International audienceAnalyses of security practices at borders have focused on the dematerialisation and de-territorialisation of control of individuals’ mobility. This paper explores the nature of the control the state still exercises over individuals’ mobility at national borders. It focuses on a border that is supposed to have been opened, between France and Italy, inside the Schengen Area. It is based on analysis of the practices, representations and organisation of French border police officers, beginning with the legal and organisational transformations due to implementation of the Schengen Convention at the France–Italy border. It then turns to the study of border police officers’ targeting practices, using Heyman's notion of a ‘plausible story’. Finally, it assesses the influence of deportation practices on the territoriality of the control of individuals’ mobility, as well as its effects on targeting practices. These borders are at the core of the interaction between the construction of a new, European political centre, and the affirmation of an older one, the national, political centre. This paper demonstrates that border police officers are in charge of dealing with the tension, a double bind of sorts, emerging from this interaction. National, internal borders are still a site in which the state manages individuals’ mobility
The reintroduction of border checks as a chain of reactions during the 2015 "migrant crisis" was interpreted as the dislocation of the Schengen area, and as a "Schengen crisis". Free movement, understood as a complete removal of border checks at internal borders of the Schengen area, would be at risk. However, very few studies have examined the implementation of free movement, and consequently no work has been done on the consequences of such crises on the activities of streetlevel border guards. This article investigates the activities of the French border police at the France-Italy border in an open border setting in 2008 and 2009, and at two moments of crisis and border closing in 2011 and 2015-2016. By adopting a bottom-up approach toward EU policy implementation, this article shows that regardless of government's attempt at spectacularising the checks at the internal border, the extent to which the border is either "closed" or "open" relies on the member states' administrations. At the bottom of the chain of command, street-level bureaucrats are tasked with managing the inherent ambiguities of free movement as defined in the Schengen convention, concentrating the checks on third-country nationals and leaving the vast majorities of border crossings unaffected.
Western European states have increasingly linked immigration and welfare policy. This trend has important implications for European welfare-state trajectories, but accounts of the policy reasoning behind it have diverged. Are policymakers attempting to delimit social citizenship to secure welfare-state legitimacy? Pursuing new, market-oriented welfare-state goals? Symbolically communicating immigration control intentions to voters? Or attempting to instrumentally steer immigration flows? These accounts have rarely been tested empirically against each other. Redressing this, we employ 83 elite interviews in a comparative process-tracing study of policies linking welfare provision and immigration status in Germany, France, and the UK during the 1990s. We find little evidence suggesting welfare-guided policy reasonings. Rather, this policy linkage appears “immigration-guided:” meant to control “unwanted” immigration or resonate symbolically in immigration politics. Differences in exclusions from welfare support for migrants grew from existing national differences in welfare-state design and politicizations of immigration, not from policy intentions, which were largely shared.
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