Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (California Series in Public Anthropology)

by Ruben Andersson

In this groundbreaking ethnography, Ruben Andersson, a gifted anthropologist and journalist, travels along the clandestine migration trail from Senegal and Mali to the Spanish North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Through the voices of his informants, Andersson explores, viscerally and emphatically, how Europe’s increasingly powerful border regime meets and interacts with its target–the clandestine migrant. This vivid, rich work examines the subterranean migration flow from Africa to Europe, and shifts the focus from the “illegal immigrants” themselves to the vast industry built around their movements. This fascinating and accessible book is a must-read for anyone interested in the politics of international migration and the changing texture of global culture.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology, Academia, Academic

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best book on migration during the course of the past year year? With all the usual reservations about the virtues of each and all of everything I’ve dipped into in 2014, I’m going to go for Ruben Andersson’s Illegality, Inc. A social anthropologist, Andersson is interested in what the ever-evolving social institution of the border makes of us all as migrants, citizens, actors in the political, administrative and civil society sphere. He explains early in the book that the strengthening of the role that borders play in our lives has made people who were once humdrum, mundane travellers into something “observable, controllable – and, as migrants themselves insist, profitable.”

He draws on experiences gained from wandering with migrants from the ocean shores of Senegal through to the regions of the deep Sahara, eventually pitching up in the surreal pseudo-European enclaves that hunker down behind barbed wire entanglements on the Mediterranean costs of Morocco. Throughout all of these landscapes he brings out the ways in which awareness of borders and the relationship which the various actors have with them brings out a set of predicable roles – the border cop, the humanitarian naval guard, the calculating NGO activist, the aggrieved, indignant migrant, the camp welfare officer, right the way through to the anti-globaliser ‘no borders’ protester.

Borders are there to tell us the range of behaviours that are expected of us and the actions and attitudes that betoken, on one hand, security, and on the other, threat. They invite role-playing on the part of citizens and this plays into the forging of the identities which they are expected to cling to as functional members of a given polity. But while borders take on an ever-clearer role with regard to defining the insider and the outsider, they seem less useful when it comes to deciding who gets the benefit of whatever personal welfare society feels it is able to put on offer.

All in all, Illegality, Inc seems a good way to end a year that began with a spell of thinking about the relationship between liberal democracy and the role that immigration policy might play in shoring up its values and purpose. The plain fact seems to be that the further we move from being the sort of society that can check the tendencies of the market to produce inequality and unfairness, the more central borders become to teaching us how to keep to our place and play out our prescribed roles in a world that spirals towards greater injustice. Winning the battle to keep movement across them as open as it can be, and to extend our capacity for solidarity to those who borders tell us are supposed to be on the outside is one of the ways we have to light a beacon of resistance to the direction in which we are being dragged.

[Fiona Hogan Bradford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once again, it would've been great to get a perspective that's not Western on the phenomenon of clandestine immigration, but I really liked Andersson's take. He explored the financial underpinnings of the industry and the diversity of individual and organizational actors that influence it.

[Isaac Hulse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really insightful read. I read most of this book as background reading for my dissertation on refugees but didn't get a chance to sit down and finish it until now. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is a powerful book. Anderson presents a valuable contribution to the study of migration as he manages to complete both a broad and deep study. It is a geographically vast study, from Warsaw to Dakar but this doesn't compromise the depth as Anderson describes his genuine friendship with some of the actors involved in the 'industry'. The message of the book is clear: illegal migration has become a global industry which benefits a vast array of actors and stakeholders with the only group not profiting being the very migrants themselves, who are "nothing more, nothing less, than people on the move" (p. 281)

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading about illegal migrant travels by sea. The themes of the commodification of bodies, ownership of migrant identities, and race were adequately touched on. I wish, though, that the ethnography read more fluidly; often times, the stories were presented without any additional context.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

imo everyone should read this instead of the *popular self-help books
such an eye-opener

[Dragoș · Rating 5 out of 5]

Complex in its portrayals, thick in its descriptions, Illegality Inc. is a great read and a fantastic introduction into the ‘business’ of policing Europe’s borders. Andersson builds an intricate multi-sited ‘follow the process’ etnography of the border drawing on informants from both sides of the border and ‘legality’ divide as well as multiple levels in the hierarchy of the security apparatus. What Andersson’s analysis reveals is a perpetual comedy of errors, a theatre of the absurd where cooperating agencies compete under a shared framework, migrants wear the hat of victim or perpetrator depending on their context and development aid ‘gifts’ are squandered on dead-on-arrival projects.

