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Private actors play an increasing role in mediating the relationship between States and noncitizens and even in creating or perpetuating exclusions associated with noncitizenship. This paper offers a way to analyse the forms of engagement of the for-profit private sector in migration control and asks what it means for how noncitizenship is constructed. It presents the private sector as acting like a buffer, altering whether and how individuals may engage with a State constructing what noncitizenship means within a State’s territory, and removing so-constructed individuals from a relationship with that State. It shows how this may occur directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly. The paper addresses two main concerns: the impact on the State-noncitizen relationship and whether there are some areas of the relationship between the State and the noncitizen that should not be so-delegated. It argues that privatised migration control raises problems for standard justifications of migration control and noncitizenship construction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Map-making has played a crucial role in the politics of bordering and ordering. Irregular migrants challenge these politics of confinement on a regular basis; despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, their stories are hidden in state-centric discourses. Through a counter-mapping approach, this paper focuses on our understanding of how irregular migrants experience their journey. Specifically, an analysis of cognitive maps created by Central American irregular migrants in transit through Mexico on their journey to the US is presented. The strength of this approach is that it highlights the scenarios and practices veiled by the macronarratives of the securitisation of migration. At the same time, it underscores the fact that for irregular transmigrants border control is widespread through their entire journey, thus challenging the border’s notion of fixity. This paper aims to contribute to methodologies used in the study of mobilities and to the broader understanding of how bordering processes are lived and defied by migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a component of illicit globalization, smuggling has loomed large in international political economy in recent years. The question of sovereignty is at the forefront of the discussion because smugglers make efforts to evade state regulations and thus jeopardize sovereign power. This paper examines the operation of commodity smuggling between China and Myanmar and discusses major factors that facilitate this business. Another objective is to explore antismuggling initiatives launched by the Chinese state to exercise its sovereignty over cross-border commodity flows. The study case is the Ruili (China)-Muse (Myanmar) border crossing, where smuggling has been an essential component of cross-border networks for decades. Increased smuggling does not infer the Chinese state as weak or failing, but reveals the illicit side of globalization that operates in parallel with trade liberalization and economic integration. Nevertheless, border control is not in vain, but draws on antismuggling campaigns to push informal economies to become formalized, and safeguards national sovereignty at the border. This article presents new material on the complexity of trade governance in one of Asia's most isolated borderlands, and contributes to theoretical debates on the articulation of effective sovereignty in relation to illicit globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sanctions placed upon airlines and other operators transporting persons without the required paperwork are called 'carrier sanctions'. They constitute a key example of how border control mechanisms are currently being outsourced, privatized, delegated, and moved from the border itself to new physical locations. These practices can lead to a phenomenon referred to in this paper as 'hidden coercion'. This paper argues that, while hidden coercion is commonplace in the reality of migration policy in most states, it is so far neglected in theoretical discussions of state coercion. Moreover, the discussion of carrier sanctions demonstrates that this neglect is problematic, since hidden coercion is not justifiable even within a framework that legitimizes state border coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much of current debate on European border control focuses on the reinforcements of Europe's Southern and South-eastern borders, the Baltic States, traditionally countries of emigration to Western Europe, are experiencing their own challenges in adapting their border regime to handle novel transit migration. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in the Lithuanian and Latvian State Border Guard Services, tasked with securing the Europe Union's Eastern external borders and curtailing migrants' onward movement to Western Europe, this paper sheds light on the meanings and practices of 'borderwork' in an underexplored region. The article asks: How is the Baltic border regime performed by State Border Guards, what meanings do they attribute to these borders, and what can this tell us about the ever-changing nature of the European border regime? For border guards, the complex landscape of de – and reterritorialised Schengen borders primarily serve as tools for manifesting their belonging to 'Europe' and their geopolitical distancing from Russia. Only recently did their borderwork become politicised in the context of migration. The Baltic case sheds light on the diverse manifestations and meanings of borders, which go beyond the mobile populations they are declared to be set up to control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will address the multiple forms and layers of porosity that give borderlands, such as the Bengal borderland, their distinctive nature as zones of contestation. Cross-border interactions continue to be an integral feature of everyday life in the Bengal borderland despite increasing militarisation and regulation by the Indian government in the last decade. Criminalization of local cross-border flows has driven them underground - while organized cross-border crimes (smuggling and trafficking) enjoy considerable attention, the breadth and depth of informal cross-border interactions in the quotidian lives of borderlanders remain understudied. What is the significance of such daily cross-border transactions? How do they feed into the local perceptions of the state policies of border control? How do they relate to larger organized flows of smuggling and trafficking? Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in the border district of North 24 Parganas in West Bengal, India, this paper critically examines the rationales and practices of such informal 'illegal' cross-border interactions and problematizes the territorial logic of the postcolonial nation-state as it is contested in the realities of the borderland. Such a focus also enables a construction of the social history of those people in whose worlds an international border appeared in the monsoon of 1947, thus relating the present configurations of porosity to the regional unity that existed in the pre-Partition past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arrival of migrants on Italian coasts following the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 has led to a multiplication of housing struggles. These struggles are widespread across the country and focus on the occupation of abandoned buildings and their transformation into collective housing spaces to provide an alternative to the formal reception system. This article will focus on the housing struggles in Rome, as the place with the highest number of occupations and the longest tradition of campaigns for the right to housing of migrants in the country. These struggles are the outcome of the encounter of recently arrived migrants with local solidarity movements and build on existing occupation movements and housing struggles. The article explores how the mobilizations over the right to housing intersect with issues such as the social appropriation of urban commons, the regeneration from below of unused areas, freedom of movement, and the contestation of Italian government policies on the relocation of migrants and refugees. The paper argues that housing struggles not only appropriate and regenerate urban commons, but also challenge the reception governance of migration and the policies of border control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007, the German government introduced the requirement of a language certificate for citizens of ‘third countries’ who want to join their spouses in the Federal Republic. Thereby, Germany followed the example of the Netherlands, Austria, the UK and France. German policy-makers have justified this language certificate as a measure to facilitate integration before entering the country. Drawing on the Moroccan case, this paper challenges this dominant integration argument and shows the actual consequences of this new instrument of border control. This paper argues that the language certificate leads above all to the hierarchisation of marriage migrants and even to the exclusion of certain candidates, depending on their educational background and financial means. The history of marriage migration from Morocco to Germany shows that family migration, especially of spouses, has a long tradition and has always been the special target of restrictions and control. However, the required language certificate leads to a new level of control. While marriage migration is traditionally based on a private matter, namely the decision to marry someone and to share life together, the utilitarian logic of a neoliberal migration management has found its way into the control of this form of migration. This is also visible in the externalisation of the border regime in the sense of an out-sourcing of migration management, whereby institutions such as language schools have become an integrated part of Germany's border control system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores inhuman/human constructions that feature in state responses to refugees. We move beyond straightforward normative claims that dehumanizing or demonizing refugees is unfair, unjust or bad to ask: what kind of inhuman monsters are refugees characterized as when they are 'demonised'; and, what are the consequences of such a characterization? Our argument is that reading the demonised refugee as the contemporary zombie monster and inversely, reading the resurgence of the zombie monster through the prism of the so-called refugee and migrant crisis, reveals the precise anxieties brought about by refugees and asylum seekers. In particular, we claim that both figures represent the transgression of borders, as well as the failure of containment, borders and border walls as a response to crisis. We also argue that the contemporary zombie, as a race-less catchall monster figure, mirrors the erasure of colonial histories, race and race relations in the casting of refugees as dehistoricized, invading and disorderly bodies. We analyse these themes through the 2013 blockbuster film World War Z (dir. Marc Foster). In the film, the United Nations, US Navy, World Health Organisation, and Gerry Lane (a former UN employee) combine to fight a global zombie war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Practices of border control increasingly rely on digital biometrics in order to sort and filter cross-border movements. But while its effects are well examined in migration and border studies, less is known about the intricate ways in which biometric bordering is politically negotiated and socio-technically put into practice. Therefore, in this paper, I trace the contested emergence of one particular scheme of biometric border control currently in the making: the EU’s Smart Borders Package. Proposed