Ausgrenzung (BD2015)

Exzerpt aus Dennis Broeders: Breaking Down Anonymity. Digital Surveillance of Irregular Migrants in Germany and the Netherlands. Amsterdam University Press 2009

S. 27

‘The border is everywhere,’ wrote Lyon in 2005. We are accustomed to think of the border in terms of territorial lines dividing the world into countries. While these traditional territorial lines originate in politicolegal international agreements (often codifying the outcomes of war and civil strife), they have also been translated into legal documentary requirements, which, in turn have been translated into prerequisites for rights, obligations and entitlements for those ‘belonging’ to a specific side of those ‘territorial’ lines. In other words, the border has been translated into a myriad of smaller belongings and memberships that in everyday life determine rights and limitations. And if the border is everywhere, than logic dictates that it can also crossed – legally and illegally – everywhere.

S. 157f
From the perspective of internal migration control, the defining characteristic of an irregular migrant is his irregular residence. Irregular residence, however, does not presuppose irregular entry. There are three basic categories of irregular migrants: those who enter and stay illegally (the irregular migrant ‘proper’), those who apply for asylum
and become irregular after their application is rejected and those who travel to the EU on a legal visa and become irregular its validity expires. These migration histories lay at the base of the development of the EU migration databases and their use for the exclusion of irregular migrants.

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The main function of these systems in migration control is primarily linked to the external borders of the EU – the geographical borders and the access to legal procedures for asylum and visa – and therefore to external migration control. For the internal migration control, the main contribution of these systems can be expected in the support and instrumentalisation of the second logic of exclusion: that of exclusion through documentation and registration. The EU-wide scale of these systems that will document and register important legal migration flows into all of the member states brings the level of ‘identity management’ (Muller 2004) through database technology to a whole new level. Documenting identities and itineraries can be used for internal migration control as it may provide links to the missing information that frustrates national level expulsion policies. When these systems become operational in the context of the fight against illegal migration and especially in the internal control on irregular migrants they should become vital tools for the exclusion through registration, as their principal function is to re-identify irregular migrants (Broeders 2007).