hello all,
hope you had a good weekend.
Here is Part 2 of Heidrun Friese's “Border Economies: Lampedusa and The
Nascent Migration Industry” (2012, updated 2015), full text (2012 version)
here:
http://www.shimajournal.org/issues/v6n2/h.%20Freise%20Border%20Economies%20v6n2%2066-84.pdf
*PART 2*
*Governing Undocumented Mobility and Economical Interests*
Issues of (undocumented) mobility have become a core part of political and
economical relations between the EU and its neighbours across the
Mediterranean. Current European political efforts promote twofold action in
containing movement and undocumented mobility: the shifting of borders
beyond borders and at the same time, their increasing control and
multiplication. Borders, as William Walters points out, “operate like
filters or gateways”, selecting “the good and the bad, the useful and the
dangerous, the licit and the illicit; (…) immobilising and removing the
risky elements so as to speed the circulation of the rest.”
Border management and technologies of *gouvernementalité* (Foucault) aim to
detect and contrast resourceful strategies of border-crossings (before they
even occur) and to fix mobile people. The generation of knowledge thus,
becomes a remunerative resource and product to place on the highly
competitive market. “In order to elaborate knowledge-based approaches to
migration, be this at policy level, strategic level, or through concrete
actions, *access to comprehensive and updated information* is a
prerequisite” as the International Centre for Migration Policy Development
states. Statistics, screening, mapping and visualisation have a long
tradition in techniques of surveillance, policing and *gouvernementalité*. Not
by chance the International Centre for Migration Policy Development hosts
an interactive map – its official name is *i-map* – entailing
visualisations of movement, routes, hubs and flows. Implementing partners
on irregular and mixed migration include Europol, Frontex, Interpol, UNHCR
and UNODC, Migration and Development: IFAD, IOM.
Cecilia Wee
Tutor, Sound Design
Royal College of Art
School of Communication
Kensington Gore, London
SW7 2EU
E: [log in to unmask]
T: +44 (0)20 7590 4313
www.rca.ac.uk
twitter.com/rcaevents <http://twitter.com/RCAevents>
facebook.com/rca.london <http://facebook.com/RCA.London>
*please assume I am offline on evenings and weekends*
On 11 December 2015 at 14:55, Cecilia Wee <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> hello listers,
>
> as part of this month's discussion, we wanted to introduce the work of
> practitioners who are working with notions of migration.
>
> Heidrun Friese has been conducting anthropological studies with people in
> Lampedusa for almost 10 years. As well as writing about these issues, she
> has been using photography to document migrant experiences and in 2013 she
> created an ibook of images of "Objects Left Behind" by migrants approaching
> Lampedusa:
> https://itunes.apple.com/de/book/objects-left-behind/id616733600?l=en&mt=11
>
> We have the pleasure of presenting excerpts from her essay “Border
> Economies: Lampedusa and The Nascent Migration Industry” (2012, updated
> 2015)
>
> There will be 5 installments - here's Part I.
> For those who are keen, the full text is here:
> http://www.shimajournal.org/issues/v6n2/h.%20Freise%20Border%20Economies%20v6n2%2066-84.pdf
>
> Happy reading -
> Cecilia
>
>
> Heidrun Friese “Border Economies: Lampedusa and The Nascent Migration
> Industry” (2012, updated 2015)
>
> *PART 1*
>
> Dans les civilisations sans bateaux les rêves se tarissent- Michel
> Foucault
>
> Situated between Tunisia and Sicily, the tiny island of Lampedusa has
> become a prominent symbol for Mediterranean borderlands, EU-migration
> policies and cross-border governance.
> <#151918a2786c654f_15191886734f6188__edn1>Whereas the right to mobility
> is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, undocumented people
> encounter – not least with the introduction of the Schengen-treaty and the
> visa system in 1986 – legal systems and border regimes that set up a
> variety of limits to their freedom of movement and capacity to stay.
>
> Undocumented mobility and the “border regime” involve a multitude of local
> and (supra)national actors, whose practices relate to each other without
> being ordered by a central logic or rationality. The idea of a “migration
> regime” helps to stress the interdependence of observation and action.”
>
> The border regime also articulates shifting relations between the global
> and the local, centre and periphery, leading to incessant processes and
> mobile textures of de/re-localisation, de-bordering and re-bordering which
> blur the internal and the external, as well as the formal and the informal
> economic sector. The *harraga* (as those who “burn their papers” are
> called in the Maghreb), their friends, families and networks, self-made
> entrepreneurs who arrange the voyages on one hand, and actors who organise
> the reception of boat people on a day-to-day-basis on the other: members of
> the Coastal Guard and security forces, the employees of “reception
> centres”, the local municipality and political forces.
>
> Images of “flow”, “invasion”, “crisis”, “invasion” or “emergency” are an
> integral part of such an industry as the media gaze produces and
> disseminates dominant views of undocumented mobility. This dominant gaze
> situates the mobile subject both as a victim and as a threat to national
> security and systems of welfare, and is part of a powerful social
> *imaginaire* of catastrophes and thus, legitimises political discourse
> and action, a process outlined by Agamben, where the emergency - the
> exception - becomes the rule.
>
> So far, shifting fields of sovereignty, the multiplicity of power
> relations, technologies, programmes and strategies of liberal and
> neo-liberal governance have been critically scrutinised. Likewise,
> practices of hospitality, as well as the quest for cosmopolitan concepts
> and the need of new forms of citizenship have been acknowledged. However,
> economical aspects of border-regimes and especially the political economies
> and the nascent migration industry, in other words, the relations between
> local and translocal/transnational informal and formal economies, have
> largely escaped attention so far.
> <#151918a2786c654f_15191886734f6188__edn3>The “production of illegality”
> contributes not only to brute exploitation of “illegalised” manpower,
> moreover, it enhances the security sector as an “emergent market” providing
> technically sophisticated devices for the detection of undocumented border
> crossers, such as documented by William Walters.
>
> At the same time, such border regimes foster the production of
> subjectivities, of cross-border actors and their strategies to circumvent –
> or to actively use – established procedures and routines for individual
> projects of mobility. Borders are both a means of exclusion, division
> *and* at the same time, porous zones of contact, border commuters and
> in/formal commerce (be it “legal” or “illegal”) provide a livelihood for
> inhabitants of these regions.
>
> Cecilia Wee
> Tutor, Sound Design
>
> Royal College of Art
> School of Communication
> Kensington Gore, London
> SW7 2EU
> E: [log in to unmask]
> T: +44 (0)20 7590 4313
> www.rca.ac.uk
> twitter.com/rcaevents <http://twitter.com/RCAevents>
> facebook.com/rca.london <http://facebook.com/RCA.London>
>
>
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