In recent years there have been many instances of increased migrant mobility at Europe’s borders, such as the arrival of 30,000 migrants on the shores of the Canary Islands in 2006, the collective border jumps at the European enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in northern Africa, and, more recently, the arrival of over one million people on the Greek islands off the Turkish coast in 2015 and 2016. These are generally dubbed as “border crises”, evoking a sense of emergency, of a Europe “under threat”. However, these crises are systemic, they are products of the EU’s border politics and they signal moments of rupture in its seemingly orderly governance.

As a result, practices and spaces of confinement for migrants — hotspots, transit and reception centers, off-shore, extraterritorial, temporary and mobile detention facilities — proliferate and multiply. But the EU’s borders do not exist only at the border. They can equally be found in FRONTEX’s pre-frontier digital surveillance system, the Schengen Information System where the data of persons denied entry are kept, and the Eurodac database where fingerprints of asylum seekers and detained migrants are stored.

So the border is not really a place, a physical space outlining the territories of states. Borders are instruments of power that reproduce hierarchies of class, race and gender and they are enacted in our daily life and everyday spaces: at our workplaces, on the bus, in our squares, at the supermarket. This everyday border might be invisible to most, but it shapes the lives of those on the margins of our societies on a daily basis.

It is more useful to think of the border as a provisional arrangement, an assemblage of different practices, places, spaces, laws and regulations, policies, actors, politics, knowledges and experiences. All these different components come together and form the border regime, which, despite having significant spatial characteristics, is abstracted and diffuse.

In recent years, everyday manifestations of the EU’s border regime have intensified severely. Migrants find themselves confined and isolated in camps, forced to live under conditions that endanger their lives, physical and mental health, and future prospects. The COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdowns, travel restrictions, border closures and curfews have exposed the way that the border works to many more of us.

But, if borders materialize through everyday practices and play out in our daily lives, this opens up possibilities for their contestation through antagonistic practices of solidarity and care, as the response of the public has shown in the form of mutual aid networks, rent and labor strikes, and migrant solidarity initiatives. This is particularly consequential considering the increasingly shared vulnerability of both migrants and non-migrants. By focusing on everyday embodied practices of solidarity and on the collectivization of care on the basis of shared precarity and vulnerability between migrants and non-migrants, we can begin to dismantle the exclusions, segregation and oppression produced by the border.

Borders in the age of the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns have disrupted various commonplace assumptions and misconceptions around mobility/immobility, border security, globalization, cosmopolitanism and the nation-state, revealing much deeper patterns and trends in border management.

One of the main measures to contain the spread of the virus have been travel bans and other restrictions of movement. By mid-March, most states restricted access to their territories only to citizens and permanent residents, deepening existing cleavages between citizens and non-citizens. These measures are far-reaching and unprecedented, but they build on past trends, expertise and technologies, and will have future implications for the governance of human mobility and the deterrence of unwanted migration.

For example, police checkpoints on our streets, in our neighborhoods and on highways, ports and toll stations, requiring people to prove their legal status and justify their movements, build on existing practices of border surveillance: it is everyday borderwork, but on steroids. What migrants have endured for decades on our streets through police checks and racial profiling is intensified and extended to include non-migrants. Such intensification of the surveillance of our bodies and movements will certainly leave a mark long after the crisis is normalized.

The pandemic has made it glaringly obvious that control over the movement of workers is one of the core functions of borders today. Migrant workers from Eastern Europe have been exempt from travel bans and are brought to Western Europe on chartered planes and buses to harvest crops: asparagus in Germany, strawberries in France, soft fruit in Scotland. In this process, they expose themselves to poor work and health conditions, dire living standards and an increased risk of infection. And all for a sub-minimal wage.

In Austria, care workers were flown in from Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania, despite hostile policies, such as a merit-based migration system and integration through achievement,  introduced just two years ago. The UK extended the visas of over 3,000 migrant NHS workers, Germany recruited non-licensed medically trained migrants, while other states, such as Spain and France, relaxed migration rules for medically-trained asylum seekers and refugees. Such instrumental use of migrants will not lead to a re-evaluation of immigration policies and a curbing of xenophobia, as many hope today, but will instead widen the gap between who is perceived as “deserving” and who is not; between skilled and unskilled, valued workers and “fortune seekers.”

