Migration policy: from control to governance
Saskia Sassen

It may look like one step forward and two back, but the European Union has actually accumulated a series of innovations that move it towards governing, rather than controlling, immigration inside the EU. This move towards governing is gaining strength even as national governments in the EU continue to speak the language of control.

At the same time, strengthening control is what the European Union is gearing up to do when it comes to immigration from outside its borders. Its first effort was to construct the equivalent of the Maginot line on its southern and eastern perimeter. It did not fare much better than that older defence line. Now it is moving towards the construction of a sort of Berlin wall across the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic – with the Islas Canarias (Canary Islands) the emblematic object of control-lust. History has given its verdict on the Berlin wall – and it was built on solid ground. The EU is trying to construct a Berlin wall on water.

But the difference is actually not where the limits of walls make themselves visible. The wall and the weaponised border function in a vaster ecology. That larger ecology helps explain the failures of government attempts to stop unauthorised migration via border controls. It might be argued that the Berlin wall "worked" on its own terms. True enough, but those terms were far too narrow to keep a larger ecology from making it unworkable in the long term. It was not US tanks that brought the wall down. It was that larger ecology.

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