Abstract
Over the past half-century or so, ethnographers have sought to overcome criticism of their discipline, as imbued with colonialism, by turning from the study of traditional societies to scrutinise cultures of the global north. In The Migration Apparatus, political anthropologist Gregory Feldman goes a step further by turning the ethnographer’s spotlight onto the migration mechanisms of the EU itself, in order to understand how they work within the global political and economic order. To that end, he analyses the social and political framework for migration policy-making in the EU, before looking in depth at particular policy areas such as external border controls and Frontex, biometrics and circular migration.
But Feldman is also concerned with modernity’s destruction of direct social connections. His book explores the functioning of an apparatus in which there are no such connections between the thousands who implement EU policies, or between these officials and those they police. To do so he develops a new, ‘non-local’ ethnography.
He starts his study – the product of fieldwork with the EU’s immigration officials, policy-makers and technicians – by observing officials being shown round a detention centre. For him, it is startling that they never make eye contact with detainees. This disconnection leads him to ask what mediates officials’ view of migrants; how people are turned into static policy objects; and how thousands of ordinary, decent, liberal-minded people can work, often enthusiastically, for a project designed to reinforce and sustain the radical inequalities of globalisation, admitting the few and efficiently excluding the many.
Feldman describes how states mediate the tensions between the neoliberal and neo-nationalist Right, the one demanding a flexible labour supply, the other protection for the national workforce, for national identity and sovereignty. Within the compromise between neoliberalism and neo-nationalism, reproduced at EU level, there is no room for migrants’ voices.
There are, he argues, clear resonances between today’s neo-nationalism and interwar fascism. Both appeal not to the ‘lowest of the low’ but to ‘squeezed’ workers whose foothold on a decent livelihood is under threat. Both set ‘European values’ against a reified migrants’ culture. In modern Holland, videos of women bathing topless feature in ‘language and life’ tests migrants must take to show they can ‘integrate’ into modern Dutch society – another demonstration of the incorporation of neo-nationalist demands into neoliberal government policy. And (with reference to Roma in Italy) he describes the ease with which neo-nationalism slides into racist attacks. Neoliberalism relies on the nation for orderly labour circulation and for tranquillity within national boundaries – so the idea that ‘liberals welcome migrants without condition’ is, he shows, an oversimplification.
This discussion of ideology is the framework for the ‘apparatus’ he describes. The elements of the apparatus itself are familiar, although Feldman brings an outsider’s freshness and astonishment at the enormity (in both senses) of the enterprise. He depicts the surveillance network with its real-time plotting of journeys ensuring that no little fishing boat can leave Libya, Morocco or Senegal without being monitored and, if suspicions are not allayed, intercepted and turned back; the biometrics databases containing scores of millions of people’s unique characteristics, the information networks and databases which ensure that ‘undesirables’ are refused admission wherever in the EU they seek entry and that asylum seekers registered in one member state are returned there if they seek asylum elsewhere in Europe; the ‘co-operation agreements’ which condition favourable trade and migration opportunities for countries of the South on receiving and processing returned nationals and sometimes third-country nationals too.
What is new and valuable in Feldman’s analysis is his description of the processes whereby, for those devising and implementing these measures, technical challenges are made to replace moral ones, and how the process is disguised by a vocabulary marrying liberalism (‘development’, ‘humanitarianism’, ‘opportunity’) with ‘common-sense’ (neo-nationalist) codes for restriction and exclusion (‘legality’, ‘security’). He is concerned with the ways in which European policy-makers actively shape language and so policy, in ways that obscure both the causes of global migration (i.e. rampant and growing inequality) and the reality of what is being done to migrants, and the operatives’ true role, so as to make it impossible for these questions ever to be discussed truthfully. Thus, those involved in organising surveillance or manning patrols justify their work in humanitarian terms: they are ‘saving lives’, not stopping refugees from reaching safety. (These operatives would presumably see the deaths in 2011 from hunger and thirst of sixty-one out of seventy-two migrants on a drifting boat in the Mediterranean as an ‘aberration’ rather than a paradigm of European treatment of migrants). But Feldman also observes how the humanitarian language gives way to a more military language of ‘targets’ the closer the boats get to Europe.
Feldman’s analysis of the ‘migration apparatus’ is also an attempt to understand the demands neoliberalism makes on states. For neoliberalism doesn’t mean a ‘hands-off’ state, as Sivanandan has pointed out, 1 but requires states positively to deregulate financial markets. As Feldman puts it, neoliberalism requires states to provide optimal conditions for the productive behaviour of the ‘entrepreneurial unit’, which requires constant adaptation. He shows how neoliberal policy-makers pushed for the development of biometric immigration controls partly to ensure that the individual, not the country of origin, was the focus of inquiry: a racism at the border which could not distinguish between the Indian peasant and the Indian multi-billionaire was anachronistic and counter-productive. Now, ‘registered traveller’ schemes enable the multi-billionaire to get through immigration in seconds (once he or she has provided biometrics and exhaustive personal details and documents).
For Feldman, ‘circular migration’ programmes are popular in the EU because they are a happy compromise; neoliberals point to the opportunity such programmes give migrants to earn money, improve their ‘human capital’ and aid the development of their home country by the remittances they send back, as well as the boost to the host country’s economy they give, while neo-nationalists love the short time period (generally six months) migrants are allowed to stay under the programmes. Feldman points out the self-deception in the neoliberals’ assessment of the benefits to migrants of circular migration – the low-pay jobs which afford little opportunity to save or remit, let alone improve skills or earning capacity. For all its purported emphasis on individual development, neoliberal policy takes as little account of migrants’ wants and needs as does neo-nationalism.
This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book, which ends on a passionate note as the author gives expression to his fears that the creeping moral indifference induced by the language and culture of the ‘migration apparatus’ will give rise to ever more brutality at and beyond our borders.