Migrants’ passage : the making and unmaking of the European border in Malta

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Master’s Thesis for Cultural and Social Anthropology at the Graduate School of Social Sciences

Migrants’ Passage

The Making and Unmaking of the European Border in Malta

Photo: Ronald Arthur van Schaik

Marie-José van Schaik

6126502

Amsterdam, 21-06-2015

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Declaration on Plagiarism and Fraud:

I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy

[http://student.uva.nl/binaries/content/assets/studentensites/uva-studentensite/nl/a-z/regelingen-enreglementen/fraude-en-plagiaatregeling-2010.pdf?1283201371000]. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper.

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Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to those that were willing to share their story with me, despite recalling ghosts from the past and being haunted by stigma and feelings of shame. Your fortitude has inspired me and I hope my research can give you some sort of recognition.

I am also very thankful to Antoinette, or ‘Mamma Africa’, who took me on a day-trip over the island of Malta in her fully loaded car to distribute clothes to the migrants, to eat and talk with them and sharing her experiences over the years. Your gift to people is a precious one: that of offering a sense of home.

Thanks to all the people who supported me throughout this research, both the period in the field and during the writing of this thesis. My supervisor Barak Kalir, for all the useful comments and the way you guided me getting the most out of myself. Revijara Oosterhuis and Maaike Reynaert, for all the hours reading and the constructive criticism. The best mother and sister in the world, who are always there, wherever I go.

I want to thank my father, for being my father and inheriting me with the curious look into a turbulent world and never stop asking questions. Being deprived of autonomy, life loses all its value. He left when I just arrived in Malta, and the world will never be the same.

I am most grateful to my husband, for the sacrifice of being my personal ‘border gaze’ and the support of being my loved one. Being a muse isn’t always a favourable thing, it can confront you with the person you don’t want to be anymore. Thank you for your loyalty and thank you for being my mirror.

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Abstract

Borders are not static entities, they are processes of negotiation, made and unmade by different actors and institutions that are involved in the politics of the border. Naturalised as boundaries of national belonging, borders give rise to a global inequality of mobility rights. In my thesis I focus on the rituals performed by migrants landing in Malta to overcome the borders and boundaries of Europe when structurally excluded from the freedom of movement. It is based on recent interviews and observations with migrants who crossed the Mediterranean border ‘irregularly’ by boats and unintentionally landed in Malta. By taking an empirical approach from humanized accounts we can come to understand the ways how borders are experienced, negotiated and challenged by those that are restricted to cross them. The normalised perception of borders as the limits of nation-states, national identity and rights of citizenship are challenged by

cosmologies of egalitarianism. I look at the conflict between the generalised concepts and populist discourse of borders, migration and political belonging formed by the state and society versus the emic arguments and implicit contestations of people on the move. If we look at their arguments and actions, the naturalization of current European discourse on migration, exclusion and citizenship and the actual fundaments of the neo-liberal nation-state get delegitimized and undermined. By focusing on the tactical negotiations that migrants use to reach their objectives, we can come to a deeper understanding of the power dynamics evolving at the border and the structural inequality that globalisation only continues to stress.

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Introduction: The Emic Face of Border Crossing

“I know a few things to be true I do not know where I am going Where I have come from is disappearing

I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here My body is burning with the shame of not belonging My body is longing”

- Warsan Shire -

The little Yusuf cried. He was tired and thirsty, his mother had dried out during the hot and tiresome journey. She held her son firmly, clamping on his life, praying to God and begging to bring them to land safely. Yusuf was only fourteen days old. His mother had travelled alone from Somalia through the desert to Libya where she had met his Somalian father. While he was

growing in her womb he was already trapped in the border spectacle, subjugated to the

constraints of prison, since his mother got detained in one of Libya’s dreadfuldetention centres. Because of the colour of her skin and because of her lack of documents. When she was brought to hospital for complications, she had managed to escape. Yusuf’s life had started at the border. His eyes had opened in a turbulent world of insecurity and exclusion. Now he was lying in his mother’s arms, rocked by the waves of the Mediterranean sea, surrendered to the border game. His big brown eyes watched it all, absorbing the fear, the humiliation, the suffering. Being a baby he could not make sense of it yet, submitted to the power constraints his young life was made an arbitrary sacrifice for the border.

---The drama that unfolds at the Mediterranean border is topic of heated debates. Everywhere the images of fully loaded unseaworthy boats, dehydrated and cramped black bodies, rescue workers in white protective clothes and facemasks, swollen floating corpses, army ships patrolling the sea, overloaded trucks in the desert moving northwards and damaged ship graveyards feed the

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sensational gaze of the public, constructing the image of the relatively unknown ‘boat refugees’ that “haunt the rich world” and that are victimized and pitied for, scorned at and mistrusted (Andersson 2013: 4). The popular imaginary of their invasion, emphasized by the terminology of floods and waves, promotes a growing unrest and contributes to the legitimization of the

contradictory implementation of even more distressing forms of border control that seems to function by its collateral damage. Yet interesting is the fact that those that are the topic of discussion, imaginary, surveillance and categorization are themselves excluded from participation in the debate. There seems to be little attention for the humanized accounts of the migration motives, the experience of the journey and the personal impact, negotiations and challenges of the securitization of migration. The ordeals they have to endure reveal a lot about the

contemporary making and unmaking of illegalised migration. It is my aim in this thesis to look at the emic perspective of border crossing and how this brings new insights into the power

dynamics that evolve at the border.

Research question

Based on the narratives of migrants travelling from Africa to Europe and landing in Malta, this thesis aims to deconstruct taken-for-granted notions on migration and borders. It looks at the ways how the experiences of exclusion inherent of the European border politics construct notions of belonging and create different forms of negotiation and resistance. My research question that leads my thesis is: How does the experience (of the physical, legal and symbolic boundaries) of the European border politics construct the negotiations and challenges of migrants landing in Malta?

A critical look at migration involves a focus on changing conceptualisations of borders, citizenship and political belonging. It should be noted that particular legal and political

frameworks and concepts are there to serve certain political interests. Also, those concepts are not bounded and fixed, but constantly subject to change, formed by different power relations. Since I elaborate the power dynamics between the European border politics and the experiences and negotiations of migrants who are subjugated to these politics, my approach is both

influenced by top-down and bottom-up understandings and interactions of power. Inspired by the Foucauldian notion of neoliberal governmentality, I look at the interchangeability and convertible nature of power dynamics as manifested by state policies and individual actors. Generally speaking, the particularity of my research contributes to the wider debate of power dynamics and the making and unmaking of notions on borders, migration, the neoliberal nation-state and citizenship. I aim to deconstruct these often banalfixed concepts by looking at the

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larger structural formations and policies that construct the lives of the excluded in order to understand how they make sense of the world.

