Humanitarian border: Reprise. Anti-human trafficking discourses and security practices at the southern Italian border

Abstract

The article analyses the friction between anti-human trafficking discourse and border practices in the context of EU migration management: the narrative of protecting migrants from human traffickers, evoked by law enforcement actors, merges with a discourse criminalizing migration, discerning between the migrant as a passive victim – the asylum seeker –the “economic migrant” and the ruthless smuggler. Practices and procedures at the border aim primarily at classifying migrants within these categories, in fact identifying potentially dangerous subjects for the country of arrival. The case study is the Southern European border in Sicily, and the operations enacted by law enforcement actors and EU agencies within the hotspot facilities. Moving from the ethnographic fieldwork I conducted on this context since 2016, witnessing disembarkations and border procedures and getting access to the hotspot structures of Lampedusa and Pozzallo in 2021, the article analyses the transformation of the border apparatus and of contemporary governance of mobility. What delineates is a revival of the humanitarian border, where anti-human trafficking discourses are evoked to legitimize exclusionary border procedures and practices.