The Privatisation of Immigration Control through Carrier Sanctions: The Role of Private Transport Companies in Dutch and British Immigration Control
... Cohen, 2002) and outwards to private actors (e.g. Scholten, 2015). Detention and deportation, for example, are widely contracted out to private security companies (Doty and Wheatley, 2013;Flynn and Cannon, 2009;Hiemstra and Conlon, 2017;Martin, 2012), and controls of immigration status are increasingly performed by a variety of private actors who include transportation companies and employers for example (de Lange, 2011;Lahav, 1998;Scholten, 2015;Yuval-Davis et al., 2018). ...
... Scholten, 2015). Detention and deportation, for example, are widely contracted out to private security companies (Doty and Wheatley, 2013;Flynn and Cannon, 2009;Hiemstra and Conlon, 2017;Martin, 2012), and controls of immigration status are increasingly performed by a variety of private actors who include transportation companies and employers for example (de Lange, 2011;Lahav, 1998;Scholten, 2015;Yuval-Davis et al., 2018). By outsourcing immigration control to private actors, this literature argues, states are placing some of the burden of immigration policy enforcement outside the state. ...
... Darling, 2016;Doty and Wheatley, 2013;Flynn and Cannon, 2009;Hiemstra and Conlon, 2017;Martin, 2012), as is the processing of visa applications (Infantino, 2016;Sa´nchez-Barrueco, 2018). Responsibilities for control of migration status have also been divested to a variety of non-state actors, including carrier companies (Lahav, 1998;Scholten, 2015), employers (de Lange, 2011;Lahav, 1998;Yuval-Davis et al., 2018), banks, landlords (Yuval-Davis et al., 2018) and universities (Jenkins, 2014). Governments have long been coercing transportation companies into performing immigration control on behalf of the state. ...
Non-state actors are increasingly involved in enforcing immigration policies. Of late, there has been growing recognition that greater involvement of non-state actors has contributed to reconfiguring migration governance in a spatial sense. Scalar literature conceptualises the involvement of non-state actors as a move by immigration authorities to use actors beyond the state to enforce immigration policies. Network-inspired analysis, on the other hand, draws attention to attempts by non-state actors to form alliances in order to influence immigration policy. In this paper, we set out to show that other spatial shifts are at play in contemporary migration governance. In order to make sense of these spatial shifts, we advance a reading of migration governance which aims to show how efforts to manage migration are the result of, and result in, strategic attempts by state and non-state actors to enrol others, establish a sense of presence and build relationships of proximity and reach. We provide one example of this, involving an administrative alliance between a Swedish government agency and two intermediary actors in labour migration: employers in the information-technology industry and immigration service providers. By drawing attention to spatial shifts in migration governance such as this, new light can be shed on the ways in which the governance of migration recasts relationships between state and non-state actors.
... Moreover, the assemblage of the coach is also subject to international rules and regulations in regard to (cross-border) transport of people such as carrier sanctions. This control by FlixBus follows a European tendency where governments distance themselves legally and geographically from immigration control (Scholten 2015). This distancing takes place through, among other things, outsourcing controls through carrier sanctions (Rodenhäuser 2014;Scholten 2015) or the development of digital checks and controls prior to travel (Van Houtum 2010;Salter 2006;Squire 2011;Walters 2011). ...
... This control by FlixBus follows a European tendency where governments distance themselves legally and geographically from immigration control (Scholten 2015). This distancing takes place through, among other things, outsourcing controls through carrier sanctions (Rodenhäuser 2014;Scholten 2015) or the development of digital checks and controls prior to travel (Van Houtum 2010;Salter 2006;Squire 2011;Walters 2011). Under carrier legislation, carriers are obliged to control travelers' documents to prevent "so-called inadmissible passengers from continuing their journey" (Scholten 2015). ...
... This distancing takes place through, among other things, outsourcing controls through carrier sanctions (Rodenhäuser 2014;Scholten 2015) or the development of digital checks and controls prior to travel (Van Houtum 2010;Salter 2006;Squire 2011;Walters 2011). Under carrier legislation, carriers are obliged to control travelers' documents to prevent "so-called inadmissible passengers from continuing their journey" (Scholten 2015). This legislation consists of three components: "first, the duty of a carrier to remove an undocumented migrant brought to a country; second, the duty of the carrier to bear all expenses until the undocumented migrant is removed; and, third, a fine imposed on the carrier for bringing an undocumented migrant to the frontier of a state" (Rodenhäuser 2014, 226). ...
The critical border scholar William Walters argues that although vehicles of mobility (e.g. coaches, boats, and airplanes) are important features of mobility and migration, there is relatively little attention paid to the relation between materiality and migration. This research follows Walters’ notion of viapolitics to approach the bordering of mobility from the middle, from the perspective of the vehicle and not just the state, to gain a more theoretical and comprehensive understanding of human mobility and its entanglement with power-relations. Building upon assemblage theory, mobility studies, and contemporary border studies this research aims to lay bare the viapolitics of FlixBus. Drawing upon a mobile ethnography, that combines my own FlixBus travels with the analyses of policy documents and international agreements, I illustrate how FlixBus represents and reproduces scattered borderscapes. The analysis results in a concluding call for differentiated understanding of body/vehicle relations in order to understand better the bordering of mobility within the European Union.
