The practices of the everyday war against migrations (and its paradoxes)

Starting from the Seventies, and particularly since the beginning of the Nineties, the practices adopted in order to manage international migrations give the impression to progressively reproduce a «revolving door» dynamics. By this metaphor we refer to the fact that nowadays borders ambivalently work as filters, which may alternatively block or tolerate and promote the movement of people, always conditioning it.

From the one side, borders can actually arrest migrant’s movement directly form the start (through the selection of Visa – see D. Bigo, E. Guild, Culture et Conflits,n. 49, 2003), or rather concentrate their effects in some geographical areas (thus re-naturalising themselves, as in the case of Mediterranean sea and of the desert between Us and Mexico), or even converge in some «points of intensity» (Tijuana, Ceuta, Melilla, Lampedusa etc.).

From the other side – and this is probably the most relevant of the two directions – the «doors» appear to be deliberately open, in the sense that borders, through «naturally» or «culturally» selecting people, are definitely porous: they let get in insofar as they mark people who, legally or illegally, cross them. In other terms, once migrants enter into «host» countries, they can even materially integrate themselves (through the network of informal and personal relations and capitals that they directly enact within the new societies), but in the most of the cases their status remain under suspicion for the very fact of having crossed a border – thus depending on the blackmail of a Visa and its expiration terms.

The border they have crossed will actually follow them for all the time of their permanence in the new country. And their biographies, as well as their actual possibilities of political integration, will be marked by the very fact of not belonging to that country – materially translating itself into a particularly precarious condition of «deportability». Such a predicament is therefore reflected into the paradox of a politics «on migrations» that officially speaks about a peaceful and stable integration and a broader social cohesion, actually reproducing an endless condition of irregularity and clandestinity – thus legitimising policies of law enforcement if not of war against migrations.

The practices of the everyday war against migrations (and its paradoxes)