http://www.irinnews.org/report/101644/why-border-controls-are-now-a-global-game
Why border controls are now a global game
By Ruben Andersson
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Photo: Frontex
Frontex officers inspect discarded clothing at the Hungarian-Serbian border
LONDON, 17 June 2015 (IRIN) - Ahead of World Refugee Day,
anthropologist and author of “Illegality, Inc.”, Ruben Andersson of
the London School of Economics looks at how localised migration
control efforts have ignored the globalisation of irregular migration
routes.
The warning was restrained, as was to be expected from a European
border police chief, yet it was a warning nonetheless. Amid European
leaders’ scramble to launch a military operation targeting migrant
smugglers’ boats in the Mediterranean, the director of EU border
agency, Frontex, voiced some caution: “If there is a military
operation in the vicinity of Libya,” he said in early June, “this may
change the migration routes and make them move to the eastern route.”
One route closes; another opens up. Simple, really – yet rarely are
any migration control lessons drawn from this elemental fact.
In the “war on drugs”, it is often called the “balloon effect”:
squeeze the balloon in one place, and it expands somewhere else.
Something similar is happening with efforts to crack down on irregular
migration, with an important difference: when the balloon consists of
people, they get more desperate the harder you squeeze. So too do
border officials and politicians, as demonstrated by Italy’s growing
frustration with other EU leaders reluctant to help the country deal
with the influx at its southern shores.
The balloon effect puts the supposed success of some migration control
operations in a rather different light. For instance, desperate EU
politicians have looked to Spain and Australia as models of migration
control that have worked – yet these experiments have been successful
only in the narrowest sense. Spain’s much-celebrated closure of the
maritime route between the Canary Islands and West Africa around 2007
simply shuffled people around. The route itself had only emerged after
tough crackdowns in northern Morocco pushed routes south; and as Spain
and African states started collaborating on deportations and patrols
in the Atlantic, routes shifted again, now towards the Sahara. And
voilà – Spain’s problem became Italy’s, then Greece’s, and on it went.
As European leaders celebrate 30 years of the Schengen agreement on
free movement across the Union this week, they would rather have us
forget about this self-interested scramble to make irregular migration
someone else’s problem.
But the border balloon stretches well beyond Europe’s frontiers.
Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders has been much praised by
hardliners and Prime Minister Tony Abbott has called on Europe to
adopt similarly harsh measures and simply “stop the boats”. No matter
that Australia, like Spain, has depended on poor and powerless
neighbours for the success of its draconian offshore policy - a
solution simply not available in Europe’s relations with states in
North Africa, where there’s no Nauru in sight. And never mind the
cruelty and human rights abuses in detention, the pushbacks and even
the reported payments to smugglers. Even if taken as a success on its
own narrow numerical terms, we should recall that the nationalities
that were arriving in Australia now overlap with those arriving in
Europe. Some 3,500 Afghans arrived in Australia in 2012-13; after the
launch of Operation Sovereign Borders in September 2013, overall
arrival figures dropped dramatically. Meanwhile, the number of Afghans
arriving at Europe’s borders shot up from about 9,500 in 2013 to more
than 22,000 in 2014.
Photo: Australian Customs & Border Protection Service
This poster issued as part of Australias Operation Sovereign Borders
campaign has been published in 18 languages.
As the CEO of the Refugee Council of Australia told The Guardian in
April, “What Australia has done is just displace the issue away from
the shores of Australia, by promoting an attitude of deterrence and
harsh responses. They have, almost without doubt, made the situation
worse for people who have tried to find safety in Europe.”
Different destinations, similar story. Israel – also keen to extol its
border control model – completed a fence along its border with Egypt
in early 2013, and around the same time, draconian new detention
provisions were put in place. As IRIN reported at the time, until then
“about 1,000 asylum seekers, mainly from Eritrea and Sudan, were
reaching Israel every month.” Soon after, that figure was almost zero.
Meanwhile, border reinforcements in Saudi Arabia and growing hostility
towards foreigners in South Africa have made refugees and migrants
from the Horn of Africa recoil from those destinations too. During
this period, detections of Eritreans at the EU’s external borders shot
up, from 2,604 in 2012 to 34,586 in 2014, while the number of Somalis
arriving at Europe’s borders more than doubled between 2011 and 2014.
In short, irregular migration routes are globalising, as most recently
seen with the Rohingya boats pushed back and forth in southeast Asia’s
seas. As the callous response to the Rohingya’s plight showed, routes
have globalised in parallel with a punitive “border security” model
that generates ever larger risks for border-crossers without reducing
overall numbers. As this security model has been exported from its
western heartland, it has simply empowered and fed the security
forces, corrupt regimes, defence contractors and human smugglers
variously involved in the trade, from Mexico to Turkey to Thailand. A
“not in my backyard” approach has occasionally reaped short-term
rewards for national governments, yet internationally, this one-eyed
approach spells disaster.
We are still only beginning to understand the globalisation of
irregular migration, to be sure; and we also need much more evidence
of global displacement effects. If our leaders were serious about
addressing the migratory “crisis”, they would push for precisely such
evidence-gathering, and then apply the lessons. They could even try to
come up with a global architecture for human movement, now that
migration and refugee routes are every bit as globalised as our trade
and capital flows. Yet our leaders are doing none of this. Instead of
an evidence-based policy, we get political point-scoring. With more
and more funds poured into migration controls in Europe and elsewhere,
and record fatalities at borders, it is time for a rethink - and for a
truly global approach to mobility. Ahead of World Refugee Day on 20
June, no task could be more urgent.
ra/ks/am
Received on Thu Jun 18 2015 - 14:27:50 EDT