by the European Commission in 2013, it aims at digitally registering all third-country nationals’ entries to and exits from the Schengen area, while simultaneously accelerating the border crossing of certain travellers. I argue that, unlike other forms of biometric bordering, the Smart Borders Package problematises border control primarily on the level of its temporalities and constitutes the speed of border crossings, the timing of control as well as third-country nationals’ duration of stay as distinct objects of governing. Meanwhile, the project’s political negotiations have sparked techno-political controversies that repeatedly brought it to the brink of failure. Yet, these controversies have significantly enhanced the intelligibility and practicability of biometric bordering, contributing to the emergence of what I call the self-service border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visa officers are one of the gatekeepers of a state's borders. Research on discretion exercised by immigration officials tends to focus on interdiction or the regulation of ports of entry. Though all border control agents are delegated with discretion, decisions about visa issuance are arguably more tightly bound by the rule of law. Based on in-depth interviews with overseas visa officers who work for Citizenship and Immigration Canada, this paper examines the social constitution of discretion in Family Class spousal and sponsorship cases. Debates in Canada suggest that the personal attitudes of visa officers are significant factors in shaping their exercise of discretion. Moreover, discretion is seen as a reflection of racism of individual visa officers. This paper challenges this view by suggesting that broader meso- and macro-level forces play a prominent role in discretionary decision-making. It examines how the demands of efficient client processing, client behaviour, migration contexts and legal constraints in Canada and overseas shape the process of decision-making. Discretionary decisions to dig deeper into some applications and not others do put applicants from some countries or regions at a disadvantage, but it is a technical administrative logic, and not ‘race’ that is the source of discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars have highlighted the importance of Frontex risk analysis in the institutionalisation of EU-level border control without, however, sufficiently substantiating alleged harmonisation dynamics. This paper interrogates how and why EU-level actors seek to exploit risk analysis to harmonise European border control. An interpretive policy analysis of three contemporary applications of Frontex risk analysis – the Eurosur impact level assessment, the Schengen evaluation and monitoring mechanism and resource allocation in the Internal Security Fund – indicates that Frontex and the Commission found their harmonisation hopes on the rationalisation promises of risk-based governance – efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency gains and de-politicisation effects. This multi-functional rationalisation of Community decision-making is meant to justify increased EU-level coordination and interventions without challenging member state competencies, thereby enabling soft harmonisation processes in the weakly integrated and much contested domain. Rather than merely adhering to securitisation goals, risk analysis represents a magic bullet in the EU’s own institutional risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US and India have strengthened their borders against illegal immigration. However, the two states have striking differences with respect to their border control methods. The US strengthened its Mexican border through fences and militarization. In sharp contrast, even though India fenced some parts of its border, it has relied on shooting practices which have resulted in the deaths of thousands of Bangladeshi immigrants. Drawing upon Narrative Policy Analysis (NPA), this paper identifies patterns in justification strategies regarding border control against illegal immigration in the US and in India. The findings indicate that in the US, border control was justified by the restoration of law at the border. To the contrary, in India, border control was associated with arbitrariness. The majority of Indian policymakers encourage arbitrary border practices by adopting the view that ‘any method’ is legitimate to curb illegal immigration from Bangladesh. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As well as a site of politics and public health action, the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa has been a focus of media representations. This paper examines print media narratives around border control in relation to Ebola in the UK, the USA and Australia from the start of the epidemic to May 2015. It shows that Ebola became mobilised as a frame through which domestic politics could be discussed. The disease was transformed from a problem for West Africa to a problem for the West. The context of West Africa and affected populations was homogenised and hidden. The focus of reporting centred upon domestic political actions and more local sources of threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The entanglement of border control technologies and immigration policies and practices with discourses of race, national identity and belonging has long been a focus of scholarly interest. In this paper we discuss the Human Provenance Pilot Project (HPPP), the aim of which was to evaluate the utility of genetic and isotope testing to corroborate asylum seekers' accounts of their nationality. We subject the HPPP to a detailed socio-technical analysis, highlighting how technologies, practices and modes of thought travelled from the policing context to the asylum context, illuminating the unspoken prejudices that made that transfer possible, and reflecting on implications of the HPPP for academic research, policy advice and the asylum