The Migration Apparatus: Security, Labor, and Policymaking in the European Union

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feldman, Gregory, 1969- author.

The migration apparatus : security, labor, and policymaking in the European Union / Gregory Feldman.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-6106-2 (cloth : alk. paper)--ISBN 978-0-8047-6107-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)--ISBN 978-0-8047-7912-8 (e-book)

1. European Union countries--Emigration and immigration--Government policy. 2. Foreign workers--Government policy--European Union countries. 3. Illegal aliens--Government policy--European Union countries. 4. Internal security--European Union countries. I. Title.

JV7590.F455 2011

325.4--dc23                              2011023762

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion

The Migration Apparatus

SECURITY, LABOR, AND POLICYMAKING IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

Gregory Feldman

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

To Ilo and Uku. May your hearts always be this migrant’s home.

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence . . .

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

CONTENTS

Cover

Copyright

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

1  Unconnected in the Acephalous World of Migration Policymaking

2  Right Versus Right: How Neoliberals and Neo-nationalists Dominate Migration Policy in Europe

3  Making Things Simple: Forms of Knowledge and Policy Coherence in the Area of Justice, Freedom and Security

4  Border Control: The New Meaning of Containment

5  Biometrics: Where Isn’t the Security Threat?

6  The Right Solution, or, the Fantasy of Circular Migration

7  When There Is No There There: Nonlocal Ethnography in a World of Apparatuses

Epilogue: The Comparative Advantages of the Academic and the Policymaker

References

Index

PREFACE

This book aims for two goals. The first goal is to capture how the European Union’s emerging migration management apparatus interfaces with the contemporary global political and economic order. The book’s operative questions are how the apparatus’s various parts articulate without a centralized authority, and how a normative policy subject is conjured up in its whirlwind of disparate policy processes. It focuses less on the questions of how well the apparatus works on the ground and whether migrants really conform to the demands pushed upon them. While crucially important, these questions do not necessarily point the investigator to the myriad routines of scattered technocrats whose work enables this apparatus, synergistically and perhaps unwittingly. Regardless of the degree of the apparatus’s success, literally millions of migrants and travelers around the world must deal with its convergent strength, generated from the otherwise unrelated effects of external border control, biometric information technologies, and circular migration programs. Though large, it would be misleading to describe such a social construction as large-scale. This tag suggests that it rests loftily above real people and acts independently of them. It does neither. Rather, it results from the situated practices of technocrats, officials, and experts who often do not know each other and conduct much of their work virtually in cyberspace. If local rituals organize people by establishing direct connections between them, then apparatuses destroy those mechanisms, individualize people, and create indirect relations between them so that they, or their labor power, can be processed to an enormous degree. Grand moral statements make up for the social breakdown. They integrate policy experts, policy targets, and the apparatus that relates them into a common, if vacuous, ethical frame: A migration policy that works for everyone, as EU officials are known to say. Put starkly, however, the strange effect of this social situation is that there is no social in the substantive sense of the term.

The book’s second goal is to deploy a suitable ethnographic methodology for achieving the first goal. Like globalization, an apparatus poses obvious challenges to participant-observation, anthropology’s signature field method, which was designed to map direct social and ecological connections. Ethnographers’ responses to the shattering of fixed place share a commitment to tracing tangible connections across the globe, establishing an in situ presence in as many nodal points as possible, and filling in the gaps with keen theoretical insights. This book offers a vital complement to these important responses: specifically, a methodology for studying highly mediated social relations and the veritable absence of connections between actors who are nevertheless absorbed in the same processes, though often from radically different positions. If alienation, estrangement, and objectification are hallmarks of mass capitalist society, then we should consider a nuanced understanding of connections as a methodological and theoretical construct. How do we study amorphous systems of population regulation—under which we all increasingly live—that rely on countless educated laborers who lack serious influence as particular individuals, ongoing ties to each other, and direct contact with the masses of people whom their labor indirectly regulates? I hope that what I call nonlocal ethnography will help us to examine how these (non)connections specifically take their shape, and their toll. It also acknowledges another hallmark of mass society, whether one is a poor Southern migrant or a wealthy Northern citizen, or any combination thereof: as we lack control over the most important conditions of our lives, so these conditions are rarely formulated in our midst. This point does not require us to abandon in situ field research, which places the ethnographer there in the actor’s midst. Rather, it requires us to continue to complicate how we identify and access the elusive there where we need to be to understand what made that actor’s midst possible.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Producing this book quickly became both a great challenge and a sheer pleasure. Many people helped significantly with the former and hopefully shared with me in the latter. Of course, none of them share the blame for the pages that follow! I apologize if I have accidentally omitted any of their names below.

