The Power of Border Politics: On Migration in and outside Europe

Abstract

Migration and the movements of refugees are embedded in a broader societal context in which our world is depicted as unstable, insecure and haunted by threats. Terrorist attacks, we learn, can occur almost everywhere and strike almost anybody; democracy is under pressure, autocratic leaders impose arbitrary political decisions on citizens; wars nearby and at its periphery shake Europe; the European welfare states face multiple challenges; and, in the middle of this, migration is presented as a danger to public order, cultural identity, and national labor-market policy. Open borders, and immigrants “pouring into Europe,” be they refugees, asylumseekers or immigrants, are depicted as a major security problem. The threat becomes incarnated in the refugee and immigrant. The question that comes up is whether there exists a right to exclude, a right to close borders – also for states that claim to be legitimate, in the sense that they respect human rights and are democratically organized.2 And what is the role of borders in publicly defining threats and forms of insecurity? Borders, I argue, are a multifaceted infrastructure that not only infringes on people’s free movement. Moreover, borders are an instrument but also a condition for the creation of modes of securitization. As long as borders are imposed coercively, and through this, contribute to securitization, they are illegitimate. The reason for this, I show, is mainly because the power of securitizing restricts people’s qualified options, structurally, by literally blocking their way out of war zones, hunger, and economic de-