system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at an earlier episode in the history of the UK border security apparatus by examining how the immigration control system was used in the 1970s and 1980s to detect potential terrorists from the Middle East and North Africa. Using recently opened archival records, it shows that the UK government introduced a strict system of visa checks, interviews, and other measures to nearly all Middle Eastern and North African visitors to the UK to prevent the entry of suspected terrorist personnel. By using these highly arbitrary measures, it became the modus operandi of the UK authorities to treat all Middle Eastern and North Africans as potential terrorists until convinced otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matters of border control in twenty-first-century Japan interact with current social issues involving demography, the labour market and economic relationships with other countries in the region. Japan faces a rapidly ageing population, the highest life expectancy in the world, a birth rate well below replacement level and a shrinking population. Smaller families find it difficult to provide primary care for the sick, the elderly and those with disabilities, and the welfare system is stretched to the limit. At the same time, Japanese people are increasingly unwilling to undertake work regarded as 'manual labour' or 'unskilled labour'. Thus, the management of border control is related to the labour market and the management of welfare. This is a range of policies which I would like to refer to as involving the management of bodies. This paper thus focuses on 'the management of borders' and the 'management of bodies' in contemporary Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the strategy for controlling ‘unwanted’ immigration that has been implemented by the US government since 1993, and suggests explanations for the failure of that strategy to achieve its stated objectives thus far. Available evidence suggests that a strategy of immigration control that overwhelmingly emphasises border enforcement and short-changes interior (especially workplace) enforcement has caused illegal entries to be redistributed along the south-west border. The evidence also suggests that the financial cost of illegal entry has more than quadrupled; that undocumented migrants are staying longer in the United States; that migrant deaths resulting from clandestine border crossings have risen sharply; and that there has been a surge in anti-immigrant vigilante activity. Consequences predicted by advocates of the concentrated border enforcement strategy have not yet materialised: there is no evidence that unauthorised migration is being deterred at the point of origin; that would-be illegal entrants are being discouraged at the border after multiple apprehensions by the Border Patrol and returning home; that their employment prospects in the US have been curtailed; or that the resident population of undocumented immigrants is shrinking. It is argued that a severely constrained employer-sanctions enforcement effort that has left demand for unauthorised immigrant labour intact is the fundamental reason why steadily escalating spending on border enforcement during the last ten years has had such a weak deterrent effect. Reasons for the persistence of a failed immigration control policy are discussed, and alternatives to the current policy are evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many refugee-receiving countries have restricted their asylum policies and stepped up their border control policies to prevent asylum seekers from reaching their territories. At the same time, the resettlement of refugees has gained popularity. Many states have introduced resettlement schemes or have increased the number of refugees they resettle. Why do states voluntarily admit refugees by expanding resettlement? This article develops a comprehensive theoretical account of countries' resettlement choices and identifies the determinants of their openness to refugee resettlement through an empirical analysis of 33 OECD countries between 1980 and 2019. We find that the supply-side factor of wealth best predicts whether a country engages in refugee resettlement. The number of effective resettlement admissions tends to fluctuate with the demand-side factor of humanitarian need. Nevertheless, the expansion of resettlement policies has not resulted in a subsequent expansion of humanitarian protection. Instead, states combine resettlement policies with restrictive border control policies which allows them to preserve their humanitarian credentials while curtailing refugees' overall access to asylum. These findings provide important insights into the policy-making of refugee resettlement and the strategic considerations in the asylum governance of liberal democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in January 2017 there was a dramatic increase in the number of people crossing irregularly from the US to make a claim for refugee status in Canada. Officials declared a crisis and admonished those who, in the words of one official, were crossing 'in between the border.' It is important to pay close attention to these spaces in-between borders: those (un)intended and strategic openings left by the working out of nation-state policies (like the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement) and those paths that are opened through the transgressions of those borders by people on the move. Crisis is the necessary corollary of the 'politics of anticipatory governance' that scaffolds contemporary nation-statist border control policies and practices. Approaching the border as an archive means confronting the work that is done by such temporal and spatial manipulations, while placing contested border crossings at the centre of border formation. By examining a series of intersecting moments from the recent history of this border (1987–present), I seek to both 'inhabit' the crisis and understand what might