led policing strategies. As a result, there has been a disembedding of borderwork and a displacement of decision-making away from ports of entry. Frontline security professionals negotiate these changes in ways that have consequences for our understanding of border priorities. In response to the consequences of this new division of labour, including their loss of clout in the security field, customs officers attempt to maintain their hold on border responsibilities by relying on their discretionary powers. Meanwhile, they emphasize the potentially dangerous aspects of their work over the more administrative by deploying an enforcement narrative––one that has recently found its concrete application in their union's successful campaign to obtain arming for its members. While an analysis of the "pistolization" of borderwork indicates the progressive adoption of a policing sensibility by border officers, an examination of their restructured professional socialization reveals the emergence of distinct generational approaches to borderwork. Hiring and training play a central part in shaping "old ways" and "new ways" of doing borderwork. Anchored in divergent temporalities of border control, these internal categorizations of skills and attitudes point to the new registers of distinction mobilized by officers as they negotiate a transitioning security field

Mediated Bordering: Eurosur, the Refugee Boat, and the Construction of an External EU Border

The external border of the EU remains under permanent construction. The author engages with two of its primary building sites - the European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur) and the Refugee Boat. She analyzes how the function and quality of the EU's current political border is crafted, shaped, produced and eventually stabilized through these two mediators. Eurosur and the Refugee Boat mediate a level of Europeanization which has hitherto - and would otherwise have - been impossible. While Eurosur mobilizes the limits of border policing in various ways, the Refugee Boat functions as the vacillating European Other to legitimize both control and humanitarian interventions. The study shows the specific, if not constitutive, ambivalences of EU border policies, and explores the emergence of viapolitics

Mediated Bordering

The external border of the EU remains under permanent construction. Sabrina Ellebrecht engages with two of its primary building sites – the European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur) and the Refugee Boat. She analyzes how the function and quality of the EU's current political border is crafted, shaped, produced and eventually stabilized through these two mediators. Eurosur and the Refugee Boat mediate a level of Europeanization which has hitherto – and would otherwise have – been impossible. While Eurosur mobilizes the limits of border policing in various ways, the Refugee Boat functions as the vacillating European Other to legitimize both control and humanitarian interventions. The study shows the specific, if not constitutive, ambivalences of EU border policies, and explores the emergence of viapolitics

Border enacted: unpacking the everyday performances of border control and resistance

For over a decade European governments have invested in technological systems to develop new forms of border security in their attempts to regulate migration. Numerous innovations have been designed in order to grant border agencies an unbroken vision of the borderspace, thus allowing states to continuously enact the border beyond their territorial boundaries. Meanwhile, other strategies have been designed in order to control the movements and actions of ‘irregular migrants’ and asylum seekers following their successful attempts at reaching the territorial boundaries of the European Union (EU). In this thesis I seek to tease apart these technocratic claims of omni-voyance and pervasive control by focusing on the everyday realities of border control and the ways in which these are negotiated and resisted by those who seek to evade them. To this aim, I approach the border by drawing on assemblage theory, as well as feminist geopolitics’ attention to performance and embodiment. Such an approach re-centres attention on the human performances of border control, emphasises the agency of ‘non-human’ actors, foregrounds the messy realities of borderspaces, and engages with the multiplicity of borders. In applying this approach, I argue that the border should not be thought of as a static entity; neither in its location in space, nor in terms of the actors that perform it. Instead, I have oriented my approach towards conceptualising the border as in a constant state of becoming – with actors being continuously added to and subtracted from the security assemblages which constitute the border. In particular I focus on the ways in which ‘non-state’ actors are increasingly being coerced into performing the border and what the effects of this are on those who seek to evade its violent gaze. In order to put this approach to work, I employ a multi-sited ethnographic study of three European borderspaces: the Frontex headquarters in Warsaw, the Straits of Gibraltar and an anonymised city in the United Kingdom (UK). In Warsaw and the Straits of Gibraltar (specifically the cities of Algeciras and Ceuta) my research was focused on two border surveillance assemblages: (1) The European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR) operated by Frontex and (2) Spain’s Sistema Integrado de Vigilancia del Exterior (SIVE) maritime surveillance system. I argue that the ‘messiness’ of the borderspace proves too complex for the surveillance system to control, the vision produced through SIVE being fragmented and stuttered through both human and technological flaws. I also highlight how securing the border is as much a temporal negotiation as it is a spatial one; the struggle for control over the borderspace comprising a contest of speed. The effect is a geography of the border that foregrounds the ‘little details’ of borderwork; exposing the flaws behind a scopic narrative that claims unceasing vision and an unhindered reach. While in Ceuta I also challenged the formal performances of the enclave as a ‘humanitarian space’. Indeed, I argue that it is as a result of framing the enclave’s detention centre as a reception centre for humanitarianism that irregular migrants can be detained in the autonomous city indefinitely. Yet the actors that perform the borders of the enclave do so in an untidy alliance which regularly springs leaks. I also discuss the tactics of the migrants who have made it to the enclave and who now seek to leave it again. In particular I note how their tactics of resistance have become entangled with the bordering strategies specific to the enclave. I also question the extent to which the border enclave and the specific identities forged by the migrants who pass through it will remain with them as they pass through future checkpoints of the European border – the evidence of their time spent in Ceuta locked in their fingertips. In the anonymised city in the UK my aims were to question the reach of the state into the everyday lives of asylum seekers. While the lives of asylum seekers are often described as being in ‘limbo’, I sought to question the temporalities and materialities of urban living for people stuck in the asylum system. I argue that the strategies used by the UK Home Office are intended to limit the movements and actions of asylum seekers in the city through securitising the support that asylum seekers are entitled to. I focus on the ways in which the border is carried by asylum seekers in the city through their use of ARC and Azure cards, especially, and the ways in which these cards serve to ‘fix’ people with the negative qualities and stereotypes associated with asylum seekers. Through volunteering for a group offering solidarity support to asylum seekers in the city, I also argue that this strategy of limiting movements can be resisted. Like the tactics encountered in Ceuta, however, these tactics frequently become entangled in the strategies of border control