... Throughout the last few decades, European governments have increasingly outsourced the implementation of their migration and integration policies to a wide range of external actors including national and transnational NGOs (Koch 2014), intergovernmental agencies (Guiraudon and Lahav 2000), private corporations (Scholten 2015), medical staff (Ambrosini 2010; Ambrosini and Van der Leun 2015) and local welfare organisations (Van der Leun 2006). By doing so, nation-states seek to circumvent the limits of their sovereign power in regulating the principally transnational phenomenon of migration. ...
... By shifting policy implementation 'up, down and out' (Guiraudon and Lahav 2000;Lavenex 2006) or by governing through 'networks' (Hajer and Versteeg 2005;Lavenex, Lehmkuhl, and Wichmann 2009), European nation-states thus sought to restore part of the sovereign power they appeared to have lost. In doing so, they relied upon external actors' specific expertise (Ellermann 2006), their ability to reach particular groups of (undocumented) immigrants (Scholten 2015), and the moral legitimacy or credibility to act in more ambivalent terrains such as physically enforced deportation (Kalir and Wissink 2015). Amongst the plethora of these externalised policy measures, the following are perhaps most salient: ...
... Frontex), and to develop a series of biometric tools to identify undocumented immigrants (Guild and Bigo 2010;Hyndman and Mountz 2008); (2) fining private actors transporting undocumented immigrants (e.g. airplane companies, taxi drivers and sea transport) (Guiraudon 2000;Scholten 2015;Scholten and Minderhoud 2008); (3) stimulate the effective return of undocumented immigrants and rejected asylum seekers by developing the European Return Fund, and by investing in bilateral and multilateral readmission agreements with countries of transit and origin (Cassarino 2007); (4) financially stimulating social, educational and medical services to exclude undocumented immigrants, to discourage them from staying without residence permits (Devillé 2008;Van der Leun 2006). ...
Whilst European governments have increasingly externalised restrictive migration policies to civil actors, the latter’s main interests lie in improving or defending immigrants’ well-being. This raises the crucial question as to how civil actors deal with the puzzling position they find themselves in: to what extent do they execute or transform their funders’ policy objectives? And which mechanisms enable them to do so? This article contributes to answering these questions by detailing the historical shifts in the roles played by civil actors in the Assisted Voluntary Return programme in Belgium. Most importantly, the article argues that the considerable autonomy these civil actors achieved resulted in two seemingly opposite effects. On the one hand, they developed a wealth of expertise in ensuring the quality of return, thereby transforming the national government’s goals of managing migration into humanitarian ones. On the other hand, in recent developments their autonomy paradoxically became instrumental to migration management, not so much by changing their practices or values, but by changing their functioning within the wider field of migration policies. The article concludes by proposing the metaphor of ‘immunisation’ as an apt way of describing civil actors’ practical and functionally role in migration management.
... Carriers have always controlled passengers' documents for their own commercial and security reasons, but, as Scholten has put it, through sanctions private companies are obliged to check passengers' documents in the interest of the state, to enhance the capacity of the state to control the movement of persons travelling across its borders. With such measures, states de facto co-opt carriers as key actors, and 'privatise' a process that has always been central to state power: immigration control (Scholten 2015). The consequences of such indirect delegation of migration management tasks to carriers through the provision of sanctions are primarily the offshoring of the jurisdiction of States and the privatization of the exercise of the sovereign power to control borders. ...
... The externalization and privatization of border control followed as a most significant consequence of the indirect delegation of migration management tasks to carriers through the sanctions. The outsourcing of the exercise of the sovereign power to control borders and the right to admit or refuse the entry of immigrants into the territory of a state empowered private actors with tasks and responsibilities which were not originally part of their core business (Scholten 2015: 2). ...
The presented article attempts to put carrier sanctions policies in a perspective of the migration and refugee crisis in the EU. The development, motives and rationale of carriers’ liability are explored to highlight the process of privatisation and offshoring of immigration control at the level of the EU and its Member States. The article is based on an extensive review of documents and the literature related to the carrier sanctions policy and the migration crisis. An interdisciplinary approach based on European Studies is mostly applied. The migration and refugee crisis is examined as one of the most relevant factors shaping the carrier sanctions policy in the EU. The current legal and political context is presented, including binding international and EU regulations related to carriers’ responsibilities. The link between the carrier sanctions and visa policy is explored, as well as main arguments for and against maintaining the measures concerned. The paper argues that carriers sanctions constitute a relevant supporting tool for the national and EU visa policy. Aimed mostly at curbing migratory flows and combating illegal immigration, carriers’ liability legislation may lead to exclusion from access to a fair and efficient asylum procedure.