remain once the crisis is declared over. I argue that migration management regimes produce the border crises they anticipate while simultaneously masking and revealing contested histories and geographies of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biometric technologies using digital representations of bodily characteristics to identify individuals have become an institutionalised method of registering and recognising persons, thereby establishing their right to cross borders. Based on situated ethnographic fieldwork among tech-developers, border police, forensics, IT hacktivists and migrants, this special issue illuminates how biometric technologies are put to use and experienced by the diverse social actors who imagine and promote, develop, employ, are subjected to and attempt to circumvent such identification. In this introduction biometric identification (or IDentification) is presented as a relatively new area of investigation that has been subjected to little ethnographic scrutiny. It is argued that, while biometric technologies are promoted as enabling objective and incontestable IDentification of individuals, they are in practice embedded in specific social contexts, fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty, and dependent on substantial human interpretation and social identification. They are therefore of considerable interest and concern to anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the construction of migration as a security threat in Europe has been thoroughly examined, how different groups of migrants become targets of security concerns has not received similar attention. In its fight against irregular immigration, the European Union uses visa liberalisation agreements with neighbouring states as an incentive for cooperation on migration control. At a first glance, this strategy appears somewhat contradictory, as visa liberalisation potentially increases the share of visa overstayers among irregular migrants. Through analysis of the annual "Risk Analysis" reports between 2015 and 2020 published by EU's border and migration management agency, FRONTEX, this article shows that visa overstay is routinely left out of the agency's security concerns of irregular migration, thus rendering risk assessments asymmetrically occupied with irregular migration by means of "illegal entry". Although visa overstayers are not conceptualised as threats to security in discourse on par with other categories of irregular migrants, we find that they are increasingly subjected to a rationale of surveillance and risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Undesirables' explores the various border control practices employed against migrant communities that have been branded as undesirable by the authorities, including exclusion, deportation, monitoring and detention. The contemporary approaches to undesirable migrant groups have deep historical connections. This special issue offers evidence that current policy and practices are products of a long-term historical recourse. This proposed issue explores how certain migrant groups (on the grounds of race, gender, ethnicity, political ideology, and perceived criminality) were identified as 'undesirable' by the authorities of the state and subjected to various border and policing practices. This often involved the exclusion of 'undesirable' migrants at the border or the deportation of individuals if found to be 'undesirable', but also included the surveillance, arrest and detention of undesirables from migrant groups by police and intelligence agencies once they had settled in the destination country.This special issue shows that border control practices extended far beyond the physical border and that as well as using border practices to reject or expel 'undesirable' migrants, the state highly monitored those 'undesirable' migrants who had been allowed to enter the country. This builds on Paddy Hillyard's (1993) theory of the 'suspect community', which described the heavy policing of the Irish community in Britain during the 1970s-80s. While some studies have looked at how some community groups have replaced others in the contemporary government's security agenda (Pantazis and Pemberton 2009), this special issue showcases that the 'undesirability' concept has historical origin that still influences current approaches to policies, hence it warrants a more comprehensive investigation and reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the 1920s and the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of Italians emigrated to Australia, with fewer restrictions placed upon them than other continental European migrants. However, Italian migrants, especially from southern Italy, were often seen as 'undesirable'. This was due to both their ethnicity and the view that Italians were attracted to extreme political ideologies, such as Fascism and communism. This combination led the Australian authorities to treat Italian migrants as a'suspect community', which meant prolonged surveillance of Italian communities, as well as efforts to prevent entry, deny citizenship to or deport certain undesirable individuals. The policing of Italians in Australia intensified in the Second World War, which resulted in many being interned, regardless of political affiliation. But at other times, the political persuasion of the Italian migrants did play apart in how they were viewed by the authorities, with communists being monitored more heavily in the 1920s and 1950s and fascists being the focus in the 1930s and 1940s. This article looks at the shifting undesirability to Italian political activists in Australia over four decades and how ethnicity alongside ideology informed their policing by the authorities across several periods of political upheaval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores why and how the British and Australian authorities monitored their British Cypriot communities and how this impacted upon their respective immigration policies in connection with British Cypriots. Both the British and Australian authorities monitored sections of the British Cypriot community for similar reasons, especially political, using similar techniques, yet adopted different immigration policies on more Cypriots arriving. While the historiography for this period claims that the British were moving towards restricting immigration from their Empire and Australia was opening its borders, the opposite is in fact the case for the British Cypriots. The British did not alter their policies or procedures very much on the immigration of Cypriots from the 1930s, and even opened their border to Cypriot informers during the EOKA period. On the other hand, the Australian authorities progressively placed restrictions on Cypriots until they suspended immigration in 1956. