Beyond Geographic Borders.

• Author: Stanley, Chuck
• Position: The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe: Detention, Deportation, Drowning

A Review of The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe: Detention, Deportation, Drowning

Edited by Yolande Jansen, Robin Celibates, and Joost de Bloois

(London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014), 262 pages.

Lew would argue that suffering and death in hostile border regions, under-equipped detention facilities, or unsafe working and living conditions are anything other than tragic consequences of failing immigration systems around the world. But, as Julien Jeandesboz argues in The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe, exploitation, abuse, and even death of undocumented immigrants can be convincingly described as inherent features of systematic domination rather than a failure of order in Europe's immigration system (1). The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe is edited by University of Amsterdam professors Yolande Jansen, Robin Celibates, and Joost de Bloois, and draws together contributions by academics from a variety of social science disciplines to examine the implications of the Eurozone immigration regime. The authors examine the European approach to immigration in recent decades as one that has proliferated and strengthened, rather than dissolved, national borders. As Nicholas De Genova asserts in the book's opening sentence, "[i]f there were no borders, there would be no migrants-- only mobility." (2) Consequently, the authors treat the establishment and maintenance of borders in Europe not as a building of barriers but as the active creation and shaping of an identity for immigrants (both current and prospective) as a class of people. Rather than a thin line occupying the geographic limit of national frontiers, the book presents the border as an ever-present division between citizen and outsider, which manifests itself in the form of restrictions on access to legal protections, the domestic enforcement apparatus throughout Europe, and the web of physical and electronic deterrents deployed throughout the Mediterranean Sea.

Central to the volume's argument is that, while the Schengen Agreement of 1985 led to the ostensible dissolution of most intra-European borders, the net effect has been to deepen the Eurozone's borders well into northern Europe while spreading them southward into North Africa. The authors paint a picture of a series of European borders that separate planes of existence rather than geographic spaces. The Mediterranean Sea is offered as a depressing example of...