The contradictory and improvised enforcement of travel bans expose sustained socio-economic inequalities inside the EU and disrupt our assumptions that mobility is associated with privilege. They demonstrate clearly that we are not all equally affected by the pandemic, but rather that the impact of the public health measures varies depending on one’s class, race and gender.

This is not only true for the seasonal migrant workers mentioned above, but also for industrial workers in Italy and elsewhere made to work through the lockdown on cramped assembly lines; the communities of color in the US and the UK, who are disproportionately represented in COVID-19 deaths as a result of pre-existing socio-economic inequalities; and women who are expected to cover increased family care needs while also suffering disproportionately from rising unemployment, precariousness, impoverishment, and an increase in domestic and everyday violence.

All in all, it has become clearer than ever before that human mobility, governed through the border, is an instrument of power, bound-up in power hierarchies, often used punitively, and functioning in a gendered, raced and classed way. The state is currently mobilizing a whole new legal and technological arsenal to exert control over peoples’ movements through external, internal and biometric borders.

States deploy borders not so much to stop people from migrating, settling and working in new places, as to shape the conditions of their lives, the job opportunities and labor conditions available to them. In other words, borders define who can inhabit, where, for how long and with what rights.  

The EU border regime governs migrant lives through criminalization and victimization, producing docile subjects. This happens during the everyday encounters migrants have with others, in which they must constantly prove, depending on class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, age and physical ability, that they have the right to be there, to work, that they are entitled to health care and housing.

The camps in Greece

The management of the migrant camps, designed to confine all those stranded in Greece since 2015, illustrates the intensification of the everyday practice of borders in recent months through subsequent crises, culminating in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Today, 120,000 migrants are trapped in Greece; half of them women. Most are confined in camps and other camp-like spaces in locations with increasingly hostile local populations. The conditions there are particularly unsafe for women and girls, LGBTQI+ individuals, children and people with disabilities and chronic illnesses because emergency response policies and legal frameworks are not gender-, age- and ability- responsive, putting these already vulnerable groups at even more at risk.

Recent efforts to move people from the severely overcrowded camps on the islands were forcefully resisted by local authorities and populations in destination cities across the country. Similarly, efforts to expand existing facilities and build new closed camps on the islands were met with ferocious reactions by locals, leading to severe clashes with riot police. These explosive conditions have led to migrants, NGO workers and even journalists on the islands becoming targets of attacks and abuse, often by newly mobilized fascist militant groups.

These tensions have come to exacerbate the dire conditions that migrants are forced to endure while living in camps: overcrowded facilities, improvised housing, highly unsanitary and unsafe living conditions, little to no access to essential services such as physical, mental and reproductive health and legal counseling.

The sustained confinement of migrants in remote locations where they are not wanted together with their portrayal by the media and the authorities as threats to local communities, has further constrained their movement, turning simple and routine tasks such as grocery shopping into dangerous endeavors.

In early 2020, new tensions at the border with Turkey intensified this war-like atmosphere, as the number of those trying to cross rose sharply. This latest ”border crisis” moved the authorities to take exceptional, extraordinary and disproportionate measures, such as the suspension of asylum applications for the month of March, which is not provided for in EU and international law.

The Greek authorities and media labeled the situation a planned invasion and infringement of national sovereignty by Turkey. The police and the military were deployed in an already heavily militarized border zone while armed militias and vigilante groups mobilized, hunting migrants and pushing them back. The police and the army fired live rounds at those trying to cross into Greece, killing two men, Muhammad Gulzar and Muhammad al-Arab, on March 4, and leaving many more wounded.

One day before, Ursula von der Leyen had visited the area, crediting the Greek authorities for being “our European shield” and pledging €700 million more in aid. Under the unrelenting obsession to avoid a new crisis, the EU legitimized the violent practices and unlawful actions of the Greek authorities.

Conjuring the emergency, all the migrants that arrived in March were detained and confined in improvised, temporary and mobile spaces, such as naval ships, under re-traumatizing conditions, in violation of their rights and without access to legal counsel. The EU’s embrace of such unlawful and illegitimate practices against border crossers increasingly embroil migrants in the geopolitical games between the EU and Turkey. Following the policy direction sealed by the 2016 EU-Turkey Statement, the EU today continues to infringe the rights of migrants in a structural way, prioritizing the externalization and fortification of its borders while transferring the pressure to peripheral member states.