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that internal inclusion requires external exclusion features prominently in many theoretical accounts of modern statehood and citizenship. In a similar vein, it has been argued that internal freedom of movement in the European Union requires strict immigration control at its external borders. This article sheds light on the relationship between internal de-bordering and external re-bordering, making two main contributions. First, we theorise the idea of an integration-demarcation conditionality based on the European Union's symbolic legitimacy and functional needs. Second, we test the common belief that public support for free movement within Europe depends on a restrictive border regime for non-European immigration. For this purpose, we assess how the external shock of the 2015 refugee crisis shaped the bordering preferences of European citizens. We find that the crisis primarily increased citizens' support for external re-bordering, and did not substantially undermine their support for internal free movement. Thus, the large-scale arrival of refugees has not led to a general backlash against open borders and immigration but has, rather, increased public support for the European model of combining internal freedoms with external controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article stiches together a conceptual discussion on 'humanitarian infrastructure' with research amid Venezuelan migrants, asylum seekers, army personnel, governmental officers and envoys of humanitarian agencies responsible for implementing 'Operation Shelter' – described by the Brazilian government as a large humanitarian task force offering assistance to Venezuelans entering Brazil's province of Roraima. The article's goal is to explore the material and normative renderings of humanitarian infrastructure that enables migrants' desire to move, while also governing and making sense of Venezuelan mobility. We suggest that the bureaucratic split of Venezuelans into two temporally different migration figures – asylum seeker and humanitarian migrant – is illustrative of an ambivalence of enacting control and freedom. We explore how such ambivalence is manifested in attempts to discipline migrants' bodies and movements along built, technological and logistical humanitarian infrastructure, with consequences for engagements between border authorities and migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the fact that the implementation of migration policies fails to perfectly manage migration is well known, the actual dynamics of policy implementation have received little attention to date. A serious engagement with this phenomenon requires a move beyond policy texts and political intentions, and towards a ‘migration regime’ perspective that pays attention to the inherent contradictions, conflicts of interest and competing logics within migration control practices. This collection posits a multi-actor perspective that includes state agents, migrants and non-state actors alike and proposes three key factors that require a closer examination: competing institutional logics, discretionary practices and migrants’ agency. Based on original empirical research, the contributions of this collection ‘zoom in’ on specific asymmetrical negotiations over the right to enter or remain in Europe, and focus on the institutional logics and interplay between the different actors involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My article focuses on migrants, borders and border control in the ideological, political and cultural domains. It considers UK statist attitudes to border control through its representation in The Border Force National Museum, Liverpool; it observes borders disassembling and reassembling in Belgique (2017), a sequence of images by artist Joan Key; finally, it watches as dominant images of migrants are dismantled and reconfigured in the film On the Bride's Side, by Antonio Augugliaro, Gabriele Del Grande and Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry (2014). These examples illuminate different ways in which migration, borders and boundaries can be broached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effect of the EU border control agency, Frontex, in its use of information. The agency organises information and analyses what is deemed to be a ‘risk’ for EU external borders. According to Barnett and Finnemore [2004Rule for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics(Cornell University Press: New York)] such a task can be regarded as ‘a form of power’. Frontex has developed, under the supervision of the European Commission and member states, a particular process of categorising irregular migrants, in order to determine which member states’ external borders should be considered ‘high risk’. This article traces how Frontex has developed a risk analysis and how this has been used in the policy-making process. As this article demonstrates, the financial resources of the European External Borders Fund are distributed to member states based on Frontex's risk analysis. It also discusses that Frontex is now assessing the member states’ internal borders. These