... Surprisingly, there is no research on officers' influence in the visa process, even in 'remote control' literature. Otherwise excellent studies by Scholten (2015) and FitzGerald (2019) mention liaison networks from policy documents and their work advising airlines and officials, but fail to investigate what this neutrally-termed 'advising' consists of substantively. There is also high-quality ethnographic research on consulate staff (Alpes and Spire 2014;Infantino and Rea 2012;Scheel 2018;Infantino 2021), but nothing on experts who provide 'risk' knowledge and guidance for their visa decisions. ...
This article studies the hidden world of extraterritorial liaison officers, mid-level civil servants posted abroad whose agency influences UK visa implementation within a global framework. Specifically, we unpack their influential role in translating vague policy objectives into specific institutional justifications, norms, and practices, which bureaucrats apply when implementing visa decisions on location. ‘Risk’ knowledge production is crucial: they mobilise, broker and communicate so-called ‘immigration risks’ applied to specific foreign nationals across institutional levels and national boundaries. Liaison officers are intermediaries, ‘risk’ brokers, who: (a) interpret (and feedback on) the Home Office’s supposedly objective central ‘risk’ assessments; (b) construct ‘risk’ assessments based on local knowledge and intelligence to guide and legitimate street-level bureaucrats’ (consulate, airline) decisions; and (c) co-operate to a surprisingly high degree over ‘risk’ assessments with peers in Global North multi-state frameworks. Importantly, their interventions for the UK state effectively reinforces an unequal North–South global mobility regime. To examine how ally and target states are treated differently, we compare across France, USA, Thailand, Ghana, and Egypt. High state secrecy makes studying liaison officers difficult. Our original research applies document analysis of public policy statements, interventions via freedom of information requests, and interviews with twenty mid-level operational officers.
... Such trends have been framed by others as the "privatization" and "commercialization" of immigration control (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sørensen 2013;Scholten 2015). The practice of "enrolling" or "mobilizing" private actors' capacities and resources (Wood and Shearing 2007) clearly show that policing and security agencies are involved in power relations, which previous studies have shown can be problematic for collaborative responses to policing and security (Crawford 1997). ...
Global hubs such as airports and maritime ports are geographical centers where immense flows converge, and are characterized by speed, time and efficiency in linking local markets and global economic trade networks. Being symbolic infrastructures of capitalism, global hubs may attract criminal exploitation and be exposed to security risks. Drawing on extensive interview material from those involved in Norwegian airport and port security, this article explores how policing agencies experience the balancing of the imperatives of security and trade. It reveals how policing agencies are affected by, and seek to adapt to, the demands for efficiency and speed intrinsic to the trade regime, thereby highlighting the importance of the temporal dimension to understanding the complexities of contemporary security governance.
... However, although extensive research on the liability of carriers has been carried out, no single study exists which would offer an in-depth analysis of the scope of the carriers' obligations and of the ways in which these obligations should be correctly met. Scholten's works, extremely valuable ones, seem to focus on Dutch law and policy rather than on reconstructing the standard of 'an obeying carrier' (Scholten, 2015). This article attempts to fi ll this gap by combining a short description of the existing European and Polish legal frameworks with an extensive analysis of Polish administrative courts' jurisprudence, and is an answer to Baird's conclusion that "empirical studies explaining the development of carrier sanctions, their implementation and their impacts suffer from limited data and small-n case studies" (Baird, 2017). ...
This article analyses carrier sanctions in light of Poland's membership of the European Union and its obligation to protect the EU's external borders. It offers an in-depth analysis of the scope of the carriers' obligations with regard to bringing third-country nationals to the Eastern external border of the European Union and explores ways how these obligations should be fulfi lled correctly so that carriers are not obliged to pay administrative fi nes of as much as 3000-5000 euro per person. The research is based on an extensive review of the jurisprudence of Polish administrative courts and takes into account the specifi city of this jurisprudence.
... Although various synonyms are used such as 'non-entre´e', 'non-admission', 'non-arrival', 'deterrence', 'extra territorialisation', 'offshoring', and 'deflection', we define containment as instruments and arrangements aimed at preventing onward movement beyond the more immediate location of displacement with attendant measures that seek to deny access to the territory for those seeking onward movement as well as efforts to return asylum-seekers to their countries of transit or origin. In practical terms, containment measures can include restrictive visa requirements, carrier sanctions, physical barriers to entry, interdictions at sea, the use of 'safe third country' and 'safe country of origin' concepts, readmission agreements, border controls, processing centres in third countries, and bi-or multi-lateral agreements that strengthen cooperation (Barnett 2001;Legomsky 2006;Betts 2010;Rodenha¨user 2014;Scholten 2015;Domenech 2017;Gammeltoft-Hansen and Tan 2017). This also leads to specific geographical effects such as the concentration of refugees and those seeking protection in the Global South, where they often endure protracted human rights restrictions. ...