Operationalisation

My central question can be a misleading one, since the term migrant generally covers a large group of people who travelled to another country to live and work there. Especially in Malta one can find people from all over the world, visiting as tourists, working in seasonal jobs or following an English course, yet most of them travel by visas or under European legislation of freedom of movement. The migrants I refer to, are often conceptualised under the term of ‘boat migrants’ or ‘boat refugees’. Other terms that describe their entry into Europe or their status within Europe are ‘illegal migrants’ or ‘irregular migrants’. All these terms are problematic, since illegality is not defined by one’s identity but by the fact that one lacks the documents demanded to enter or reside on European territory. Simultaneously, ‘illegal’ or ‘irregular’ travel is not a mere choice but constructed by restricted border policies, sincequite understandably people prefer to fly to Europe rather than take the perilous route over sea. The contradiction that remains very problematic is that - regardless one’s eligibility - any human being has the right to apply for asylum in Europe, but most lack the possibility to enter European land by legal means. The concepts of ‘illegality’ or ‘irregular migration’ are also problematic since they presuppose a minor position in the concept of human mobility. As such it has a mantle of shame around it, since most people feel not proud of the fact that they were depending on irregular migration routes, as it presupposes that they are of ‘lower’ status. The use of these terms assume an implicit

acknowledgement of the symbolic entitlement of the state to decide who is excluded as the ‘other’. The terms ‘boat migrants’, ‘illegal migrants’, ‘irregular migrants’ or even ‘undocumented migrants’ are therefore not used by those that crossed the sea. The people I met in Malta, both Maltese working with migrants and migrants themselves, used the word ‘migrant’. In my thesis I will use this very same emic concept, since it reveals how people see themselves. Throughout my thesis the word ‘migrant’ functions as an umbrella term that resembles the diversity of people that crossed the borders of Europe in conflict with migration policies. Since migratory motivations vary extensively, and standards and conditions of asylum procedures vary per

country and per individual opinion, whether migrants are potential eligible or recognized refugees will not specifically matter in my research. I will not be led by Eurocentric legislation and

normative discourse but rather look at the meaning migrants give themselves to their uprooted lives and policies that shape their very existence and identity. From this perspective I will include

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all of those who landed in Malta unexpectedly, most of whom by boats, some surprisingly by airplane.

Although the majority of illegalised migrants enter Europe by airplane - be it by visa or with false documents - most of those migrants fly at larger destination countries. The route via air to Malta is taken by the minority rather than the majority of migrants and often happens to be

unintentionally, as a consequence of the submission to the smugglers that brought them there.1

Since none of my informants planned or expected to arrive in Malta, be it by airplane or by boat, I will make use of the term landing while speaking of their disembarkation or arrival in Malta. The word landing can be seen as landing by airplane, but simultaneously it can resemble landing by ship. Landing means literally setting foot on land, so whether it was the current of the sea, the will of the smugglers or the decision of the rescue operations, the term landing in my research resembles the unexpected and unplanned arrival of migrants in Malta.

The physical, legal and symbolic boundaries I refer to, are all the exclusionary policies, discourses and practices inherent to the European border politics. They entail the physical borders that are restricted to cross, the racialized exclusionary discourse surrounding migration, the policies created to manage and control their movement and lives, the legal frameworks categorizing them with labels of authenticity and the imaginary surrounding migration and producing the politics of the border. The distinction between borders and boundaries that is usually made in migration studies illustrates borders as the physical limits of the territory and boundaries as the social and political delimitations found in society. Yet since through globalisation the physical borders are more and more eliminated and function by its invisible manifestation of both internal and external boundaries and politics of exclusion, the meaning of territorial borders has become reconfigured and is constantly subject to change. As Fassin notes, the combined approach gives a better understanding of the functioning of borders and what it means for those that cross them (2011). Borders in my thesis therefore include the boundaries that help to construct them, through a tensed and contested politics of space, time and belonging. It is therefore that I focus on the physical, legal and symbolic boundaries that are manifested within the European border politics, through which the border is negotiated, challenged and eventually reconfigured. With European border politics I generally refer to the existing and toughening policies targeting migrants around the European-Mediterranean border but also the contestations against them. Politics in this sense reveal the conflict between the power of the European nation-states versus

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the individual moving subject that undermines this power through tactical negotiations and by its very definition of being a migrant.

Theoretical Framework

Globalisation has opened up the world to some extent, making way for the transnational flow of goods and knowledge and feeding the popular image of the world being at hand’s reach. Yet transnationalism has a dark side. Whereas mobility of people is largely enjoyed by the privileged, many more are constrained in their immobility. The allocation of mobility rights is largely based on nationality and economic standards and especially restricted for those travelling from South to North and East to West. The politics of the border are therefore inherently racialized and class-based. The EU preaches equality and human rights, but has been exclusivist in who can enjoy those rights.2_{In recent years the EU has intensified and externalised its border policies and}

securitization beyond the territorial borders with the aim to prevent and discourage the arrival of illegalised migrants (Gerard 2014). Without the means to travel with the legitimate

documentation and as a result of restricted border policies, many migrants rely on more dangerous and fragmented migration routes and journeys (Schapendonk 2012). As a result, the demand and therefore fulfilment of smuggling routes and networks has grown, and not, as the EU with its new Mediterranean naval mission to eliminate smuggler’s boats seems to assume, the other way around. The reliance on smuggling routes and the exposure to risk is an immediate consequence of the restricted border regime. Due to this, the Mediterranean sea, functioning as a national barrier separating Africa from Europe, has become a mass grave.

The border in our contemporary world has become a competing spectacle of life and death, representing who’s worth living and who is not. As the limits of the nation-state, borders are guarded by a biopolitical governmentality that aims to exercise state power over the physical, political and social fields of the nation-state to defend its sovereignty (cf. Foucault). Since the fundamental attributes of sovereignty constitute by the power to decide who may live and who may die, biopower is exercised beyond the normal state of the law (cf. Foucault., Agamben 1998). This necropolitics, or the sovereign right to kill, surrounding the border has brought back old forms of slavery, molded into modern forms of power and control (Mbembe 2003). The invisibility of this biopower, manifested by the natural dangers of the European Mediterranean border, allows the powerful to expose the powerless to atrocities without getting blood on their

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hands. It is a modern form of ritual sacrifice, in which death is used as a powerful deterrent to safeguard the sanctity of the sovereignty of the nation-state. It is even more powerful by the humanitarian reason that is used to keep the moral high ground, which legitimates the policing of the border by the simultaneous involvement of humanitarian missions and organisations that ‘save’ the ones exposed to risk.By a pretended preservation of human rights and international law, the EU presents itself as the moral caretaker, while migrants are molded into victims of an unchangeable and tragic fate (Fassin 2007, Walters 2011). Through this humanitarian

authoritarianism the state’s actions and policies become morally defensible, which makes necropolitics a justifiable consequence of border control. Yet necropolitics consist not only of the exposure to physical death, but social and political death as well. Deprived of a political identity one is no one, outside the nation-state there is no space for humanity (Khosravi 2011: 122). With the loss of a political community, one loses ‘the right to have rights’ and becomes expelled from humanity (Arendt 1973). It shows the dark and carceral age we live in, in which mobility becomes both a privilege and a potential journey into death.

