Photo: Ilias Bartolini/Flickr. Some rights reserved.
When the Berlin
newspaper Der Tagesspiegel published,
a few weeks ago, the complete list of the 33.293 deceased migrants identified
since 1993 on their way to Europe, its goal was a very simple one: to highlight
the fact that each line in that somber list "tells a story": the story
of Faisal, Frederick, Zhang, Pape or Safi, who died holding her baby. They are
– like many others who are mistreated on their way and are considered delinquents
or legal ghosts at destination – the losers of this migratory system.
The question,
then, is an obvious one: if they lose, who is winning? This was the starting
point of the research project that PorCausa Foundation launched more than a year ago. The result is
the first mapping of the migration control industry in Spain, a complex and extraordinary
business that feeds almost exclusively on public resources and that carries out
and influences a system designed to stop
the flow of people, not to handle it.
Our analysis
started from a double hypothesis: the first is that in Spain – as in the rest
of the European Union – an ecosystem of economic actors who receive increasing
amounts of public money for carrying out the policies of migratory control has
been consolidating over the years. The second is that these same actors have
come to acquire a position of strength within the system that enables them to
influence the drift of the norms and political decisions which affect them. This
phenomenon – known as political or
regulatory capture – is similar to the one occurring in other industries,
such as the pharmaceutical or defense industries.
If they lose, who is winning?
The map of the
migratory control industry in Spain displays four sectors: border and border
area control and surveillance, which includes both the construction and
maintenance of the Ceuta and Melilla fences and a high-cost technological
deployment on the coasts and in the Mediterranean; detention and forced return
of immigrants in an irregular situation, which includes some symbols of
immigration repression, such as detention centers for foreigners (CIE) or transfer
flights to their countries of origin or transit; programs for the reception and
integration of immigrants, mostly managed by non-governmental organizations;
and activities related to the outsourcing of border control, a broad category
including, among others, the training of third-country control forces or
financial compensation to their governments, but also the development of programs
directly related to the reduction of migratory flows towards Europe.
The research
undertaken by PorCausa focused on the first two of these sectors, which account
for 97% of the public contracts to private companies for migratory control
activities between 2002 and 2016. In all, our database includes nearly 350
companies which benefited from 943 public contracts for a total amount of more than
610 million Euros. Ten companies (led by the Spanish technology and defense
company Indra) account for more than half of this amount. However, despite the
large number of contracts we have managed to locate, the administrative haze over
this sector has made it impossible, for now, to identify all of them.
The release of
the contracts and companies database is a piece of news in itself and has
already begun to raise uncomfortable questions about the origin and the use of
resources, as shown by a recent example. A few days ago, different media outlets highlighted the contradiction between the Spanish
Ministry of the Interior stated intentions regarding the building of new CIEs
and their funding, which had already been negotiated and approved by Brussels:
while Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido, a few months ago, indulged in the
Senate in rhetorical considerations about the convenience of building three new
detention facilities, these had already been listed as priorities in the national
budget since 2012.
The case of these
three CIE illustrates a fundamental conclusion of our analysis: European
migration policy – in which Spain, as EU southern border and connection with
Africa, plays a leading role – has been construed on the basis of a political
principle of caution, according to which the arrival of foreigners is
perceived, first, as a threat and, then, as an economic burden. In other words:
they must be stopped before they reach our territory, or expelled if they
manage to get here. The preventive control strategy implies increased
investment in detention and surveillance infrastructure, but also decisions which
are hard to explain, such as fixing an a
priori objective for forced returns – in the case of Spain, 53.000 between
2014 and 2020.
The migration control industry is not only financed by European funds, but it also responds to a political logic that spreads like a plague throughout the continent
In other words,
the migration control industry is not only financed by European funds, but it also
responds to a political logic that spreads like a plague throughout the
continent. Spurred by self-induced collective hysteria, Europe has responded to
the arrival of refugees by accelerating the building of a common migration
policy that had been in the fridge for decades. The problem is that this
political impulse has not considered the wider perspective of the migratory
phenomenon – that is, a perspective encompassing unprecedented opportunities
for the countries of origin, the countries of destination and the migrants
themselves, which is what the European Commission plans in 2005 took into consideration – ,
but has chosen instead to expand to the point of hypertrophy the tools sustaining
the fantasy of impermeable borders.
The consequences
of this drift are the loss of and threat to human lives, but also a distorted
model of international mobility that harms European interests. As Frontex data
show, for each person who accessed Europe in 2016 through the dramatic and
hyper-publicized sea routes and fence jumps, another 206 did so legally through
authorized paths on highways and at ports and airports. The obsession for
controlling a minority of irregular movements undermines the practical
interests of the majority of people who access EU territory legally, pollutes European
external action in neighbouring states and dilutes Europe's commitment to the
rules of international protection, in the building of which it had invested so
much effort.
How much of all
this is here to stay? What chance does Europe have to open a fact-based
conversation about the true risks-and-opportunities balance of international
mobility and the smartest way to optimize it?
The answers to
these questions are partly linked to the second hypothesis of porCausa’s research,
which is the one related to the effects of political
capture. On the basis of available information, we cannot assert that the
migration control industry in Spain has taken over a relevant part of public
policy control. As in other areas of this research, the absence of transparency
that characterizes the relationship between the private sector, political parties
and institutions (in the form of revolving doors and financial donations) is a
fundamental obstacle to accountability and informed public debate.
We need to know who is driving what appear to be increasingly unstoppable policies
But this does not
mean that we dismiss its influence at all. In the course of our research we
have identified different factors which encourage us to investigate further:
the extreme opacity in which a part of the industry operates, the existence of
informal and indirect channels of influence (such as fairs and congresses, media
relations), and the prominence achieved by some companies within a sector that
has left in the hands of private firms the development and management of
technologies on which a key aspect of State sovereignty, such as border control,
depends.
We need to know
who is driving what appear to be increasingly unstoppable policies. As in a
self-fulfilling prophecy, the narration of migrations as a threat is feeding the
proliferation throughout Europe of xenophobic movements demanding ever more
costly and comprehensive control measures. The electoral margin left to the political
alternatives is narrowing and the political drift in other major geographical
destinations (such as the United States and Australia) is not of any help. This
is precisely the breeding ground the migration control industry needs.
Breaking the system’s
vicious circle will require not only a much more lucid and unequivocal position
on the part of moderate parties, but also the building of unlikely alliances
between all the actors – from private companies to large NGOs – which base
their values and their results in the existence of a globalization that is open
but governed for the benefit of the common interest. This is the spirit driving
some remarkable (though uncertain in terms of results) international
initiatives such as the Global Migration Pact which is now being negotiated
at the UN. For regions in full migration boom such as Europe, however, this
type of agreement may be too little, too late. What we need is a citizen
revolution from within – starting today.