Michael Jandl played a crucial role in getting my fieldwork started. His colleagues and many others located at different places around the EU were extremely generous with their time, space, and attention. This book would not have materialized without their support. Many of these individuals appear in the book, though their names have been changed or left unmentioned for reasons of confidentiality. I hope that the final product wins their respect.

At various stages in the project, the manuscript benefited from the encouragement and feedback of Joe Heyman, Cris Shore, Susan Greenhalgh, Hugh Gusterson, Paul Silverstein, Bill Beeman, Don Brenneis, Paul Spoonley, Robert Rubinstein, Dan Hiebert, and Pablo Mendez. Alexia Bloch and Neil Guppy provided helpful comments on the grant proposal. At the University of California, Irvine, Susan Greenhalgh and her graduate Anthropology of Public Policy class (particularly Adonia Lugo, Connie McGuire, and Shaozeng Zhang) gave their class time and comments on a book chapter titled Illuminating the Apparatus: Steps Toward a Nonlocal Ethnography of Global Governance. That chapter appears in the edited volume Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Anatomy of Contemporary Power, published by Berghahn Books (2011) and edited by Cris Shore, Susan Wright, and Davide Però. With permission of the publisher, parts of it also appear in Chapters 1, 3, 4, 6, and 7 of the present book.

Various pieces of the book were delivered as papers at different universities since 2005. These include Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies and Brown’s Working Group on Anthropology and Population in the Population Studies Training Center. I would like to thank Winifred Tate, Nicholas Townsend, Marida Hollos, Kay Warren, and Inna Leykin for invitations and stimulating discussions. During the workshop Migration in a Neoliberal Age, hosted by the University of Florida’s Center for European Studies, I received helpful feedback from Maria Stoilkova, Monika Salzbrunn, Ayse Parla, Paul Silverstein, Cristiana Giordano, Laurie McIntosh, and Esther Romeyn. I thank Maria and Esther for the invitation to participate. I would also like to thank Ann-Cathrine Jungar at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörns Högskola, Stockholm, for hosting me as a visiting fellow, and Pat Cavendish for inviting me to deliver a keynote lecture for the Northeast International Education Association at Pierce College, Puyallup, Washington. Both opportunities offered useful input and engaging discussions, which further refined the present argument. At the University of British Columbia (UBC), the manuscript benefited from a number of workshops as well. These included the graduate student methods seminar in the Department of Geography; the research methods colloquium sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program; and Catherine Dauvergne’s law workshop on Challenging Sovereignty.

I have benefited tremendously from Dan Hiebert’s insights during countless open-ended conversations on global migration. So-called working lunches were made for these kinds of conversations. Gogi Bhullar provided early and helpful assistance in orienting me through a maze of online EU documents. Two excellent doctoral candidates in UBC’s Department of Geography provided crucial research assistance by sleuthing out and organizing various literatures, policy updates, and reports of all kinds. Luna Vives provided support midway through the project, particularly on matters pertaining to external border control. Sarah Zell took the baton for the final lap, which also included formatting and proofreading the entire manuscript twice. Amazingly, she completed much of this work between chemotherapy sessions. Francesco Brardinoni provided translation for the Italian language monologue in Chapter 4.