The border is racialized by its very nature, since “[i]n the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state” (Mbembe 2003: 17). The allocation of risk of death is normalized by a populist discourse and legitimized by notions on state sovereignty that feeds a growing xenophobia towards illegalised migrants. The socio-political construction of citizenship needs this ‘other’ in order to exist, it is a securitarian rhetoric that divides ‘us’ from the ‘other’ and a means to

construct a legal framework of social, political and national belonging (Bigo&Guild 2005: 5). This identity is territorialized since “it is only with reference to the state and its citizens as bounded and territorialized identities that the concept of irregular migration is brought into being and that the policing of borders against irregular migrants is justiﬁed” (McNevin 2006: 136). The

“subordination of human rights to citizen rights” results in the exclusion and isolation of migrants from the territorial, political and social landscape (Pisani 2011: 26). Citizenship functions as an identity through which political marginalisation and privilege are constructed (McNevin 2006: 137). Inherent to the dominant account of territorialized citizenship, is the simultaneous exclusion of non-citizens. Citizenship reinforces the meaningfulness of the territory and of conceptualisations of political belonging that constructs the legitimacy of the state. “The positioning of irregular migrants as immanent outsiders and the legitimizing effect of this strategy upon the dominant account of political belonging” help to reinforce and continue the existence of current border politics (ibid.: 141). In this way, citizenship is not as much “an institution or statute but a collective practice” (Balibar 2000: 42).

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Those that have managed to cross the border remain subject to an exclusivist politics that subjugates migrants to marginalised positions in society. Yet, it is mainly globalisation that has given rise to a new conceptualisation of the ‘threatening other’, since in contemporary formations of citizenship “[t]he stranger does not have to be recognized as ‘beyond’ or outside the ‘we’ in order to be fixed within the contours of a given form: indeed, it is the very gesture of getting ‘closer’ to strangers that allows the figure to take its shape” (Ahmed 2000: 4). This “[d]ifferential exclusion registers how the border has moved to the centre of political life” (De Genova et al. 2015: 26). Imaginary and linguistic differentiation also “increasingly works as a form of exile, an `interior' exile from the contemporary world, producing the same anxieties and feelings of

powerlessness” (Balibar 2009: 207). The paradox of Europe’s demand for cheap un-skilled labour and the securitization of borders, materializes in the current struggles that migrants find

themselves in (de Haas 2008). The economic inequality inherited from colonial times “pushes people to seek fortunes abroad” (Andersson 2014: 7). The European economy relies on their low-skilled labour and by keeping them physically and economically present and politically

excluded, the EU gains great economical profits. Illegalisation and the EU’s attempts to control it has become an industry from which many parties profit and that “only produces more and increasingly distressing forms of it” (Andersson 2014: 24).The politics of the border has become a ‘spectacle’, functioning to govern and manage migration by the exclusion of the ‘undesirable outsider’ (de Genova 2013).

Within this border spectacle, in a space of lawlessness, moves the migrant, in search for opportunities (Khosravi 2007: 324). Illegal, clandestine, undocumented, asylum seekers, boat refugees, economic migrants, fortune seekers, irregular migrants: the names are various and aim at categorizing a large variety of cultural identities and motivations into the mold of the ‘other’ (Andersson 2014: 8). They are the concepts that dominate the media and political debate and because of that reifies people to a demarcated group of helpless, desperate and victimized people that have no agency. It overlooks the pluriformity in nationalities, religion, gender, age and the diversity of dreams, ambitions and opinions. It tends to diminish the complexity of being human and at the same time refuses to look at the fortitude that brings them to cross the desert and sea. Debates are either focused on their victimization in their search for safety or on their ignorance in their search for prosperity. ‘The migrant’ has become an icon of heroism, an object of scrutiny, a subject of heated debate, an example of inequality, a target of racism and the illegalised opposite of the legitimate citizen. His or her shadowed life, as a result of restricted mobility, functions as a means to reconstruct national identities and shines “a light on the role of movement in our understanding of what it means to be a fulfilled, rights-bearing human being” (ibid.: 7).

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Borders are not fixed but dynamic and shaped by “a multiplicity of actors, movements and discourses” (De Genova et al. 2015: 15). They are spaces of political contestations, negotiations, challenges and reinforcements. Regardless their mobility restrictions, migrants move and by their very movement, they reconstruct the power relations that evolve around the border. Illegalised migration is an act of defiance and self-control. It causes a “spatial reconﬁguration of sovereign practices that destabilizes naturalized assumptions about political belonging” (McNevin 2006: 136). The politics of belonging in this sense, “encompasses contestations both in relation to the participatory dimension of citizenship as well as in relation to issues of the status and

entitlements such membership entails” (Yuval-Davis 2006: 205). Yet as the structural exclusion “may suggest a passive role for the travelers targeted by controls, (…) they actively participate in their making as migrants” (Andersson 2014: 15). Border transgressors make use of tactical negotiations that both undermine and reinforce border rituals, since “[b]order crossing is, after all, a matter of performance” (Khosravi 2007: 330). In the end, migrants as both strategic and submissive actors are part-takers in both the making and unmaking of the European border politics that is excluding and stigmatizing them as the ‘feared outsider’. With their attempts to overcome the borders imposed on them, they do not only challenge, but also contribute to their existence. It reveals the interaction of power dynamics between state policies and migrants that construct the contemporary European border.

Setting and Methodology

Situated at the border of Europe, and as an independent micro-state, Malta appeared to be the best place to witness the direct negotiations and contestations of migrants regarding border policies and to search for their experiences and narratives. It also offered sight to the national implementation of European border protection that has transformed Malta into a modern carceral regime (Gerard 2014: ix). While being in Malta, access seemed to be the greatest struggle. Although I had already contacted some NGOs before I left to help me get in touch with

migrants, most were not responding or replied with great delays. In the meantime I looked for migrants online, and although I found a few, the response was minimal. It took great efforts and patience to get in touch with NGOs and migrants, something that reveals the detachment of migrants with Maltese society. The difficulties I encountered in getting access had partly to do with migrants unwillingness to share their experiences. I found out that conducting research on people’s life stories is very difficult when doing it among those that use secrecy as a protective means to safeguard their interests. However, it was also resulting from the larger exclusionary

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structures that fence them off society, as a result of national and European migration policies. Migrants are structurally categorized as the ‘other’ by a wide array of exclusionary discourses and practices.Both the exclusionary practices arriving from state policies and society and the tactical concealment migrants used to hide themselves already revealed in itself the complex power dynamics inherent of the European border politics. Paradoxically the silence I encountered revealed much more than I had expected.

