...no matter how high the wall there is no wall high enough to block off migration (Houtum, 2010: 973)

Historically, colonial settlers followed ‘divide and rule’ strategies to carve up the world based on resources, ignoring native socio-economic and cultural linkages to their lands.  ‘B/order/ology’  (Houtum, 2010) cannot be entirely understood by ignoring European colonial historiography. Borders constrain or enable human mobility through laws and institutions that are juxtaposed within the citizenship and entitlement nexus which gets blurry between natives and immigrants in settler nations where indigenous communities who were not migrants were disassociated from their lands by European settlers. Today the epistemology of borders can be gleaned in a variety of ways: as a verb, a historical construct, discourse, a line, a frontier, a membrane, a biometric-digitized-racialized mechanism, an intricate machinery to expand territory or boundaries that divide the superior-civilized imperialists from the uncivilized barbers. In sum, borders are mobile as migrant subjectivities carry borders as a part of their identity.

The EU, Penal State and modern day homines sacri

The symbols of statehood are visible across the European Union (EU), through the widespread display of the EU flag, the common Euro currency, the all-embracing legislative, executive and judicial activities, the establishment of the EU parliament and its concentration of power (Bhabha, 1998). Europe is not a product of colonial history but existed as a group of countries which colonized most of the world (Balibar, 1991). In spite of this, the notion of a ‘pure’ Europe cannot be justified and is deeply problematic. Cold War Europe is non-existent since the collapse of communism (Huntington 1993) and with the decline of western Christianity and the advent of racial heterogeneity across the metro-cities of Europe, which has altered the very sound and look of Europe. Presently, three out of every hundred European workers are third-world nationals, which alters the ethnic composition of the EU significantly with a growing proportion of second and third generation immigrant workers which is much higher if white citizens are not included (Bhabha, 1998). Although an increasingly salient aspect of European consolidation lies in the recognition of the fundamental respect of human rights, in reality, none of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights conventions are ratified as activists and scholars claim that racial discrimination, harassment, ghettoization, seclusion and violence towards immigrant populations persist across EU member states (Balibar 1991;  Fekete 1997). Western economies are dependent on clandestine immigrant workforce yet harsh incompromisable, convoluted and expensive regularization processes keep the status of immigrant workers illegal so their labor can be over-used and devalued.

With all our boasted reforms, our great social changes, and our far-reaching discoveries, human beings continue to be sent to the worst of hells, wherein they are outraged, degraded, and tortured, that society may be ‘‘protected’’ from the phantoms of its own making (Goldman 1917: 71 from Engel Di-Mauro 2012: 1).

In control societies like the EU and settler states, power operates from within because the control extends outside the disciplinary structures and institutions that operates through tractable networks, which conditions the ‘brains and bodies’ to construct subjectivities (Hardt and Negri, 2000:23). Interned at detention centers, solitary prisons, refugee/asylum camps or city squares, the threadbare lives of clandestine immigrants are excluded and at the same time included, as the sovereign state constantly creates and re-creates their subjectivities and raises ‘bans’ on their ‘bare’ bodies (Schinkel, 2009) and minds through rigid illegitimate mechanisms. Stateless, paperless, incarcerated immigrants are modern day homines sacri who cannot be sacrificed or killed, as they are neither inside nor outside the jurisdiction of state laws (Agamben 2002). It is established that the post-9/11 attacks in New York and Washington DC, post-3/11 attacks in Madrid and post-7/7 attacks in London had no connection with immigrants or the immigration of refugees, asylum seekers or clandestine workers. Still, the increasing global apartheid geopolitics are deceptively juxtaposed with a global war against clandestine immigrants and mystifying global ‘war on terror’ (Wright, 2003). These events have resulted in repressive b/order mechanisms through stricter policies. Strangely enough with a decline in asylum centers, their followed an exponential increase of expenditures and numbers of detention centers/solitary camps, colored prison inmates, deaths in prisons and border deaths (see Davis 2003; Golash-Boza 2009; Engel Di-Mauro 2012 for details). Solitary prison camps and detention centers are new concentration camps that contain, discipline and incarcerate the ‘deviant’ migrants and all these wrongful state tactics keep the nefarious immigrant ‘underclass’ (De Genova, 2008) sequestered in urban ghettos, inner cities, and ethnic enclaves, away from welfare. In reality, welfare schemes have made immigrants even more precarious as the immigration and naturalization departments have misused power by acquiring information on illegal immigrants to deport them (Hayter 2000).

Call for ‘No Borders’

The border apparatus is digital and selective and is not simply a set of walls around a nation-state but rather a “distributed network of myriad checkpoint, technologies and actors, which can be situated inside or outside a given state territory” (Aas, 2005). According to Walters (2004) borders are rationalized as a sheath that protects the purity of EU nation-states. The most worrying aspect is that the EU’s current economic crisis is blamed on the increase in clandestine immigrants towards a ‘common integrated risk analysis model’, illustrative in the composition of a ‘white’ Schengen list and ‘black’ Schengen list. The ‘white-list’ represents the 60 countries whose citizens do not need a visa to visit or transit in any Schengen countries. The ‘black-list’ consists of 135 states whose inhabitants require a visa to enter the EU-space. The divisionary borders are not random or unambiguous, nor are countries cherry-picked but are selective based on race, economics and history (Houtum, 2010). Most black-list countries in Europe have some colonial/imperial connections, whereas the white-list countries are the settler states and European nation-states. Then the very construction of the black- and white-list has to do with racialization, marginalization and segregation of a large part of the world. Race is something that Europe has done to third-world nations, settler states and states under neocolonialism. Asylum warfare has replaced the conventional understanding of global conflicts because global apartheid against the ‘immigrant’ has “replaced crime as warfare and warfare as crime control” (Findley 2003, 234).

I therefore suggest that welfare states have been transformed into ‘carceral archipelagos’ through their ‘b/ordering’ mechanisms (Weber, 2002) that manage the biological and material immigrant bodies, coercively and ‘murderously’, as threats to the nation-state. The classical model of the Panopticon is reframed as the ‘ban-opticon’ (Bigo,2006) that transverses the irregular immigrant, adulterating the ‘quintessential other’ (Houtum,2010), which is not just an efficient prison but a scheme of mechanisms of power reduced to an ideal form and sophisticated governance and politics (Foucault, 1977) that containerizes immigrant bodies and concurrently fortifies the EU. On the one hand, “nation-states are in ‘states of denial’ about the enormous social inequalities and suffering on the global scale” (Cohen, 2001), and on the other hand critical/radical social science disguises its performativity pretending its innocence that it cannot have (Law and Urry, 2004: 404). Broadly leftist scholars have overlooked colonial historiographies and detention centers as de-facto prisons or spaces incarceration of coloured populations. Unless radical scholars transcend the nation-state order or question the legitimacy of frontiers designating ‘non-persons’ with respect to justice by moving on from illegitimate state-territorial assertions (Fraser, 2005), I am afraid that racialization and discrimination of immigrant populations will continue. And, with minimum comprehension of these developments it is insufficient to critique existing social conditions and to put in practice egalitarian initiatives. Therefore this intervention calls for ‘no-borders’ following histories of migration, globalization of capital and goods, arms-trade and militaristic and imperialistic interventions, over-consumption and over-accumulation of bourgeoisie and rich nations, and questions the legitimacy of restricting human mobility by birth and the first-world nations’ responsibility towards environmental/war refugees and asylum seekers whose income earning activities are not criminal. 

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Credits

Photos taken in Madrid by the author.