The Migration Apparatus: Security, Labor, and Policymaking in the European Union

Description

Every year, millions of people from around the world grapple with the European Union's emerging migration management apparatus. Through border controls, biometric information technology, and circular migration programs, this amorphous system combines a whirlwind of disparate policies. The Migration Apparatus examines the daily practices of migration policy officials as they attempt to harmonize legal channels for labor migrants while simultaneously cracking down on illegal migration. Working in the crosshairs of debates surrounding national security and labor, officials have limited individual influence, few ties to each other, and no serious contact with the people whose movements they regulate. As Feldman reveals, this complex construction creates a world of indirect human relations that enables the violence of social indifference as much as the targeted brutality of collective hatred. Employing an innovative "nonlocal" ethnographic methodology, Feldman illuminates the danger of allowing indifference to govern how we regulate population―and people's lives―in the world today. Cover Copyright Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations 1 Unconnected in the Acephalous World of Migration Policymaking 2 Right Versus Right: How Neoliberals and Neo-nationalists Dominate Migration Policy in Europe 3 Making Things Simple: Forms of Knowledge and Policy Coherence in the “Area of Justice, Freedom and Security” 4 Border Control: The New Meaning of Containment 5 Biometrics: Where Isn’t the Security Threat? 6 The Right Solution, or, the Fantasy of Circular Migration 7 When There Is No There There: Nonlocal Ethnography in a World of Apparatuses Epilogue: The Comparative Advantages of the Academic and the Policymaker References Index