Nevertheless I eventually gained access to the Balzan family centre, an open migrant residency centre ran by the catholic NGO Emigrants’ Commission. I started visiting regularly and since I was partly interested in the gendered experiences, I finally ended up cooking with a group of women in the house, as a means to build relationships of trust with them. Furthermore I found informants online and through snowball sampling. My arguments in this thesis are formed by the data I gained by interviews, conversations and observations with migrants and those working with them in Malta. In total I have spoken to about 28 people and approximately 15 can be counted as interviews. The other 13 were more informal conversations or short encounters, which due to language barriers, unwillingness of the person in question or other circumstances unfortunately did not lead to a more formal interview (see appendix 1). Additional information arrives from extensive online research, following public debates in the media and by my personal knowledge I gained over the years through my husband and his friends about undocumented life in Europe. The names of my informants are anonymized to safeguard their privacy, since most stories concern sensitive information. Some quotes are translated from Arabic or edited to enhance readability.

Reflection: The Ethnographic Gaze of the Border Spectacle

I left for Malta together with my husband, who, as someone who has been through a similar experience as my informants - travelling to Libya, crossing the sea ‘irregularly’ by boat and living undocumented in Europe - has made me witness the embodied experience of his position as a migrant throughout the years. Since he is originally from Egypt, he helped me during my fieldwork as both my Arabic translator and as a gatekeeper, making people more at ease by his shared experiences and enhancing their trust towards me. Although my husband can be considered as my main inspiration, there has always been an ambiguous and uncomfortable feeling around my research interests. For him, being continuously reminded by his history and identity as a migrant, still feeling ashamed of this minority position and former dependency on irregular movement networks, and not believing any research can make a change in this ongoing

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inequality and human rights abuses; seeing his wife engaged in these issues was an ongoing struggle. He often told me that he was involuntarily confronted with a past that he preferred to forget about. I realised that by the very materialisation of my studies, his minority position based on his past got continuously reproduced and referred to. Although my intentions were and still are the opposite, the constant reminder of being the ‘other’, the ‘unwanted outsider’, the ‘illegal’ or the ‘foreigner’ has been a real burden and affected our relationship as well. While the

boundaries of otherness faded partly by our marriage, my research has set them back to a certain extent. Nevertheless, my husband offered me the ultimate anthropological reflection on my research and the matter of migration. Through his reflections and position I realised that, as the ethnographer in the field studying migrants, I became myself guilty of what de Genova calls the ‘spectacle’ of the border gaze (2013). By involving my husband into my research I made him the very personification of the ‘other’, I turned him into the object of my personal border gaze. The border spectacle generates a configuration of images and discursive formations that result in an essentialised notion of ‘illegality’. The spectacle holds the power of subjugating migrants to the gaze of the powerful spectator that reduces them to mere objects of categorization and exclusion. This exhibitionary system makes migrants observable, and therefore controllable, and “upholds and enhances the iconicity of particular fetishized figures of ‘illegal immigration’” (De Genova 2013: 1181). The uncomfortable feelings of my husband regarding my research also arrived from being subjugated to this very border spectacle. By reminding and referring him to his history, I unintentionally made him the personification of the border: he involuntarily became the border. The ethnographic gaze holds a power imbalance in itself, as it touches on a fetishism of the subordinate by constructing him or her in the very category one (often) aims to criticize.When watching an item on ‘boat migrants’ in Turkey on the Dutch news, I realised how powerful this border gaze was.3_{The item showed a small inflatable boat loaded with people on the coast of}

Turkey ready to take off to the island Kos in Greece at dusk. A family with two young children were running towards the boat, worried they might not make it since the motor was already roaring. Panicked the family tried to swim through the water to reach the boat, the children crying. But the most astonishing of this scene were the flashlights reflected by the boat and the people, revealing that the beach was full of journalists. The gaze of the cameras were silently watching the tragedy evolving on the coast of Turkey, exhibiting people in their most vulnerable, depriving them of their respectability, dignity and humanity. Later the pictures would go all over the world with people looking in amazement, reinforcing the border spectacle.The border gaze

3_{NOS Journaal 05-06-2015, 8.45 min.}_{http://www.npo.nl/nos-journaal/05-06-2015/POW_00942047}_(last

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represented in this media example reveals a fetishism that contributes to the victimization, categorization and reification of people that are confined in their mobility and reduced to people of less value. By being myself a spectator and reproducing the terminology and ‘otherness’ surrounding migration, I remain guilty of the fetishism that objectifies my informants to the ethnographic gaze. This objectification is similar to what Marx called ‘commodity fetishism’, as it transforms and diminishes the subjective stories into the objective categorization of certain qualities and values that are attached to it (1867). In this way, the fetishized ‘migrant’ becomes only interesting for the ethnographic gaze when he or she resembles features of the ascribed category, and therefore ‘becomes’ the category. As Sara Ahmed states: “Stranger fetishism is a fetishism of figures: it invests the figure of the stranger with a life of its own insofar as it cuts ‘the stranger’ off from the histories of its determination” (2000: 5; author’s italics). By labelling migrants in this sense by the very category, the histories of its construction become concealed and unquestioned.

The essentialisation of migrants through the border spectacle and the socio-political production of ‘illegality’ is also the focus of Andersson’s book ‘Illegality, Inc.’ (2014). Andersson states that: “The illegality industry, it seems, reduces and flattens its migrant “product” in the borderlands by funnelling a wide array of personal stories and cultures into this one generic mold of migrant illegality” (ibid.: 8). In this way, the objectification of the migrant becomes reproduced, reified and obsessed. This obsession has led to a real industry around migrant illegality, profiting border guards, journalists and academics alike (ibid.: 12). The lucrativity of the topic gives a bitter taste to the purpose of doing this research, namely deconstructing borders and the categories of those that cross them. I remember how guilty I felt when collecting my data in the field by asking people reliving their darkest memories to help me finish my studies and build on my career. Benefiting from such inequality is exactly what I aimed to oppose. Besides, I have been fully aware of the constructing power I hold in my writing, since my informants are pushed into stigmatized positions that are constantly misused, marginalised and under attack, be it from state professionals or the public debate. There lies a risk behind the knowledge production of the margins, since it can be profited from and even contribute to the continuation of the existing exclusionary border politics (ibid.: 14). Yet, by deconstructing their homogeneity and giving room for the subjective stories, be it through analytical concepts, I hope to show the complexities behind the human experience of labels, ‘othering’ and exclusion.

