Bordering Europe: Producing Illegality through Visualised Border Politics

In the past years we saw different layers of policies restricting movement in(to) Europe. Making exclusionary borders visible, is what I focus on. I want to look at two current phenomena of bordering Europe: (1) through material fences and (2) practices of passport controls within the territory. What logics and semantics are in place to frame migration to Europe? I will use my former analysis of EU papers from 1995 to 2006 addressing external borders and broaden it by the idea of borders moving back into the Union through selective controls in public spaces in the Union. My analysis of the EU papers showed, that migrants are increasingly portrayed as aggressors (Barp 2016, Schwiertz 2011). After Tampere, migration is linked to security politics throughout the EU discourse of the past twenty years. Migrants are expected to import (organized) criminality and pose a threat to Europeans (see Tesfahuney 1998, Andersson 2014). Here, the image of people climbing one’s fence is highly productive to visualize the ‘illegitimate acting by moving’ (Walters 2004). At the same time, every public space can convert into a borderland for officials to control passports of certain people (Balibar 1997, Schulze Wessel 2017). If this 'new' border is felt directly, depends on whether one belongs to the suspects. These public passport controls of suspected, mostly of people of color, within the Union become a policy of visibility to the bystanders. Despite the differences of external fences and internal paper controls, both function through their communication towards the European public. Both communicate towards the European public: movers are criminals. Both are policies of visibility translating the complex notion of 'illegal migration' into a manifest image of acting illegal and therefor being illegal.