cases effectively show that its assessment affects the ability of a member state to get access to EU funding and defines whether a member state is legitimately able to reinstate the border checks at its internal border. Frontex's risk analysis is not a simple aggregation of data for operational border checks and surveillance activities, but that it should be seen as a particular form of knowledge with an important political effect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Immigration and border protection policies are driven by national interest. However, the national interest can be more broadly and more narrowly conceived, depending in part on the degree to which the future of the individual state is understood to be contingent on a shared global future and on the recognition that the short-term costs of international cooperation may bring long-term collective benefits. Whereas such global interdependence is recognised in international statecraft in the domains of aid, trade and climate change, such recognition does not extend to immigration. Australia's national policies towards human movement from the Global South tend to be driven in large part by exaggerated fears (of unregulated border crossings) or a narrowly instrumental approach to the economic benefits of human capital transfers (migrants filling skills gaps and providing flexibility in the labour market). A broader conception of migration would take into account the potential developmental benefits of human movement for source nations and for migrants themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muslims are now arguably the most widely debated and feared segment of the Australian community but they are also its most long-standing non-indigenous segment. In Australia we are able to draw on a long and primarily positive contact history between Muslim and non-Muslim Australians that makes nonsense of the paranoid nationalism with which the Howard government wanted to protect a way of life from 'recent invaders'. There are deep histories underlying some of the highly debated 'border control' phenomena such the Tampa refugees and 'Timorese poachers'. The way we understand our histories also shapes the way in which we can imagine our futures and the fantasy of a white Australian history does not stand up to historical investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In concomitance with the recent abolition of national border controls across the region and the creation of new common external frontiers around the continent's edges, an 'intensive trans-governmental' system of border governance has emerged in Europe. How was this event possible? What explains the establishment of a 'post-national' approach to manage Europe's external frontiers? In order to address this question, I propose a sociological analytical framework centred on the concept of 'culture of border control'. The emergence of a new approach to border control in Europe is the result of the evolution of a nationalist ('Westphalian') culture - or set of background assumptions and related practices shared by a border control policy community - into a regional one ('Schengen'). The new approach was pursued and eventually selected because the culture in which it was embedded demonstrated in practice to be more effective in addressing relevant problems than its main rival (what I call a 'Brussels culture of border control'). I illustrate this argument by critically re-examining the crucial phases that led to the emergence of Schengen, focusing on the parallel developments in the two main institutional forums where discussions over border control in Europe took place in this period (Schengen and the EC/EU). My contention is that a 'culturalist' analytical framework can not only offer a more nuanced and persuasive account of the evolution of border control in Europe than it is currently available in the literature, but also shed some light on possible future trends characterizing this policy field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New technologies under development, capable of inflicting pain on masses of people, could be used for border control against asylum seekers. Implementation might be rationalized by the threat of mass migration due to climate change, nuclear disaster or exaggerated fears of refugees created by governments. We focus on taser anti-personnel mines, suggesting both technological countermeasures and ways of making the use of such technology politically counterproductive. We also outline several other types of ‘non-lethal’ technology that could be used for border control and raise human rights concerns: high-powered microwaves, armed robots, wireless tasers, acoustic devices/vortex rings, ionizing and pulsed energy lasers, chemical calmatives, convulsants, bioregulators and malodurants. Whether all these possible border technologies will be implemented is a matter for speculation, but their serious human rights implications warrant advance scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines EU strategies concerning immigration within the framework of Eastern enlargement and argues that EU migration policies have, in fact, hindered efforts to combat clandestine migration. It contends that enlargement should not present a significant threat to the Union’s external borders but, instead, may actually create new opportunities to reduce human smuggling and human trafficking on the continent. Contrary to the rhetoric utilised by many West European leaders and citizens, the new EU member states are currently feeling migration pressures similar to those in the previous member states and their policy objectives actually mirror those found in Western Europe. They have become transit countries rather than sending countries. Because EU enlargement entails political and socio–economic development, it actually provides a more suitable strategy for the management of migration than simple border controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]