What does the research literature on refugee and asylum migration tell us about the impact of global norms and standards on the protection of asylum-seekers and refugees? Do we see the effective reach of global standards or do we see responses to be dependent on ‘local’ contexts? We conducted a systematic review of the literature across six case countries on two key issues in contemporary refugee governance: ‘mobility’ and ‘containment’. After coding 252 documents, we found that while ‘the global’ has an important normative and aspirational resonance and is an identified source of rights expansion and increased mobility, there is significant evidence for the ‘localisation’ of global standards on asylum and refugee protection. This has important implications for the diffusion of global norms and standards. Our results also reveal a strong focus in the research literature on ‘containment’ policies and on the role of state actors in developing these policies.
... 9 Carrier sanctions mean that refugees are stopped outside of Australian territorybefore they board the planeand that the process of border control is carried out by a private company. 10 This privatization of border control adds an additional complication for those seeking protection. There are legal implications when private commercial companies rather than a government official decide if a person has the right to cross the border. ...
States have long denied basic rights to non-citizens within their borders, and international law imposes only limited duties on states with respect to those fleeing persecution. But even the limited rights previously enjoyed by non-citizens are eroding in the face of rising nationalism, populism, xenophobia, and racism. Beyond Borders explores what obligations we owe to those outside our political community. Drawing on contributions from a broad variety of disciplines – from literature to political science to philosophy – the volume considers the failures of law and politics to guarantee rights for the most vulnerable and attempts to imagine new forms of belonging grounded in ideas of solidarity, empathy, and responsibility in order to identify a more robust basis for the protection of non-citizens at home and abroad. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
... This deep secrecy over external immigration activities perhaps explains why there is virtually no research on liaison officers' on-the-ground operations. Although liaison networks are namechecked from policy documents (Mau et al 2012;Scholten 2015;FitzGerald 2019), no studies examine: the activities and efficacy of personnel abroad; how liaison efforts are implemented in specific 'sending/transit' states; and factors that shape variations in activities across foreign states. Original data is collated from 20 interviews with Home Office officials, Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, and research on primary and secondary official documents. ...
Extraterritorial migration management perspectives on how states try to enforce immigration controls beyond their juridical borders are strongly influenced by ‘remote control’ metaphors. This is conceptually limited and outdated. Most research fails to sufficiently acknowledge agency by a destination state's officials acting abroad, foreign states and their officials, when evaluating extraterritorial measures and ‘outcomes’. We study UK liaison officers abroad, specifically, how they see their efforts to implement extraterritorial immigration control through interactions with foreign state officials. Our approach links inter-state relations to the social world of on-the-ground ‘street-level’ interactions between officers abroad and their foreign counterparts. The empirical analysis draws from original interviews and official sources. We compare factors accounting for the UK's activities and perceived ‘outcomes’ across USA, France, Thailand, Egypt and Ghana. Findings show the UK's extraterritorial migration management results from a very long chain of decisions and actions, by foreign and UK state actors, operating at different institutional-levels, with uncontrollable local circumstances abroad. Realising extraterritorial goals depends strongly on liaison officers’ agency, ‘soft power’ over foreign officials and foreign officials’ willingness to cooperate. Meanwhile liaison officers’ ‘feedbacks’ importantly influence Home Office decision-making. Against the simplistic one-way causality of ‘remote control’, this is ‘street-level’ agency beyond ‘remote control’.
... Wanneer zij deze rol echter niet oppakken, dan zouden hier consequenties aan moeten worden verbonden. Hierbij zou aansluiting kunnen worden gezocht bij de manier waarop tegen de transportsector in het Verenigd Koninkrijk wordt opgetreden indien vrachtwagenchauffeurs of vervoersmaatschappijen er niet alles aan hebben gedaan om zogenaamde 'inklimmers' te voorkomen of te signaleren (Scholten, 2015). 68 In de context van drugscriminaliteit valt te denken aan locaties of bedrijven die vanwege frequente incidenten te classificeren zijn als hoog risico. ...
Public-private partnerships in tackling drug crime in the port of Rotterdam
This article focuses on the challenges associated with public-private partnerships in tackling drug crime in the port of Rotterdam. The authors identified the actors involved in the fight against drug crime and, more generally, security in the port. The authors show how these various actors view the subject of drug crime (so-called mentalities), what they set as objectives (finalities) and how they try to achieve these objectives. Subsequently the various aspects of the interactions between these actors are being analyzed. The article is empirically based on 76 interviews with public and private actors in the port of Rotterdam, that were conducted in the period from January 2018 to February 2019, and an analysis of literature, news items, government reports and other documents.
... Internationally, the 1944 Convention on International Civil Aviation and 2000 UN Anti-Smuggling Protocol required airlines to check passengers' travel documents. Sanctions regimes on airlines accelerated through the 1980s in Europe (Scholten 2015;FitzGerald 2019). ...