The research for this book was financed almost entirely through a Standard Research Grant from Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, with extra support coming from UBC’s Department of Geography and Office of the Dean of Arts. Though very pleasant and engaging on an individual basis, my time at UBC has been challenged by the increasing neoliberalization of the academy. Specific senior colleagues nevertheless made strategic moves to help me sustain a vibrant research trajectory against the structural odds. I am grateful to Mike Bovis, Graeme Wynn, David Ley, and Darrin Lehman for their interventions on this front. The editorial team at Stanford University Press has been highly supportive ever since the project’s beginning. In particular, Joa Suorez, Mariana Raykov, and Jeff Wyneken handled each and every step with professionalism and aplomb. Year after year, Paul and Kathy Feldman have backed everything I’ve done and in ways that can only be repaid by doing the same for the next generation. Last, but not least, the influence of Merje Kuus is present throughout the text.

ABBREVIATIONS

1  UNCONNECTED IN THE ACEPHALOUS WORLD OF MIGRATION POLICYMAKING

What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.

Hannah Arendt 1958, 52–53

EYES ASKANCE

Officials from the immigration office of a wealthy European Union country’s interior ministry have organized a field trip to one of its holding centers for illegal immigrants.¹ They are giving this tour to some sixty of their counterparts from European and North African states. Together, they are trying to establish common migration policy guidelines through the Mediterranean Managed Migration Project (3MP). Visiting officials can compare their host country’s practices in the reception and detention of illegal migrants to their own. Residents, as the center’s staff calls them, number up to 160 at a time and stay an average of thirty-five days before they are returned to their countries of origin. A green, metal, double-layer fence encloses the facility. The outer ring reaches about six meters high while the inner ring climbs to five meters. The center sits peacefully in a green leafy suburb, looking safe, secure, and humane even though its functionalist architecture differs awkwardly from that of the surrounding neighborhood.

On a warm, sunny day the center’s staff greets these officials (plus one anthropologist) with a wine and cheese reception in a grassy space next to the main entrance. As the fortified center incarcerates mostly darker-skinned migrants from much poorer countries, this odd moment seems to fit Luis Buñuel’s satirical film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Buñuel juxtaposes in a single frame polite members of the upper middle class, who enjoy fine dinners, teas, and other pleasantries, against an assortment of characters marginalized by global capitalism, Cold War geopolitics, and the French mainstream. The surreal and awkwardly close proximity of such disparate souls, like those gathered in and around the holding center, prompts reflection on how people who do not encounter each other immediately in their normal daily circuits are linked in unequal, far-flung, and highly mediated global power relations.

What does the fence make you think of? I ask an official, Maria, from a southern EU member state. At least the surroundings are nice. In [my country] they are in tents, she replies regretfully. After this remark our hosts move us inside to the foyer, which features a portrait of the royal couple positioned on the wall slightly higher than eye level and facing the rows of chairs awaiting us. We are shown the same video that residents see upon their arrival at the center. It presents the state’s options on how to return illegal migrants to their countries of origin. (As a Dutch official explains later, the term deport is not used in continental Europe, unlike in Britain, Canada, and the US, because of its association with Nazi deportations of Jews to concentration camps.) Each option involves increased levels of force. On one end of the spectrum is assisted voluntary return, in which removal is cooperative, comfortable, and comes with logistical and financial support from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). In some instances, IOM provides returnees with financial assistance to start up new businesses back home. On the other end is a forced return for uncooperative migrants that could involve handcuffs, ankle cuffs, straightjackets, soft helmets, and police escorts on chartered flights with other illegal migrants. In between these two extremes, migrants might be kept in light restraints while seated between two security guards on commercial flights. The video concludes with the narrator clearly enunciating that one way or another, you will be returned.

