The autonomous city of Melilla is located on the African continent, specifically opposite the Costa del Sol, and like Ceuta, located on the Strait of Gibraltar, is the remnant of the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. The two cities form part of the southern border of both Spain and Europe.LOGICS OF SECURITISATION
Although the term border has existed since ancient times, its functions have been changing, as has the way it is perceived and conceptualised. The conception of the border as a geographical boundary has now been superseded by new state logics, and is nowadays the ‘result of a dynamic process, a politically and socially constructed reality that is constantly changing in terms of its management of human mobility’ (Zapata, 2012, p. 40).
Globalisation and the global economy have significantly influenced the process of borderisation or the deterritorialisation of borders, in the visibility given to the construction of the difference between the ‘us’ and the ‘others’, the ‘citizen’ and the ‘non-citizen’ (Estrada and Fuentes, 2020); a dual regime of circulation of individuals that distinguishes those who, on the one hand, have great possibilities of global movement, and on the other, those whose freedom of movement is restricted.[1]
This process, in the case of Europe, began in the 1980s as a process of eliminating borders between the countries of the continent. The Schengen Agreement (1985) was the beginning of the paradigm shift in border management in the European Union, moving towards the idea of creating a border-free area and dismantling internal border controls. In recent decades, the creation of the FRONTEX Agency (2005) and the new conception of the EU following the Lisbon Treaty, the EU's Internal Security Strategy, the Global Approach to Migration and Mobility (GAMM), the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), or the European Agenda on Migration (Sepúlveda-Rubio and García-España, 2022) have been the instruments that have given shape and content to European migration policy.
The decisions taken at these summits and treaties, along with coordination on visas, police and judicial collaboration, asylum policy, and the criminalisation of migrants, have prioritised security over openness and protection, which is reserved only for those with a regular administrative situation. The construction of Europe has thus been shaped by mechanisms of exclusion embodied in borders and related institutional practices (Balibar, 2003).
The externalisation of borders has meant the delegation of responsibility to third countries, conditioning migration management as a prerequisite for maintaining or adopting economic and trade agreements with the European Union (Ferrer-Gallardo and Kramsch 2012). At the same time that the management of flows is being externalised, border controls are also gradually being externalised, giving rise to ‘remote policing’ (Gil, 2003), or as Soriano et al. (2016) point out, the European Union has created a new, distant and invisible border, with the aim of hiding the current reality.
The construction of borders has been based on a discourse of securitisation which, as mentioned above, criminalises migrants, accompanied in turn by a humanitarianist discourse that maintains a discursive coherence in line with the democratic values of European states (PorCausa, 2019). Something very contradictory if we take into account, as Balibar states, that borders are "the absolutely undemocratic or discriminatory condition of democratic institutions":
“Borders are institutionally established as a ‘death zone’, thus making globally established violence visible; but at the same time, being a transitional space that touches the ‘states guarantors of rights’, especially of Human Rights, European states must conceal, and at the same time legitimise through discursive practices, the violence exercised there. Ironically, it is through discourses on the ethics of human rights, as well as the criminalisation of migrants, that the violence of states in border areas is legitimised” (Balibar, 2003, p.176).
In this process of externalisation and securitisation, the management and development of actions is often carried out by private companies whose priority is neither borders nor human rights, but profit. The complexity of what is becoming a business inseparable from a structural issue such as migration and its border control is characterised by two points: the detention of migrants on the one hand, and electronic border monitoring and tracking on the other. Frontex, the European maritime and land control company, has been managing migration flows to Europe for more than two decades. This agency, which costs the EU 250 million euros, was created in 2004 in order to stem migration flows in line with the European approach of providing simplistic and short-term solutions to problems such as the structural factors that lead to migration (Moraza, 2021).
These foreign and border policies promoted by the European Union are reflected in the treatment of migrant children and young people arriving in ‘Fortress Europe’, who spend their daily lives practically under penitentiary parameters. The prison logics carried out in the misnamed ‘minors’ centres are framed within securitisation paradigms that respond to nationalist and racist patterns.
The centres as euphemism, the forts, the fences, the advanced surveillance and the multiple security forces, become a complex and intertwined corpus that produces and reproduces perverse logics that expel those who in reality should be protected. Although the educational approach will prevail over the punitive approach in the centres, and the best interests of the child will be prioritised, the walls remain, the security agents remain vigilant, the walls remain, the security agents remain vigilant and the windows with their intricate bars do not let sunlight in. The centre, the school, will have a guard at the door, breakfasts, dinners or common spaces will be controlled and evaluated by the educators. Control and regulation (and their coordination with other actions, such as voluntariness, suggestion or motivation) will be the key to these spaces (Alcalde, 2021).
Faced with this systematic lack of protection, both children and young people who are caught up in this sinister game risk their integrity by trying to cross to the peninsula through the practice known as ‘risky’ or prefer the street rather than returning to the centres themselves.
In this way, multiple mechanisms are set in motion that - by action or omission - perpetuate frameworks of helplessness and lack of protection.
In this context, the Southern Border becomes, once again, a space of criminalisation. A scenario where the abuse of power and authority is justified and celebrated under the pretext of the securitarian scheme of ‘intelligent border policy’. Through the border control and securitisation devices implemented in recent years, ‘security’ policies reveal the most selfish face of Europe, generating a lack of protection for people who choose to move.
The consequences of history and the systemic axes of oppression based on racism and colonialism persist, as we see, today. The Southern Border as a gateway and the first mirror of a Fortress Europe executes policies of selection and exclusion of migrants, based on hierarchical criteria of oppression such as origin, nationality, gender and race. It is in the wake of events such as the one that took place on 24 June 2022 and the rejection of migrants from the countries of the global South that these historical axes of oppression become more clearly visible: the exacerbated racism and colonialism that explains national and EU migration policies (Graíño, 2022).
The privatisation of migration management, the externalisation of borders, the logics of securitisation, etc., paint a bleak picture for human rights. It is urgent that this violent and systemic drift in policies be stopped, that responsibility for what has happened be assumed, that guaranteed migration policies be generated and that a dignified reception be provided for everyone. Enough of racist and exclusionary migration policies that generate lack of protection and insecurity.
[1] The slowness of the bureaucracy and the arbitrariness of EU countries in accepting applications mean that ‘legal, regulated or documented’ entry for asylum or family reunification are not successful procedures, with respect to the number of applications received (Fuentes, 2018).
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