The Drowned and the Saved. Reflections on Mobility and Border in Times of Crisis

Abstract

The «European Agenda on Migration», whose objective is the unification of the different measures that the European Union will adopt to develop a coherent and integrated approach to migrations and border policy, is paradigmatic of how the European Commission imagines de Mediterranean as a space of migratory flows. This agenda has three main characteristics: usefulness, planning and stratification, and points to a new European mobility governance. This paper explores the implications and consequences of this agenda, including the critical analysis of the so-called «Hotspot approach» and other measures such as the «refugee relocation system». Confirming the trends in the last few years, the main tools in the European border management and control strategy are cooperation, policing, new control and identification technologies for the newcomers, and the «border extended bureaucracies». As a consequence, the most advanced border posts are pushed towards the South and militarized. This paper discusses the underlying racist utilitarianism contained in these European policies. Thus, Mediterranean’s governmentality crystallizes in a series of mechanisms generating new forms of violence, symbolic and direct. In this context, the paper explores the parallel logics of the «will to mobility» of young migrants from the Global South who, in spite of the security web established in European policies wish and try to be part of a transnational cosmopolitan imaginary.