Europe’s failed ‘fight’ against irregular migration

Despite Europe’s mass investments in advanced border controls, people keep arriving along the continent’s shores under desperate circumstances. European attempts to ‘secure’ the borders have quite clearly failed - yet more of the same response has again been rolled out in response to the ‘refugee crisis’ since 2015. Amid the deadlock, this chapter argues that we need to grasp the mechanics and logics of the European ‘border security model’ in order to open up for a change of course. Through ethnographic examples, the chapter shows how the striving for border security under a prevailing emergency frame has generated absurd incentives, negative path dependencies and devastating consequences. At Europe’s frontiers, an industry of border controls has emerged, involving European defence contractors, member state security forces and their non-European counterparts, as well as a range of non-security actors. Whenever another ‘border crisis’ occurs, this industry grows again, feeding on its own ‘failures’. This vicious cycle may be broken once policy-makers start curtailing the political economies of border security underpinning it - yet the challenges are formidable as the industry retrenches along with the political response to the drama it has itself produced.