‘Remote control’ has been a radical innovation that projects many aspects of migration and border enforcement beyond a state’s territory. Scholars across multiple disciplines make distinctive and sometimes contradictory claims about the extent to which state control over space and geographic borders is of declining significance. Drawing on a study of remote control policies in the United States, Canada, the EU, and Australia since the 1930s, this paper argues that states push much of their migration control out from their territorial boundaries though a process of extra-territorialisation. However, these liberal states simultaneously ratchet up controls at a finely calibrated border line in a process of hyper-territorialisation. The goal of restricting migrants’ access to territorialised human and civil rights drives both of these manipulations of territoriality. A taxonomy of controls based on the metaphor of an ‘architecture of repulsion’ describes their logic and practice. Many of these practices involve states sharing the legitimate means of coercion over movement in a way that challenges a core assumption about modern states. The degree to which remote control deters unauthorised migration remains a critical research question, but there is more deterrence than found in standard measures of border enforcement efficacy.
... Jos henkilö tulee köyhästä maasta tai konfliktialueelta ja siten mahdollisesti hakee turvapaikkaa, sitä epätodennäköisempää viisumin saaminen Eurooppaan on. Liikenteenharjoittajille säädetty velvollisuus tarkistaa matkustajien maahantuloluvat sekä sanktiot "laittomien" maahantulijoiden kuljettamisesta Eurooppaan ovat muuttaneet myös kuljetusyhtiöt osaksi rajavalvontakoneistoa (Scholten 2015). ...
Artikkelissa tarkastelen liikkumisen hallinnan lähtökohtia, rajojen muuttunutta roolia sekä niiden erilaisia tilallisia ja ajallisia muotoja liikkumisen pidättämisessä eurooppalaisessa kontekstissa ennen kaikkea siitä näkökulmasta, minkälaisia vaikutuksia rajoilla on niitä ylittäville ihmisille. Siirtolaisten liikettä on tarkasteltava suhteessa rajoihin, sillä ilman rajoja ei olisi siirtolaisuutta tai maahanmuuttoa, vaan ainoastaan liikkuvia ihmisiä. Rajat ovat maahanmuuttopolitiikan keskeinen instituutio, koska ne muokkaavat liikkumisen olosuhteita ja erottelevat rajoja ylittäviä ihmisiä kansalaisuuden, maahantulon syyn tai riskianalyysien perusteella. Rajat seuraavat siirtolaisia Euroopan oikeudelliseen tilaan, sillä heidän asemaansa määrittää karkotuksen mahdollisuus niin kauan, kunnes he saavat pysyväisluonteisen oleskeluluvan. Euroopan rajat eivät käy yksiin territoriaalisten rajojen kanssa, vaan niiden toiminta liikkumisen hallinnan välineenä niin Euroopan sisä- kuin ulkopuolella on mahdollista tavoittaa vain suhteessa siirtolaisten liikkeeseen.
... For both voluntary and forced migrants from the Global South, tourist visas represent an important migration deterrent or "cliff at the border" (Pritchett 2009). Preferred destination countries in the Global North not only enforce compliance with visa requirements at their national borders but externalize their immigration policies through carrier sanctions and foreign policy in origin countries (Geddes 2005;Scholten 2015). As a result, many migrants and refugees from the Global South choose the path of undocumented migration, which often means taking perilous routes (Czaika and Hobolth 2016), such as reaching Europe via the Mediterranean Sea or traveling across the Americas to enter the United States and 13 We also ran the model in Equation 2 on the net entry data and found similar results to our other findings (see Supplemental Appendix Table A2). ...
Through the implementation of universal visa freedom from 2008 to 2010, Ecuador became one of the most accessible countries in the world. This article employs mixed methods to study the impact of the de facto opening of Ecuador’s borders on intercontinental south-south migration. First, we use a difference-in-difference design to show that Ecuador’s policy of universal visa freedom led to a significant increase of immigration from previously restricted nationalities in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Complementary descriptive statistics and qualitative findings confirm the decisive impact visa freedom had on intercontinental south-south migration and suggest three main motives: taking advantage of Ecuador’s open doors as an exit option from origin countries, settlement in Ecuador based on relatively improved opportunities, and transmigration to third countries. Our findings imply that travel visa policies of southern countries significantly impact which new south-south flows emerge.
... As part of the Schengen aquis, in 1993 new sanctions were introduced to punish private carriers responsible for transporting undocumented third country nationals to Europe. Here, the responsibility to control individual authorizations to travel and enter Europe was extended to private carriers, further restricting the number of available options to enter Europe legally (Scholten 2015). The combination of these and other externalized policies aimed at establishing a sort of buffer zone surrounding Europe to keep unwanted individuals away (Browing and Joenniemi 2008). ...