After the presentation, our guide leads us down a corridor to the main security control center, which is encased in thick, shatterproof glass and located at the intersection of the facility’s two main residence halls. We pass through a double-doored air-locked chamber that separates the security center from one of the residence halls. Our group experiences a moment of claustrophobia when the opposing doors lock us inside the transparent glass. We comfort ourselves with nervous laughter until the doors open and we are let to pass into the residence hall. The residents’ rooms are enclosed with heavy metal doors purposely designed like those used in prisons. While these doors cannot be locked, they do have a small viewing slot that can be opened from the outside to look in. Residents sleep four to a room on two bunk beds. Our guide explains that the staff chooses the roommates and tries to avoid creating ethnic ghettoes on the one hand and cultural clashes on the other. Residents’ money is kept separate, though they can request it twice a week. They are allowed outside for just two hours a day within a fenced courtyard where they can play football, basketball, or just breathe fresh air. Volunteer educators organize leisure activities such as arts and crafts. A ping-pong table, foosball table, and punching bag are found in a recreation room. Instant coffee and a small, old television set are available in the cafeteria. Peering into this room, one cannot help but notice an English-language curse about the host state, beginning with F, carved into a Plexiglas window.

Residents get an identity badge containing a photograph and other personal information. When it is time to shave, they can exchange the badge for disposable razors, which are numbered and stored in the control center. If offsite medical attention is required, then a resident would be transported to the hospital in handcuffs and remain handcuffed during the visit. During the night prior to their removal, residents are kept in a separate medical wing in a locked room lest they make a last-ditch effort to escape. The security guards—one of whom has followed us throughout the tour—carry no weapons, but helmets and shields are available to them if necessary. Discipline is effected much more through containment than force, as our guide explains. Unruly residents can be placed in an isolated holding cell for up to twenty-four hours at a time. Most residents are men between twenty and forty years old. If appearances and statistics are reliable, then the residents mainly originate from sub-Saharan Africa and Muslim countries; a few individuals are from the former Soviet Union. While some residents ignore us, many stare at us with indecipherable smiles as we peep into their sleeping rooms and recreation room and shuffle past them in the corridor en masse. Others look on contemptuously. Yet, in contrast to the frequent stares from the residents themselves, the interior ministry officials in our group make no eye contact whatsoever with the residents. They quietly pass through the center and diligently study its infrastructure. Only the representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) examines it with a methodical eye. At one point, as our group is crammed in the medical wing, he whispers to me to check if the bathroom in the isolated holding cell has a toilet. I cautiously stick my head in the door while no one is looking, then glance back at him to nod in the affirmative. He nods back, indicating that this center meets international standards.

BEHIND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SCENES

This visit to the holding center offers rich leads for an ethnography of migration management. Readily available are the questions of how the residents negotiate their status as illegals while they face imminent return, or how residents and staff manipulate each other to work the center’s regulations to their own advantage. Indeed, the center could show how the ascribed status of illegal migrant is performed and contested, as suggested by the migrants’ glances, the curse carved into the cafeteria window, and the regimented daily routines. We see the Foucauldian details through which docile bodies are produced as well as the tactics with which residents resist the center’s technologies of rule. Assuming long-term access is granted, the center offers the logistical benefit of providing a manageable space in which to conduct extended ethnographic fieldwork and the ethical opportunity to give voice to people marginalized by capitalism and the security state.

While these matters remain vitally important, this book’s point of departure is found not in a moment of direct, tangible social engagement but rather in one of banal, aloof, social indifference and disconnection, which, arguably, are more common in the contemporary world order. The policy officials’ strenuous efforts to avoid eye contact with the migrants are palpable, not to mention curious, as the latter are precisely the same people whom the former are paid to regulate and about whom they ostensibly possess expertise. Why do they pass up the opportunity to keep their expert knowledge up to date? Why don’t they talk to residents and ask them about their lives if they are in fact there to see the proverbial situation on the ground? Why don’t they even look at them? Their object of ethnographic expertise—the illegal migrant—is immediately available to them. These officials, of course, have nothing to gain by engaging the migrants face to face or by acknowledging their glances, sneers, and mysterious smiles. To establish contact with them would only expose to attack the moral arguments underpinning the officials’ power position and that of the judicial, political, and economic systems they represent. They must instead maintain an invisible wall of silence.

