The Pressure Cooker: How Border Security Keeps Increasing the Chaos

Abstract

This paper explores the problems and contradictions of the so-called «balloon effect» in migratory processes, and the need to elaborate a global and interconnected understanding of population flows across borders as the necessary basis to design just and effective migratory policies.The revision of the successive «crisis» in the Mediterranean borders, starting with the first small boats (pateras) which used to cross the Strait of Gibraltar all the way to today’s «Refugee Crisis», makes sufficiently clear that the pressure on certain potential migratory entry routes does not discourage the will to cross, but rather forces immigrants and refugees in other directions. Ethnographic data show how, for example, the today prestigious Spanish border control model in Gibraltar did not stop the problem but rather provoked the shiftof migratory flows to more dangerous routes in the Sahara and the North of Africa. Spain’s problem eventually became Italy’s problem and, in turn, as routes moved East, Greece’s problem: a vicious cycle manifesting the failure of European policies. The author follows the life histories of migrants he worked in the route from Senegal to Morocco who, in their respective African transits, have had to face walls, borders, new surveillance technologies and cross-border mafias. Migrants’ experiences signal a progressive process: the globalization and commodification of irregular routes, emerging in parallel to migratory inhibition mechanisms