Around the world, externalised migration controls continue to proliferate, leading to host of human rights harms for migrants. Migrants (and citizens) are being contained in states of origin and transit and denied their fundamental right to leave. However, externalisation is typically understood as preventing migrants entering state territory and accessing asylum, which has shaped litigation efforts and the rights and obligations that are invoked. Accordingly, this article seeks to demonstrate that the right to leave any country remains a largely overlooked avenue for challenging harmful externalisation practices and to highlight the important role it can play in remedying accountability gaps. It provides a broad overview of the right to leave in international law and its main contours as a starting point for considering the applicability of the right to externalisation measures. It examines the key jurisprudence concerning externalisation and the cases invoking the right to leave, including with respect to pushbacks, offshore processing, safe country arrangements, visa regimes, carrier sanctions and pullbacks, illustrating missed opportunities and positive developments. The article calls for a change in approach that recognises the great potential of the right to leave in tackling externalisation and containment, suggesting future opportunities for the right to be litigated and developed across different fora.
This article takes an actor‐centered and bottom‐up perspective to analyze how private companies shape public responses to migration in Europe. It builds on ethnographic research with top managers and civil servants involved in visa policy, asylum reception, and immigration detention. Drawing on organizational theories about decisions and change, I analyze empirical evidence to put forward processes of international migration governance that take account of private and public actors, the implementation stage of policy‐making, the organizational and informal dynamics underpinning decisions and change within and across borders of polity, therefore adopting a transnational lens. I show three interrelated aspects: Personal contacts, informal interactions, and informal exchange that promote private companies' business while affecting change in the delivery of public policies; private companies' involvement in decision‐making and their engagement in solution‐driven processes of change; the diffusion of organizational responses to migration across national contexts, which contribute to transnational change.
How does migration become "illegal"? Illegality cannot be observed. The work deconstructs the notion of "illegal migration" or "illegal" migrants as factual circumstances by elaborating and analysing the underlying processes, thus highlighting the constructedness as such and its specific character. The analysis concentrates on the level of EU law and ranges from migration control instruments and the phenomenon of externalisation to the involvement of third parties, the right of residence and entry bans. It is supplemented by a comprehensive examination of terminological and methodological issues.
How does migration become "illegal"? Illegality cannot be observed. The work deconstructs the notion of "illegal migration" or "illegal" migrants as factual circumstances by elaborating and analysing the underlying processes, thus highlighting the constructedness as such and its specific character. The analysis concentrates on the level of EU law and ranges from migration control instruments and the phenomenon of externalisation to the involvement of third parties, the right of residence and entry bans. It is supplemented by a comprehensive examination of terminological and methodological issues.
Vehicles, their infrastructures, and the environments they traverse are fundamental to the movement of migrants and states' attempts to govern them. This volume's contributors use the concept of viapolitics to name and foreground this contested entanglement and examine the politics of migration and bordering across a range of sites. They show how these elements constitute a key site of knowledge and struggle in migratory processes and offer a privileged vantage point from which to interrogate practices of mobility and systems of control in their deeper histories and wider geographic connections. This transdisciplinary group of scholars explores a set of empirically rich and diverse cases: from the Spanish and European authorities' attempts to control migrants' entire trajectories to infrastructures of escort of Indonesian labor migrants; from deportation train cars in the 1920s United States to contemporary stowaways at sea; from illegalized migrants walking across treacherous Alpine mountain passes to aerial geographies of deportation. Throughout, Viapolitics interrogates anew the phenomenon called “migration,” questioning how different forms of contentious mobility are experienced, policed, and contested.
Contributors. Ethan Blue, Maribel Casas-Cortes, Julie Y. Chu, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Glenda Garelli, Charles Heller, Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Clara Lecadet, Johan Lindquist, Renisa Mawani, Lorenzo Pezzani, Ranabir Samaddar, Amaha Senu, Martina Tazzioli, William Walters
Widespread belief in economic liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, combined with the development of safer, faster, and cheaper transportation, paved the way for huge migration to occur. Between 1850 and 1914, 55 million people departed Europe, with the vast majority heading to the Americas during what Hatton and Williamson term “the age of mass migration”. According to McKeown, something similar in scale and duration took place at approximately the same time – albeit enduring for slightly longer – involving Indians and southern Chinese moving to Southeast Asia and people from north-eastern Asia and Russia to North Asia. However, “the booming of the guns of August 1914 brought to a sudden close the era during which foreigners were relatively free to traverse borders”, according to John Torpey. States in Europe and North America, in particular, reintroduced passport controls with vigour during World War I and instead of lifting these bellicose measures at the end of the conflict, they generally reinforced them. The United States led the way in introducing such restrictions. Following on from the imposition of the 1917 Literacy Act came the 1921 and 1924 US Immigration Acts, which limited arrivals by introducing quotas for countries. The development in much of Europe of the modern welfare state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century simultaneously gave rise to more restrictive immigration policies in Europe, thereby leading to an even greater distinction between citizens and non-citizens.