I will now turn to the chapters of my thesis that discuss migrants’ experiences, negotiations and challenges of the European border politics while passing through different spatial fields, starting from their migratory motivations to their disembarkation and settlement in Malta. Chapter 1 will

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entail the experience of becoming uprooted, the multiplicity of motivations for migration, the structural causes that are at root of migration and the lived experiences, facilitation and

negotiations of the journey. Chapter 2 will elaborate on the arrival in Malta and the exclusionary practices and symbolic boundaries migrants face in the light of the national implementation of the European border politics. Chapter 3 will show the tactical negotiations migrants use to overcome these boundaries and the ways they both construct and subvert existing power relations. It will illustrate how among others secrecy is used as both a constraining and deliberating tactic.

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Chapter 1: The Journey

Section 1: Uprooted Lives

1.1.1 Embodied Displacement

“The first loss which the rightless suffered was the loss of their homes, and this meant the loss of the entire social texture into which they were born and in which they established for themselves a distinct place in the world”

(Hannah Arendt 1968: 173)

Becoming uprooted from home is, as Hannah Arendt subtly shows, a transformative experience that shapes new perceptions of identity and belonging. For the rightless in the contemporary world this means being subjugated to constraints of power that restrict them in their mobility, categorize them as outsider and expose them to a wide array of exclusionary practices. When returning is not self-evident, finding a new home can be a neverending journey, since “what is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one” (Arendt 1968: 173). Being ‘homeless’ can have a large impact on one’s worldview and cosmologies of life. It shapes new notions of the self and other and influences feelings of trust and safety. It exposes people to a life outside the political, a life in lawlessness. It brings loss, hope, regret and pain. As Edward Said stated on exile: ”It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted” (Said 2000: 173).

Sitting over a coffee in his cafe next to the busstation in Valletta, Samir from Sudan explained me the complexity of being uprooted. Unlike most of my informants, Samir was very open in sharing his experiences. His way of talking and his charismatic attitude reflected a clear political position on human rights and equality. The sharpness in his voice and the way his body moved while he was speaking revealed a lived frustration about the experience of not fully belonging. His identity had taken form by the very definition of an uprooted life, of being ‘homeless’: “I’m not

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years, 17 years I was in Sudan, and 15 years outside of Sudan. What do you think, I’m Sudanese or I’m European? I don’t know really… Sometimes when I think: I can live there or I can live here, I don’t know…”

Displacement can become part of one’s identity and result in an embodied liminality. For most migrants today, the destination is never fully reached. For Amira homelessness had always been an inherent part of her identity. Amira was born in Eritrea but fled her country with her family when she was only two years old. She grew up in Ethiopia being a refugee. Being undocumented, the authorities demanded her to leave the country when she turned 18. She lived a hidden life, married her Somalian husband who was himself a migrant as well, and gave birth to a daughter. Since her husband did not speak Amharic it was hard to hide that he was a migrant. They had to be cautious not to be seen by the authorities. When one day a warrant came that demanded their leave, they decided to flee overnight to Sudan, leaving their daughter behind with her mother. They finally travelled on to Libya where they both got imprisoned while she was pregnant. When one day a man came to visit the prison and bought them free so they could work for him, they managed to escape. Again they had to live a hidden life in Libya, in the meantime Amira gave birth to her son. They decided to make the boat journey to Europe and eventually landed in Malta.

Amira’s whole life has been formed by the insecurities and exclusion of being a migrant. During the times I visited the Balzan family centre, where she lived with her husband and son, she never smiled. At times when there were no other women around, she used to complain to me in Arabic about the difficulties she encountered among the other women, not being accepted since she was not one of them. From the few words I could understand I figured she felt discriminated within the group of mainly Somali and Ethiopian women. Even though she had lived most of her life in Ethiopia, she was still an outsider among them. She said the Somali women did not like that she had married a Somali man. Thus for Amira, the feelings of exclusion that were inherent to her identity as a migrant, evolved even into the personal space of her new home where she lived with other migrants. Amira’s lost sense of belonging is reflected in her motivation to leave Ethiopia, but also by her aspirations to leave Malta and resettle in the US. She told me a few times how she hoped to be selected for resettlement, even asked my husband if he knew an independent house for them to rent, so as to enhance their chances to be selected by the US embassy. She hoped to have the opportunity to be reunited with her daughter in the US. Her complaints about the difficulties in her life revealed the struggle of finding oneself at peace at a certain place. Her embodied statelessness resulted in a restlessness of non-belonging, wherever her life was

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evolving. Her aspirations were all the time focused towards the future, hoping to find a better place to belong.

1.1.2 Fragmented Journeys

Exchanging the securities and familiarity of home for the insecurities and unfamiliarity of new worlds can be exciting and frightening at the same time. Despite the hopes for finding a new place in the world, leaving home is not an easy choice, and the motivations that underlie this choice are multiple, formed over time and encouraged by the socio-political context. The current discourse on migration motivations or its ‘push and pull’ factors, often sustains in a generalised notion of desperate people fleeing war or poverty, attracted by the liberties of Europe. Yet in fact reality is more complex than that. Because of the high costs of migration, the people that migrate are not the poorest people. Besides, studies reveal that social and economic development in Sub-Saharan African countries even leads to increased migration (de Haas 2008: 1318). The general assumption that migration is a direct result from a growing ‘hunger’ in war-stricken and poverty plagued Africa overlooks the “altogether more subtle, and more insidious, hunger pangs than those imagined by the media” (Andersson 2014: 18). Rural villages in the African continent are not isolated from the universal imaginary of globalisation and transnationalism. Lack of

perspectives, the social, political and economic inability for self-realization and the aspired status of modern-day cosmopolitanism are equally feeding the endeavour to move. Contemporary illegalised migration should therefore not only be regarded as a result of economic and political turmoil, but even so as a response to closed borders, inequality and the “globalized imaginations of a new era” (ibid.: 20).

The danger in the political and social debate regarding migration is the tendency to oversimplify the multiplicity and complexity of migration motivations by reducing them to mere abstractions of ‘political’ or ‘economic’ motivations. Used in the Eurocentric logic of current migration policies, these conceptualisations too easily delegitimize the reified economical motives while legitimizing political ones. The generalisation of migration motivations lead to an essentialised notion of migrants, framing them into these categories which then become to define their identity and authenticity. The motives to migrate cannot just be simplified to one condition as it neglects the complexity and the possibility of multiple motives. As Samir noted: “When we say migration, everyone, when they say migration, they think the first thing is escaping from the war. This is the first thing. But there is many things!” Samir’s motive to leave his country had partly to do with the experienced social and political inequality but there were other issues as well. As the

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eldest of his family he felt responsible to take care of them: “I had to leave because I have to fight for my family, I have to give my family food. (…) My mother she needs to go to hospital, the government they cannot help. Then who can do it, I have to do it. So I don’t care where I go, I don’t care, I don’t care if I go to Palestine, or Afghanistan or Japan, for me it’s the same. When I work, I work.” Besides looking for social equality and work, the mandatory military service in Sudan was something he did not want to be involved in: ”How can I… I am seventeen and have to be a soldier? It’s not only in Sudan, also in Kenia, Nigeria, everywhere. How you have to be… You are eighteen and you have to be a soldier? You are still young, you don’t know the life, you are fighting with uniforms for this thing… So all this is stupid things.” Conscription can indeed be experienced as a waste of time or against one’s political or humanitarian principles. In Egypt for example, many young men try everything they can to escape military service, often by

pretending they are still studying or by buying false documents to guarantee their exemption from conscription. Some flee their country before their call for service, just like Samir when he was only seventeen.