Focusing on these nonconnections between people nevertheless bound up in the same social processes, this book’s basic ethnographic questions are as follows: Where do these officials’ moral arguments come from? How do they pertain to ongoing social, political, and economic processes? What assumptions do they hold about citizenship, territory, the individual, and the economy? How does today’s European political economy make it convenient for them to construct migrants as particular problems requiring particular policy solutions? Most significantly, how do the myriad processes involved in these officials’ daily work converge so as to form a decentralized apparatus of migration management composed of disparate migration policy agendas, generic regulatory mechanisms, and unconnected policy actors and policy targets? Ethnographers rightly stress the importance of face-to-face experience and tangible connections and conflicts in ethnographic fieldwork. Nevertheless, how do we deal with a situation in which policy officials patently ignore the migrants in their immediate presence? How do we manage a case where unconnected policy domains and sundry regulatory mechanisms fuse together but human connections (and conflicts) are rarely forged, are tenuous at best, or are structurally discouraged?

Herzfeld’s (1992, 5–10) secular theodicy might explain the social indifference. Some officials blame the bureaucratic system in which they work for harmful decisions that they themselves must reluctantly make. The official at the outdoor reception, Maria, illustrated the point with the wistful remark that illegal migrants in her country are kept in tents. She expressed her regret about the effect of her own work on migrants, with whom she personally sympathizes (see Chapter 4). However, most officials (and particularly those who move high up the bureaucratic ranks) speak confidently about the moral clarity of the laws they uphold and the migration policies they develop. As one project officer for 3MP noted:

What I find normal is that if you break the law, then it’s a problem. Since states have existed, they have guarded their borders. If [migrants] are recognized as guilty, the consequences should be applied. Of course, there should be proportionality and human rights, but in any case, [consequences] should be the case.

This frank remark suggests that something more than a helplessness to help must explain the indifference witnessed at the holding center. Moreover, a simple avoidance relationship like those described in classic social anthropology is an insufficient explanation because a ritual avoidance assumes a prior social connection and comes with the expectation of its restoration. In this case, no such connection existed before, during, or after the trip to the center.

Therefore, this book explores bureaucratic indifference by asking what ­mediates the policy official’s view of the migrant; and what organizes people who are now unrelated to each other by anything tangible (Arendt 1958, 53). It starts from the position that modern mass society is held together by indirect human relations more than direct, organic connections between people. People historically have been connected through locally formed practices such as the exchange and barter of tangible goods; rituals and rites of passage involving social and bodily contact; visible acts of obeisance to elders; and public torture—a ritualized assault on the body—as a spectacular display of ancient, sovereign power. These types of connections are being replaced by relations that are indirectly mediated through abstract third agents such as: policy representations of the public; social norms against which we measure ourselves and our relevance to others; mathematical formulas that objectify populations in the course of public administration and corporate marketing strategies; and, of course, money, signifying exchange value.

In the context of EU migration management, I seek to understand how large systems of population regulation both constitute and materialize out of highly mediated relations and the near absence of connections between people. That exploration leads us to an ethnographic terrain, so to speak, that features much less of the face-to-face interaction among and between migration officials and migrants and much more of the vast, acephalous, and decentralized world of policymaking. In that world, most of the relevant policymakers, technocrats, and experts barely know each other yet speak a common language of migration management. Their policy terrain is where the migrant emerges as a knowable problem, thus sparing the official the discomfort of listening to migrants tell their stories in their own words. Policy officials do not learn what they must about the migrant through immediate personal engagement; instead, they see migrants through the mediated practice of policymaking, rendering the migrant an object of information, never a subject of communication (Foucault 1977, 200). Hence, the migrant is not policy officials’ primary interest qua policymakers but rather is the object of the political economy that their policy efforts serve. Similarly, poverty and hunger are not the primary interests of World Bank officials but rather their primary business; as loan officers they do not fly around the world to meet itinerant laborers and street dwellers but rather ministers of industry and high-level corporate executives (Goldman 2005, xvi). In both cases, connection with the policy object—the migrant or the poor—is neither established nor desired.

This book is thus necessarily concerned with how a dynamic living person is converted into a static policy object and with