While European politicians and policy makers have attempted to limit migration in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, international air traffic on European airports has almost doubled between 2002 and 2017. This contribution argues that, despite this significant increase of international mobility, clear borders separate the mobile from the immobile. Among the most significant instruments to limit access to the international air traffic market is the pre-boarding check, executed by (private) airline companies, which have effectively become an extension of state sovereignty. Moreover, visa criteria play a vital role in providing access to international air traffic. In practice, the ‘liberalization’ of air traffic tends to separate the mobile from the immobile on wealth-based and racial criteria, defended in reference to a theoretically free (but in practice strongly regulated) market.Image: Eric Fischl: A Visit To / A Visit From / Te Island (1983). © 2020.Digital image Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala
This paper argues that cultural and political strategies that appeal to citizenship and national identity can be used to regulate flows across borders. In this process, citizen bodies may be enrolled as key agents. Drawing on the National Friday Wear programme – a Ghanaian government initiative intended to encourage white-collar workers to dress their bodies in domestically produced textiles on Fridays to reduce the consumption, and thereby also the inflow, of foreign textiles – the paper illustrates that citizen bodies are both spaces upon which borders are inscribed and geopolitical actors that perform borders on behalf of the nation-state.
The initial purpose and implementation of carrier obligations to fight against irregular migration has transformed to fight against terrorism as part of the US counter-terrorism policy after September 11th, 2001. Although EU was not as enthusiastic as the US to collect the data about passengers in the beginning, some terrorist incidents in Europe have facilitated the work of the US that wanted to intervene with EU, and foreign terrorist fighters who want to join the ISIS terrorist organization have also led to some international decisions regarding immigration control and restrictions on travel. So far, there have been three EU Directives for carrier obligations, and three agreements have been made to share the PNR data with the US authorities. Stemming from the EU legislation and bilateral agreements, controversies on the protection of human rights and the data obtained from airline carriers remain to be tackled.
In this article, I build on criminological accounts of immigration detention by examining British short-term holding facilities located on French territory in the ports of Calais and Dunkerque and the policies and treaties that govern them. For a number of reasons, including barriers to research access, their legal complexity, and their modest size and nature, these institutions have received little empirical or theoretical scrutiny. Yet, as I shall demonstrate through an analysis of a range of published material from Parliamentary debates, government and non-governmental agencies, the media and the Internet, as well as observations of the sites themselves and figures about them, these banal, bureaucratic sites of temporary custody play an important role in upholding the more familiar border spectacle of the region.
This article examines the political economy of charging regimes within immigration control in the UK, focusing its attention on UKVI fees and charges, carrier sanctions, charges related to accessing services and civil penalties administered though immigration enforcement. Drawing on data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this paper examines the functions and prevalence of charging regimes, arguing that they contribute to an economy of financial power which has significant implications for understandings of criminalisation and immigration enforcement.
Au tournant des années 2000, à la frontière franco-britannique, le gouvernement anglais impose, par pression économique, un rôle de garde-frontière aux acteurs du transport transmanche. À l’appui d’une enquête de terrain menée entre 2011 et 2017 à Calais, cet article interroge les formes de cette délégation de la surveillance à des acteurs privés, ainsi que les logiques qui président à l’application discrétionnaire des contrôles par les employés de ces entreprises. Le pouvoir d’État est ainsi exploré depuis un point de vue singulier, celui de sa mise en oeuvre, ce qui permet d’appréhender à différentes échelles les enjeux de redéploiement de l’État en matière de contrôles migratoires et de définition des frontières symboliques de la nation.
Over the last thirty-five years, Western liberal democracies have exerted more control over their borders through an array of innovative migration-control practices. Scholars have taken stock of these efforts and referred to them collectively as “deterrence” measures, ignoring the fact that deterrence is an established concept with a focused definition and meaning. We argue that in the context of migration governance, the concept of deterrence has been stretched beyond meaningful parameters. In order to restore conceptual clarity and develop a more useful framework, we build on the fourth wave of deterrence literature and apply its insights to these new migration-control practices. We construct a theoretically informed typology that differentiates between deterrence and defense policies. Deterrence aims to change the motivations of migrants, whereas defense policies change migrants’ capabilities. We also differentiate between the timing and location of the interventions. We elaborate on each category of policy with examples drawn from various geographic regions and propose a framework for expanding this analysis through a systematic exploration of global practices. We conclude with a discussion of the implications stemming from these insights with respect to normative and practical debates in this research area.
Between 2014 and 2018, several NGOs ran Search and Rescue (SAR) operations in the Mediterranean. Cooperating effectively with European naval assets, NGOs saved more than 110,000 asylum seekers and migrants from drowning at sea. Since 2017, however, European authorities grew increasingly wary of non-governmental SAR operations. As anti-immigration forces gained ground in European politics, the political imperative of stemming irregular entries into the EU led European governments to criminalise not only human smuggling, but also humanitarian activities. The criminalization of NGOs rescuing migrants undermined civil-military cooperation and dismantled an effective operation which had a critical role in reducing mortality at sea.