Governing Irregular Migration: Logics and Practices in Spanish Immigration Policy

Since the first substantive changes to Spanish immigration laws in the 1980s, immigration to Spain and the policies designed to govern it have changed greatly. The pace of this continuous transformation has recently slowed down, offering a good opportunity to reflect on the ways in which irregular migration has been governed over time. Taking stock of more than three decades of debates in the Spanish Congress, laws, policy documents, interview findings and practices, this dissertation offers a sociological analysis of the messy process of immigration governance in a border country of the European Union. The dissertation starts by analyzing the early problematizations of irregular migration in Spain, understood as the result of discursive and non-discursive practices that provide specific ways of thinking about and acting upon objects. Complicating the assumption that policy shifts are a straightforward result of changes in the political orientation of ruling parties, the dissertation traces the existence of three intersecting sets of logics and practices that have shaped Spanish immigration policy over time: (1) culturalization: a set of logics and practices intimately tied to the history of Spanish colonialism and governing migrants as cultural subjects; (2) labouralization: a set of logics and practices that attempt to manage labour migration flows and frame irregular migrants as workers who contribute to the national labour market; and (3) securitization: a set of logics and practices focused on the defence of state sovereignty, the prevention of irregular entry and the framing of irregular migrants as potential threats. The organization of heterogeneous practices into three broad categories acts as a heuristic device to show how various complementary and at times contradictory logics and practices work together to create a practical regime of migration governance based on a long probationary period during which irregular migrants are scrutinized and policed. Ultimately, this dissertation posits the existence in Spain of a regime governing immigration through probation. This regime entails the rescaling of bordering practices across space and time, the deployment of a space of legal liminality in which irregular migrants are kept, and the use of conditionality and discretion in the assessment of desirability

Refugee Routes: Telling, Looking, Protesting, Redressing

The displaced are often rendered silent and invisible as they journey in search of refuge. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples from Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, Iraq, Syria, UK, Germany, France, the Balkan Peninsula, US, Canada, Australia, and Kenya, the contributions to this volume draw attention to refugees, asylum seekers, exiles, and forced migrants as individual subjects with memories, hopes, needs, rights, and a prospective place in collective memory. The book's wide-ranging theoretical, literary, artistic, and autobiographical contributions appeal to scholarly and lay readers who share concerns about the fate of the displaced in relation to the emplaced in this age of mass mobility