Andersson’s book is incredibly dense so it is hard to briefly isolate just a few compelling points but one of the most striking elements he focuses on is the importance of bodies and how the body is affected by the migration process and more specifically by its illegalization. On the one hand we have the marks of the ‘clandestine’ giving away status on their bodies – their smell of squalour after being packed into overcrowded pateras or desert bushes, their open sores from toxic mixtures of gas and saltwater, used by their ‘rescuers’ to identify their point of origin. The dress of the migrant factors in too, his backpack or ‘two pairs’ of jeans used by Dakar police to isolate imprisonable ‘clandestines’ from local, ‘legal’ migrants. On the other hand we have the migrant’s body and apparel as a survival strategy: West Africans in Morrocco isolated by police through their racialised bodies use clean clothes, ‘tourist glasses’ and water bottles to pass as a tolerable outsider rather than ‘illegal’. They try to leverage their bodies to attract a white spouse that can secure their ‘legality’ in Fortress Europe. Women are forced to leverage their unborn babies as anchors against deportation, babies that then force them to stay in the limbo of the Spanish exclaves under the discipline of the soft totalitarianism of the state.

Because the state needs the migrants just as much as the migrants need the state and its recognition. It’s not only the ‘ils mangent de nous’ (‘they are eating off us’) need of the border guards or NGO frontmen to stay employed, not only the need of the Illegality industry to perpetuate its business but the need of the state to justify itself in the context of globalism. Sociologist Ulrich Beck described modern society as a ‘risk society’, a society where the goal of the state and the citizen is to mitigate risk in an increasingly complex setting beyond its traditional grasp. The state no longer fights the enemy state but unpredictable economic, social and environmental ‘risks’ that it cannot manage. To reinforce its dwindling status it needs ritual, it needs the sacrifice of the ‘illegal’ migrant upon the altar of its sovereignty, it needs the projection of the border beyond the dotted line on the map, the outsourcing of its policing to third , less accountable parties. The state needs a generalized threat and what better than the ‘naturally selected’ best-of-the-best Others, ‘adventurers’ oozing with agency, dangerous but also endangered and needing the gentle touch of a Foucauldian disciplinary apparatus.

The state needs the solid threat of the ‘illegal’ migrant in a world of many ‘risks’ but few threats. So it creates it. It tighens rules, raises razorwire fences, lauches sattelites and planes. It sends a repressive apparatus reimagined as a lifesaving force to safeguard the dotted line while projecting its borders far into the territory of other states through financial aid and outsourced policing. And after all this all it manages to do is to professionalize ‘illegality’, to create the very smuggling networks and ‘hordes’ that it has been claiming to keep out. But the ‘risk’ no longer lies with the polity, it has been outsourced alongside the policing to neigbouring states and above all it has been outsourced to the increasingly impoverished and imperiled migrant.

Perhaps the biggest absurdity of the illegality industry is that at the end of the day, far from the border fences, satellites and patrol boats the Senegalese repatriate and the local officer policing him complain about the same thing: ‘there’s a lot of money to be made off migration, but not for us’. And in that moving feast of the illegality industry ‘eating off the migrant’ the failing state bolsters itself by eating the lion’s share.

[Bianca van de Water · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shows how migration has become a business concern for European stakeholders.

[Nils · Rating 1 out of 5]

As with any ethnography, I was prepared to be forgiving, to go along with the narrative the author presents, and to learn about local texture and individual characters. Unfortunately, this book not only fails to deliver a coherent picture of a particular narrow slice of the world (the minimum one expects from an ethnography), but also reaches for grander heights that in the end collapse in muddles theoretical incoherence.

On the latter point, the author cannot decide whether the "illegality industry" as he calls it -- the congeries of clandestine migrant-repelling agencies and companies that collaborate to stop would-be West African migrants from making it to Europe -- is a project that entails "relentless depoliticization of the border" (page 274) or is instead "simply one 'regionalized' political response to the insecurities and possibilities generated by a patchily 'globalized' world economy." He wants to pay homage to James Ferguson by uncovering the "unintended" effects of the illegality industry, but these effects are hardly depoliticizing in Ferguson's language, but instead are quite explicitly political projects, albeit ones that like all bureaucratic efforts never succeed fully. (The failure to succeed fully is not in itself a marker of failure, but Andersson doesn't seem to grasp that either.)

