Photo: Ilias Bartolini\/Flickr. Some rights reserved.
\n<\/i><\/p>\n
When the Berlin The question, Our analysis If they lose, who is winning?<\/p>\n The map of the The research The release of The case of these 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<\/p>\n In other words, The consequences How much of all The answers to We need to know who is driving what appear to be increasingly unstoppable policies<\/p>\n But this does not We need to know Breaking the system\u2019s 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nnewspaper Der Tagesspiegel<\/em> published,
\na few weeks ago, the complete list of the 33.293 deceased migrants identified
\nsince 1993 on their way to Europe, its goal was a very simple one: to highlight
\nthe fact that each line in that somber list "tells a story": the story
\nof Faisal, Frederick, Zhang, Pape or Safi, who died holding her baby. They are
\n– like many others who are mistreated on their way and are considered delinquents
\nor legal ghosts at destination – the losers of this migratory system.<\/p>\n
\nthen, is an obvious one: if they lose, who is winning? This was the starting
\npoint of the research project that PorCausa Foundation launched more than a year ago. The result is
\nthe first mapping of the migration control industry in Spain, a complex and extraordinary
\nbusiness that feeds almost exclusively on public resources and that carries out
\nand influences a system designed to stop<\/em>
\nthe flow of people, not to handle<\/em> it.<\/p>\n
\nstarted from a double hypothesis: the first is that in Spain – as in the rest
\nof the European Union – an ecosystem of economic actors who receive increasing
\namounts of public money for carrying out the policies of migratory control has
\nbeen consolidating over the years. The second is that these same actors have
\ncome to acquire a position of strength within the system that enables them to
\ninfluence the drift of the norms and political decisions which affect them. This
\nphenomenon – known as political or
\nregulatory capture<\/em> – is similar to the one occurring in other industries,
\nsuch as the pharmaceutical or defense industries.<\/p>\n
\nmigratory control industry in Spain displays four sectors: border and border
\narea control and surveillance, which includes both the construction and
\nmaintenance of the Ceuta and Melilla fences and a high-cost technological
\ndeployment on the coasts and in the Mediterranean; detention and forced return
\nof immigrants in an irregular situation, which includes some symbols of
\nimmigration repression, such as detention centers for foreigners (CIE) or transfer
\nflights to their countries of origin or transit; programs for the reception and
\nintegration of immigrants, mostly managed by non-governmental organizations;
\nand activities related to the outsourcing of border control, a broad category
\nincluding, among others, the training of third-country control forces or
\nfinancial compensation to their governments, but also the development of programs
\ndirectly related to the reduction of migratory flows towards Europe.<\/p>\n
\nundertaken by PorCausa focused on the first two of these sectors, which account
\nfor 97% of the public contracts to private companies for migratory control
\nactivities between 2002 and 2016. In all, our database includes nearly 350
\ncompanies which benefited from 943 public contracts for a total amount of more than
\n610 million Euros. Ten companies (led by the Spanish technology and defense
\ncompany Indra) account for more than half of this amount. However, despite the
\nlarge number of contracts we have managed to locate, the administrative haze over
\nthis sector has made it impossible, for now, to identify all of them.<\/p>\n
\nthe contracts and companies database is a piece of news in itself and has
\nalready begun to raise uncomfortable questions about the origin and the use of
\nresources, as shown by a recent example. A few days ago, different media outlets highlighted the contradiction between the Spanish
\nMinistry of the Interior stated intentions regarding the building of new CIEs
\nand their funding, which had already been negotiated and approved by Brussels:
\nwhile Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido, a few months ago, indulged in the
\nSenate in rhetorical considerations about the convenience of building three new
\ndetention facilities, these had already been listed as priorities in the national
\nbudget since 2012.<\/p>\n
\nthree CIE illustrates a fundamental conclusion of our analysis: European
\nmigration policy – in which Spain, as EU southern border and connection with
\nAfrica, plays a leading role – has been construed on the basis of a political
\nprinciple of caution, according to which the arrival of foreigners is