Mohammed Nour from Somalia negotiated and extended his decision to migrate over a long period of time and through different spatial fields. Sitting in his still improvised new radio-studio in Hamrun, where he had just managed to set up an NGO connecting African journalists and promoting integration of migrants in Malta, he explained to me the difficulties of his decision to leave Somalia. Being happily married with two children he loved his job and developed his career as an active journalist in Somalia. Yet as a journalist he found himself in a dangerous profession, especially since he committed himself to defending human rights issues. The presence of the militant organisation Al Shabaab, who demanded his withdrawal from his job, made his work a risky business: “The situation [got] dangerous every year, every month, every week.” He received death threats from Al Shabaab for continuing his work, which made him first of all move to different cities around Somalia to continue his life and work. Yet the threats became worse over the years, so for the sake of his own safety and that of his family, Mohammed Nour finally decided to leave the country to find work in Ethiopia. Since the political situation in Ethiopia could not satisfy his passion for journalism and limited his future perspectives, he decided to travel onwards to Sudan, where he faced the same problems: “No elections, no voice for the people, no freedom of speech and no freedom of movement.” He finally met some friends who suggested him to join them on their trip to Libya. His longing for democracy, free press and his fight for human rights made him decide to cross the desert to Libya, since the smuggler that brought him told him that it would be easy from there to travel to Europe.

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Mohammed Nour’s negotiations regarding the threatening situation were depending on the spatial, financial and social context. His journey was negotiated from the local level and slowly expanding to the global. The course of travel and the destinations were subject to the possibilities that crossed his path and the high dependency on his social ties. He explained to me how he was kidnapped in the desert of Libya by smugglers who demanded ransom money. He called his mother on the satellite phone and begged her to pay so he could continue the journey. Not much later he lost all his money in Tripoli and called her again to ask her for money to be able to cross the Mediterranean. She had to sell her land, the land that was her last savings, and send him the money. Migration in this sense can be seen as a family investment, since Mohammed Nour is now working to pay his mother back and earn a living for her and his wife and children back in Somalia. Social connections are a crucial means in the facilitation of migration, both by the exchange of money and information. During my interviews, it struck me how many people got help from fellow travellers or friends to continue their journey. When Mohammed Nour was not able to ask his mother for money again after being robbed and kidnapped for the second time in Sabha, Libya, he received some money from fellow Africans to continue his journey to Tripoli: “And then they gathered some money together, some people, from Africa, and they give me, and I have some money in my pocket. But 200 I put in, I give 500 to the trafficker man.” Friends or fellow travellers on the way can be regarded as transient social ties, since most contacts remain only for a short period and are not rooted in kinship or connections back home (Schapendonk 2012: 35). They are casual encounters on the way or bonds that exist by finding each other in the same hardships. Maybe this recognition or identification facilitates the solidarity among fellow countrymen, since it is striking how they help each other without having any social obligations. It is possible that religion or nationalism plays a role in this, as most people identify their friends by a shared national or religious background (Collyer 2007: 681). But nationality or religion do not always play a role, solidarity can also be based on a shared goal or being African.

Moussa from Guinea experienced a similar solidarity. When he found himself trapped in Niger, not being able to earn enough money to continue his journey to Libya, the friends he met there helped him collecting the money: “…and the people start, I tell them my history, and the people start giving, the friends, immediately, and everyone give some money and then they pay my ticket.” By sharing the hardships of his background Moussa created his own personal charity. Moussa intentionally never imagined himself leaving his country: “I never imagined the time that I will go, I will become this person today, I never imagined I would try to cross the desert or the sea.” His life was good in Guinea and his father earned enough money for him not to have financial worries. He had dreams of becoming a journalist and helping the poor. But when after

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the tragic death of his girlfriend his uncle held him responsible, things got complicated. He got chased after by his uncle and also the political situation in the country worsened. Since his uncle was after clearing his honour and was simultaneously his father’s political enemy, backed-up by the ruling government, the political situation at that time facilitated his uncle to take personal revenge on Moussa: “In Guinea, if you are with the government you can do whatever you want, you know…” He fled to Senegal, yet could not find peace of mind: “When I was in Senegal I used to be with some of my family members, but I just, I had nightmares at that time, I used to see my uncle running after me, I used to see people, I used to hear voices, and I used to be feared all the time and scared, because I know that if he knows that I’m there he will come. Because he have the money, he have the power…” Being chased after even into his dreams, suffering from nightmares and anxiety, Moussa hoped to find safety and peace in Libya: “I used to believe, that when I arrive to Libya they will help me, because the Libyan government used to come in my country, build a school, Arabic school, build mosques, so they used to be good. I used to think that when I go there I will be safe.” He travelled all the way through Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger to Libya, where he eventually found himself subject to racism and a developing civil war. He decided to cross the Mediterranean and finally landed in Malta.

From the Eurocentric notions underlying contemporary asylum frameworks, the story of Moussa, compared to that of Mohammed Nour, is not easily mouldable in the category of ‘political’ migration motivation. His motivations reveal very personal aspects that are difficult to proof. Because of this, Moussa’s asylum claim in Malta was initially rejected. This shows the inconsistencies in the legal framework through which migration is judged. To be an ‘authentic’ political refugee, entails delimiting characteristics that overlook the complexity of social life. Simultaneously it excludes the multiplicity of aspirations and the shifting destinations. Migration is not a static thing but a process of continuous negotiations. The progress of the journey or the aspiration of movement in general is always dependent on the social-political context and constantly subject to change. “They are influenced by, among others, the trajectories of other people, objects, capital, rules and information” (Schapendonk 2012: 32). The trajectories of migration therefore do not always occur according to previous considered plans, they are fragmented and destinations are convertible (ibid.: 34). As Collyer notes, even speaking of migration can presume a wrong idea of what migration really entails: “Even to consider these journeys as migration to Europe or to North America is to impose a linear logic which is absent from the expressed intentions of many migrants who see themselves as transients in search of opportunity, wherever it may be found” (2007: 668). The fragmentation of the journeys and the often unexpected outcome of destination is predominantly a consequence of restricted border

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policies. Although there might be destination points in mind, it eventually depends on the facilitation of migration how mobility is negotiated.