Two other mutually incompatible and separately incoherent theoretical themes are repeated in the book. The first is to wax metaphorical about how the border "security" regime resembles financial securitization. Clearly this must have been an idea that occurred to Andersson during the height of the 2007-9 global financial crisis, which was just when he was planning this work, but in fact the metaphor doesn't really work. Conceiving of the illegality industry as bundling and repackaging of debt into different risk tranches is simply not an accurate description of what that industry does, and citing Ulrich Beck's "risk society" (which uses the term "risk" to mean something very different) only deepens the theoretical murk. The second theme is repeated references to Greek mythology (many of the companies and agencies involved in policing migrants draw on names from classical literature) as if unpacking the metaphors represents anything but a shallow nominalism.

The only useful episode in the book is the description of the character of Mother Mercy, a Senegalese mother whose son was lost at sea while trying to migrate to the Canary Islands, and who has then turned into a spokesperson decrying the dangers of migration, for which she has become a feted humanitarian celebrity in Europe. Jetting off to conferences in Europe, living in a big house just outside Dakar, getting chauffeured around in a car, she has monetized her personal tragedy by tapping into the global pity economy by representing herself as the face and emblem of the human tragedy of clandestine immigration. Back home, however, this very success makes her loathed as a global bourgeois without organic connection to the world she claims to Europeans to speak for. While Andersson tells this story, he doesn't actually fully unpack the layered ironies of it.

The other valuable aspect of the book is how it demonstrates the way "development aid" can be yet again re-justified, in this case by claiming that development is a solution to the migrant (and thus security) crisis Europe faces. First the Senegalese leadership sell off their fisheries to the Spaniards (presumably corruptly, though Andersson fails to explore this question) and then when the fisheries collapse, and the erstwhile fishermen are repurposing their boats as vehicles for escape via migration, the Senegalese government turns to the Spanish government for "aid" (again presumably taking a cut for themselves) to help "develop" the economy that Spanish overfishing destroyed. The winners in each twist of the case are the corrupt government officials in Senegal, and the private European corporations, fishing companies and then private security contractors, while the losers are the Senegalese hoi polloi and the European taxpayer.

[Dawid Krawczyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do wybrzeży Europy każdego dnia dopływa z północy Afryki jakiś przepełniony ponton, stara łódź albo kajak. Z tym, że czasem nie dopływa, tylko tonie gdzieś po drodze. Wtedy na miejsce tragedii przyjeżdżają dziennikarze i fotoreporterzy. Produkują zdjęcia, teksty, filmy o śmierci na Morzu Śródziemnym. Aktywiści i tak zwane społeczeństwo obywatelskie się oburza, papież Franciszek ogłasza, że mu przykro i tak dalej być nie może, a cyniczni politycy zlecają badania fokusowe, żeby sprawdzić czy lepiej szczuć na migrantów, czy jednak wyrazić żal i współczucie. Po kilku latach tego, co zwykło nazywać się kryzysem uchodźczym, każdy dobrze zna swoją rolę, niezależnie od tego, po której stronie reżimu granicznego by się nie znajdował.

Ruben Andersson, autor książki Illegality, Inc. Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe, dodałby jeszcze pewnie, że każdy na swojej roli całkiem nieźle zarabia. Rzecz jasna poza samymi migrantami, którzy w drodze do Europy albo giną, albo tkwią gdzieś w zamkniętych ośrodkach. Chociaż są też tacy, którzy zwątpili już w sukces podróży do Europy i zatrudnili się jako „profesjonalni migranci” – sprzedając swoje historie głodnym wrażeń dziennikarzom.

Czytaj dalej na http://www.krytykapolityczna.pl/artyk...

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading. Pioneering, readable ethnography of clandestine migration within Africa and from Africa into Europe in the last decade. As the title suggests, it is not a study of "illegal immigrants" themselves but instead of the ad hoc and largely unaccountable systems that mythologize and profit from that category of people. Fascinating and enraging.

[Anna Kwan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very good ethnography. I'm giving it two stars because I was required to read it for class, and was bored out of my mind.