\nperceived, first, as a threat and, then, as an economic burden. In other words:
\nthey must be stopped before they reach our territory, or expelled if they
\nmanage to get here. The preventive control strategy implies increased
\ninvestment in detention and surveillance infrastructure, but also decisions which
\nare hard to explain, such as fixing an a
\npriori <\/em>objective for forced returns – in the case of Spain, 53.000 between
\n2014 and 2020.<\/p>\n
\nthe migration control industry is not only financed by European funds, but it also
\nresponds to a political logic that spreads like a plague throughout the
\ncontinent. Spurred by self-induced collective hysteria, Europe has responded to
\nthe arrival of refugees by accelerating the building of a common migration
\npolicy that had been in the fridge for decades. The problem is that this
\npolitical impulse has not considered the wider perspective of the migratory
\nphenomenon \u2013 that is, a perspective encompassing unprecedented opportunities
\nfor the countries of origin, the countries of destination and the migrants
\nthemselves, which is what the European Commission plans in 2005 took into consideration – ,
\nbut has chosen instead to expand to the point of hypertrophy the tools sustaining
\nthe fantasy of impermeable borders.<\/p>\n
\nof this drift are the loss of and threat to human lives, but also a distorted
\nmodel of international mobility that harms European interests. As Frontex data
\nshow, for each person who accessed Europe in 2016 through the dramatic and
\nhyper-publicized sea routes and fence jumps, another 206 did so legally through
\nauthorized paths on highways and at ports and airports. The obsession for
\ncontrolling a minority of irregular movements undermines the practical
\ninterests of the majority of people who access EU territory legally, pollutes European
\nexternal action in neighbouring states and dilutes Europe's commitment to the
\nrules of international protection, in the building of which it had invested so
\nmuch effort.<\/p>\n
\nthis is here to stay? What chance does Europe have to open a fact-based
\nconversation about the true risks-and-opportunities balance of international
\nmobility and the smartest way to optimize it?<\/p>\n
\nthese questions are partly linked to the second hypothesis of porCausa\u2019s research,
\nwhich is the one related to the effects of political
\ncapture<\/em>. On the basis of available information, we cannot assert that the
\nmigration control industry in Spain has taken over a relevant part of public
\npolicy control. As in other areas of this research, the absence of transparency
\nthat characterizes the relationship between the private sector, political parties
\nand institutions (in the form of revolving doors and financial donations) is a
\nfundamental obstacle to accountability and informed public debate.<\/p>\n
\nmean that we dismiss its influence at all. In the course of our research we
\nhave identified different factors which encourage us to investigate further:
\nthe extreme opacity in which a part of the industry operates, the existence of
\ninformal and indirect channels of influence (such as fairs and congresses, media
\nrelations), and the prominence achieved by some companies within a sector that
\nhas left in the hands of private firms the development and management of
\ntechnologies on which a key aspect of State sovereignty, such as border control,
\ndepends.<\/p>\n
\nwho is driving what appear to be increasingly unstoppable policies. As in a
\nself-fulfilling prophecy, the narration of migrations as a threat is feeding the
\nproliferation throughout Europe of xenophobic movements demanding ever more
\ncostly and comprehensive control measures. The electoral margin left to the political
\nalternatives is narrowing and the political drift in other major geographical
\ndestinations (such as the United States and Australia) is not of any help. This
\nis precisely the breeding ground the migration control industry needs.<\/p>\n
\nvicious circle will require not only a much more lucid and unequivocal position
\non the part of moderate parties, but also the building of unlikely alliances
\nbetween all the actors – from private companies to large NGOs \u2013 which base
\ntheir values and their results in the existence of a globalization that is open
\nbut governed for the benefit of the common interest. This is the spirit driving
\nsome remarkable (though uncertain in terms of results) international
\ninitiatives such as the Global Migration Pact which is now being negotiated
\nat the UN. For regions in full migration boom such as Europe, however, this
\ntype of agreement may be too little, too late. What we need is a citizen
\nrevolution from within – starting today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"