1.1.3 Mobility and Transit

Besides the dependency on family and transient social ties - donating money, food and sharing housing, job opportunities and information - crossing borders has for most become highly dependent on human smugglers. Contacts of smugglers that facilitate the crossing through the desert or over sea are often found via via. Although smugglers are often portrayed as abstract mafia-like figures, being part of large international criminal networks, many smugglers are just local people trying to earn a living on the demand for support in border crossing (Khosravi 2010: 22; de Haas 2008: 1308). In fact, some migrants fulfil smuggling roles themselves, as they are recruited by their knowledge of certain areas or as experts of navigation at sea. While sitting on a pier in the harbour of Marsaxlokk, surrounded by the yellow and blue Maltese fishing boats, Hassan, a fisherman from Egypt, told me how he got approached by a smuggler in Libya to be the captain of the boat to Italy. In return he would get paid to do the crossing, rather than having to pay himself. He managed to navigate the boat to Italy and later left for Malta to work again as a fisherman. During his work in Malta he once experienced standing on the other side: while being out at sea, he and his colleagues found a ship with migrants but were not allowed to take them aboard. Hassan’s story shows the thin line that exists between smugglers and migrants. Although abuse and violence does occur by smugglers, migrants cannot be reduced to their mere victims that are surrendered to their power. They make use of tactical negotiations to minimize risks and gain their goals. In the end, smuggling is a service that is subject to negotiations from both sides, even though the power relations are often far from equal.

For Oumar, who travelled from Guinea-Bissau to Libya, the smugglers that brought him through the desert were even experienced as a means of protection or as patrons along the way. In his case the border guards were the real danger: “…several border guards they stopped us and asked us money, when you have money you give, when you do not have they take you, they threaten you, they beat you. Some people from me… I am lucky, because the driver who took us to Libya he has done for me well, so that is why I’m not... But for my friend… If you do not have money it is a problem for you.” The positive experience is emphasized by the fact that Oumar uses the term ‘driver’ instead of ‘smuggler’, since the latter has much more negative connotations than the former. Nonetheless, there are also negative experiences. Like Mohammed Nour who got

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his smugglers in the desert of Niger. They told him to walk for 24 hours to Libya, but these 24 hours turned into 5 days, with people dying along the way. Joseph, a young and shy man from Eritrea, almost in a whisper entrusted me how he got kidnapped in the Egyptian desert, being tortured and finally released and left for death on the street. Due to the ambiguous nature of smuggling, it really depends on the goodwill of the person whether smugglers treat people good or bad. Smugglers should therefore be regarded more in the light of offering a service on the dodgy ends of the law, which can be abused just because of its manifestation in a space of lawlessness. In this sense, not so much the smugglers, but the border politics itself exposes border crossers to death, violence and torture, since “[t]he brutality of human smuggling has increased with the tightening of border control” (Khosravi 2010: 102). Migrants do not choose to move in this space of lawlessness and be subject to danger, but as long as the legal restriction to cross the border remains, they keep depending on the smugglers who can either help or abuse them.

Despite what most media and the public debate seem to assume, none of the migrants I spoke to in the field had the intention of going to Europe in the first place. Regardless their migration motivation, all started looking for safety, job opportunities or political stability in the region, especially Libya. The collective imaginary of Libya as a country with work opportunities and good life perspectives previously made it for most people a desired destination country. Betty, a young woman from Ethiopia, told me she had travelled to Libya by plane on a visa with a group of friends to search for work. When I met Betty in her room in the Balzan family centre one afternoon, she warmly welcomed me as if we were long-time friends. Her two year-old son was sleeping on the bed. The room was simple but cosy, there were pictures of Mary and Jesus on the wall and she wore a little cross around her neck. Sitting on the couch she emotionally entrusted me her story. In the beginning her life had been all good and well, she had liked Libya, had a good job and in the weekends she used to hang out with her friends. She even met her Ethiopian husband there and got married. She had been living in Libya without problems for 3 years, until Ghaddafi got killed in 2011. That’s when everything changed. She decided to leave Libya, because as a Christian it was not safe anymore. The police could invade their house anytime and arrest them or do ‘bad things’ to them. Since there is no Ethiopian embassy in Libya, she went to the Sudanese embassy to ask for help. But the options were limited. There were many Sudanese who got a visa back to their country, but for Betty it was different. They told her it would take a lot of time and money to cooperate with the Ethiopian government to get her back to Ethiopia, she would be trapped in a bureaucratic hassle. It would be a risky journey as well, since she had to travel by land to Egypt, on to Sudan and from Sudan to Ethiopia. She was afraid of finding

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dangers on the way, anything could happen. Another option she had was travelling by sea to Europe to find safety there. Although she knew of the risks of crossing the sea, she decided it was her only chance. “If I choose bahr [Arabic for ‘sea’] maybe I die, but it’s better than the dangers on the way to Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia.” Betty’s story reveals that she had only two choices of leaving the country, finding herself in the midst of a rapidly developing civil war. Most of my informants told me that since the fall of Ghaddafi, Libya had been an unbearable place to live in. The political chaos targets mainly migrants. Since Libya has no program

whatsoever to repatriate people back to their own country, many migrants are stuck in Libya. The risk of detention is all around and many of my informants told me that since they have darker skin colours, they were afraid to go on the streets because there was a great chance to get caught. Oumar told me: “Blacks they are not safe in Libya, when you are black, especially Tripoli,

Benghazi… It’s very hard for blacks to live there”. In fact, most of my informants have been in detention in Libya, sometimes even more than once and even pregnant women found themselves locked up for long periods of time. Finding a different reality in Libya than expected, migrants negotiate the options at hand. Since there is transport provided, from human smugglers who anticipate on the needs of migrants, travelling to Europe by boats is often the only way out. At the same time the growing political instability enforces the possibilities for irregular journeys, since in the light of the social and political chaos, corruption offers way to mobility. It reveals the versatile nature of migration, turning Libya from a destination country into a country of transit. This is also stated by Mohammed Akeela, the only staff member of the UNHCR still remaining in Libya, since due to the civil war the ability for UNHCR to operate is very limited. He argues that, in the case of Libya: “…basically people are detained for indefinite periods of time. Once you are released, you may get arrested again. So they have no choice, they have to cross [the sea]. This is the only option for them. Libya is not a signatory of the Geneva Convention. There is no legal framework to protect refugees and asylum seekers. Even if you are registered with the UNHCR, you may still end up detained. If you look at refugees in general, their intention is to stay in Libya, but because of the deteriorating security situation in Libya, most are forced to leave the country illegally.”4

Although the sea routes have been used for many years, they become more evident in the light of Libya’s political instability. Oumar crossed the sea on an inflatable dinghy with 128 other

passengers. Sitting on a terrace overlooking the bay in Valletta he told me how the smugglers had

4_{Mohammed Akeela in: ‘Trapped and Forgotten: Libya’s Migrant Jails (part 2)’,}

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promised him a comfortable and stable boat with enough food and water, but when he reached the sea he found out it was a big lie: “Yeah because when you are in Libya, they say you have water, you have everything (…) they put everything in the boat, yeah they will tell you because you pay money, they will put everything in the boat (…) you think it’s a very good comfortable ship like this one [pointing at ship in harbour], very strong. But finally when you reach at the sea, you see these plastic…” Often migrants are ill-informed by the length of the journey. Smugglers tell them that if they pay the money, everything will be provided and some believe that the crossing will only take a couple of hours. When they find out that in reality the boat is just an old and overloaded fishing boat, or even an inflatable dinghy, taking days, if not a week to cross the Mediterranean sea, they have no other choice but to surrender. As a direct result of the

securitization of migration, migrants today are subjugated to perilous journeys and great insecurities.