In 2016, the UN's General Assembly called for the negotiation of a Global Compact on Safe, Orderly, and Regulation Migration to be adopted in 2018. The consultations began at the start of 2017 and the negotiations began six months later. Yet, it is uncertain what a Global Compact on Migration should include and what it should look like. What should be the key objectives of a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration? In this Article I examine the issue which the UN seeks to address through an analysis of the three problems: Unsafe migration, disorderly migration, and irregular migration.
In the past 25 years, European migration policy has been externalized, resulting in a bifurcation of human movement. This has become clearly visible in the context of Syrian refugees. In two judgments, the EU Court of Justice was confronted with cases challenging the exclusion of Syrian refugees from Europe. This article seeks to analyse these judgments in the context of the broader developments in European migration law and policy. The core analysis developed here is that the bifurcation of human movement is reflected in a bifurcation of law. Excluded people are to be excluded not merely from European territory, but also from European law. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
This article considers the key data protection challenges facing humanitarian organizations providing assistance to refugees, internally displaced persons and migrants. These challenges are particularly significant for several reasons: because data protection has come relatively late to the humanitarian sector; because humanitarian organizations are under pressure to innovate rapidly; because the global communications architecture on which many of these innovations depend is inherently vulnerable to State surveillance; and because States are deploying increasingly sophisticated and coercive means to prevent irregular forms of migration and/or subjecting humanitarian organizations to surveillance and disruption. The first part of the article outlines the fundamental rights challenges presented by contemporary data-driven migration control paradigms. The second outlines concerns about “data-driven humanitarianism” and “mass surveillance” to show how humanitarian organizations risk inadvertently exacerbating these problems. The third assesses specific data protection challenges that humanitarian organizations face and the policies and practices they have developed in response. The article concludes with some brief observations on the technical and political dynamics shaping their efforts to comply with their legal and ethical obligations, and calls for the sector to work together to extend data protection norms and outlaw cyber-attacks by State actors.
This article investigates the making and contestation of mobile borders around the Channel Tunnel, the fixed link connecting Britain and the European continent. It suggests that the bordering of the infrastructural and vehicular spaces is both an object of inquiry in its own right and a productive lens for reflecting on questions related to European Union (EU) territory, the heterogeneous nature of borders as well as the interplay between regimes of control and resistance. The article starts by reviewing the legal and institutional frameworks in which the Channel Tunnel area is governed and envisioned as an interstate and European/Schengen borderzone. It then examines the uncoordinated efforts of national, private and European authorities in managing the episodic migration controversies around this area, which bring together the interconnected rationales of security, economy and humanitarianism and expose the dissonance between and within them. Finally, the article considers how the acts of turbulent mobilities interact with this contingent assemblage of mobility governance and realise the radical potential of territorial borders.
The article argues that everyday bordering has become a major technology of control of both social diversity and discourses on diversity, in a way that threatens the convivial co-existence of pluralist societies, especially in metropolitan cities, as well as reconstructs everyday citizenship. The article begins with an outline of a theoretical and methodological framework, which explores bordering, the politics of belonging and a situated intersectional perspective for the study of the everyday. It then analyses the shift in focus of recent UK immigration legislation from the external, territorial border to the internal border, incorporating technologies of everyday bordering in which ordinary citizens are demanded to become either border-guards and/or suspected illegitimate border crossers. We illustrate our argument in the area of employment examining the impact of the requirements of the immigration legislation from the situated gazes of professional border officers, employers and employees in their bordering encounters.
Until recently research on controlling irregular migration flows has been heavily biased toward what can be defined as an excessive state determinism that obviates the role of non-state institutions and organizations in this sphere of action. Although this state determinism (state-centric approach) has been academically contested by research that has focused on reactive actions and resistance by immigrants to migration control (migrant-centric approach), the state-centric approach has obviated the role that other non-state actors play in the sphere of migration control. The objective of this paper is to analyze and define the ways that have been adopted to control irregular immigration to Spain over the past decade by employing an approach that transcends and complements the state-centric/migrant-centric approaches by incorporating non-state actors to the analysis (a polycentric approach). The analysis of the role of non-state organizations in controlling irregular immigration in Spain will be carried out with a focus on what has come to be refered to as “Migration Industry”, a concept that has gained a great deal of attention in migration studies as an analytical perspective that incorporates intermediate actors. Focusing on the analysis of the Spanish case, and on the so called "Control Industry and Rescue Industry", the paper will explore the role of private companies, NGO´s and other non-state actors as agents which facilitate and constrain irregular migration flows to Spain and influence the shaping of border and internal control policies and flows.
A key element in the immigration enforcement strategy adopted by the European Union in recent years has been the focus on preventing migrants from reaching the territory of the European Union in the first place, with the aim of shielding the European Union and Member States from assuming legal obligations towards migrants.
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