Although motivations vary tremendously and always entail personal objectives and imaginations, most motives are related to structural instabilities in countries of origin and on the way. These include political instability, economic uncertainty, social inequality, violence and persecution (Collyer 2007: 673). The roots of these problems can be traced back to history and are in fact often remains of Europe’s colonial legacy. The deprivations of African resources and the conservation of political instability still remain due to ongoing imperialist interventions by

multinationals and political dominance of the West. To analyse how they shape the daily lives and struggles of people and the share they have in contemporary migration patterns, stretches far beyond the scope of this thesis. Without devoting myself to a historical analysis of the neo-colonial domination and intervention politics behind contemporary migration and its accompanying border politics, I will just shortly illustrate the normative neoliberal discourse influencing policy-making, migrants’ personal perceptions of post-colonial Africa and the ongoing colonial tradition that the European border politics seems to pursue.

Section 2: Europe’s Colonial Tradition

Following the news in the aftermath of the dramatic shipwreck on the 19th of April 2015, it is striking to see the discourse that is developing in media and politics. Even though the horrors of people drowning at the shores of Europe’s Southern border is an issue that is already going on

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for decades, the EU finally called for a crisis meeting. Unfortunately however, they came up with a ten point plan that barely seems to tackle the roots of the problem.5_{One of the strategies that}

came up is the excessively repeated and outdated defending mechanism of over-securitization of the European border, this time by seizing smugglers’ boats on the Libyan shores to make sure they cannot be used to cross the Mediterranean. However, an important side effect is neglected since this strategy can have negative consequences. When certain routes are cut off, the demand for smuggling routes becomes higher and results in more dangerous routes with less seaworthy boats. This is already going on, since the fact that people take the perilous journey over sea is the direct result of not having the safer opportunity to fly or take routes over land. The strategy is made by the presumption that smuggling causes migration, even though in reality smuggling responds to a growing demand.6_{The fact that policies focus on the smugglers as the real cause of}

migration, removes the attention from the responsibilities Europe has regarding the geo-political problems in the world. Europe’s colonial legacy and ongoing imperialism as a monopolist in the international market and as a political ally in the intervention politics of the US has had huge consequences for the living conditions of millions of people in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. As recent studies reveal, the World Bank alone has been responsible for the displacement of 3.4 million people, forcing them off their land, taking their jobs and depriving them of social security and stability.7_{As long as Europe’s share in the uprooted lives of people is unacknowledged, the}

roots of contemporary migration will not be tackled and more laws will be implemented with only greater dramatic consequences for humanity.

Samir was very explicit in blaming neo-colonialism and imperialism as a main cause for people moving out of Africa. Samir, who left Sudan when he was only seventeen, told me his decision to migrate was formed by the inequality he experienced in Sudan that was rooted in Western

imperialism. He argued that the problem in Africa is that no one knows his rights, and that therefore foreign governments play corrupt games with the African governments so they can oppress the people. He said that ignorance is the worst problem in Africa, because if the people do not know their rights, they will always be submissive. He despised the modern forms of imperialism, since it was less direct than it had been in the past: “…those colonizing countries,

5_{20-05-2015, European Commission Press Release,}_{http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-4813_en.htm}

(last visited 10-06-2015)

6_{25-04-2015, Alexander Betts, War on Trafficking Wrong Way to Tackle Crisis of Migrant Deaths, The Guardian,}

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/25/war-on-trafficking-wrong-way-to-tackle-crisis-of-migrant-deaths (last visited 29-04-2015)

7_{16-04-2015, Sasha Shavkin and Michael Hudson, New Investigation Reveals 3.4m displaced by World Bank,}

see: http://www.icij.org/blog/2015/04/new-investigation-reveals-34m-displaced-world-bank (last visited 13-05-2015)

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they do not remove their hands from those countries, from Africa. We are always like this, all our lives like this. (…) I prefer the colonization by the gun, because by the gun you can understand they are colonizing you. But they are colonizing now on the ground and this is so bad, they are colonizing you with the people from the country. You cannot know of them, you don’t know if he is with the country or against the country. Because he is from the country.” The indirect manifestation of neo-colonialism is characteristic for our time, it is formed by a globalised system of liberal interests, where the illusion of political independency removes the eye from the

deprivation on the ground. It is an invisible form of colonialism that is harder to tackle, since the ruling corrupt governments are often part of the game.

According to Samir, the current neo-liberal world order lies at the roots of migration: “…these things, those colonizing countries, they’ve fucked those countries, they’ve fucked all Africa. And this is a problem for the migration, the migrants they are coming, they cannot stop them. You never can stop them, if you want to stop the migration you have to stop the colonization.” He compared the lives of the ‘colonized’ as living the lives of animals, deprived of living a humane life with rights. In the light of Samir’s argumentation on neo-colonialism, current immobility regimes and migration management can also be regarded as a modern form of colonial power exercise, implemented on the colonized and immobilized yet moving subject: the migrant. As colonial occupation was predominantly a matter of territorial occupation, including all its imaginaries, categorizations and hierarchies, modern deterritorialised forms of colonialism focus on a transnational exercise of power (Mbembe 2003). Although territory still plays a crucial role in the backdrop of the sovereign imagination of the ‘threatened’ nation-state, space in ‘migratory colonialism’ takes a more fluid form. It is more the politics of space than the physical space that matters, since borders have become illusive and versatile. Just as the occupation of the colonized in pasttimes entailed exclusion from equal participation, the exclusion of migrants, “like their illicit mobility, is now a global condition” (Andersson 2014: 6).

In other words, contemporary forms of securitization and border control can be seen in the light of what Mbembe calls ‘late-modern colonial occupation’ (2003: 27). This colonial occupation is manifested in the control over migrant’s body, identity and mobility. Mbembe’s illustration of modern colonial occupation in the case of Palestine is also adaptable to the current securitization and immobility regimes targeting undesired migrants. As he states: “Under conditions of late-modern colonial occupation, surveillance is both inward and outward-oriented, the eye acting as weapon and vice versa” (ibid.: 28). This top-down surveillance, arriving from ‘vertical

Migrants’ passage : the making and unmaking of the European border in Malta