I had no idea that Europe had internal borders: Migrants’ ‘secondary movements’ before the EU internal border regime

Abstract

This paper looks at the so-called ‘secondary movements’, namely, migrants’ unauthorized movements across Member States of the European Union (EU). Over the past few years, secondary movements have become a main concern on the EU political agenda because they seem unstoppable, despite the more rigid migration regime designed at different levels to manage them. Secondary movements are a relatively understudied topic within the vast critical migration debate on border regimes. This paper bridges this gap by looking at unauthorized movements within Europe on two levels. Firstly, it explores them by focusing on the emergence, conceptualization and embodiment of the term ‘secondary movements’ within the EU agenda; secondly, it sheds light on this kind of movement from the migrants’ perspective. Based on empirical research carried out along the Italian–French border and in Rome from September 2018 to December 2018, this paper aims to highlight the tensions between unauthorized mobilities and the EU asylum system, which forces migrants to stay in (or move to) specific countries without taking into consideration their personal plans. Thanks to a bottom-up perspective, this analysis shows how complex migrants’ reasons for movements are and it sheds a necessary light on how EU asylum policies and border control mechanisms influence migrants’ journey without stopping them. Reading the border regime of Ventimiglia through the lens of ‘secondary movements’ allows for a more nuanced account of the systems of power within which this EU internal border regime takes form.

From fieldwork to frames: Insights from an auto‐ethnographic comic on the French‐Italian border of Ventimiglia

“…At that time, however, I had not yet conceptualised that the graphic novel, initially conceived as a ‘replacement’, could eventually reveal something about myself and my research that I had yet to discover. I had not even realised that, through the graphic novel about Ventimiglia, an area that has recently garnered attention in various academic papers, including my own (Amigoni & Aru, 2023; Aru, 2021, 2022), I was offering a distinctive viewpoint on a crucial area within the European internal mobility control system. This perspective is genuinely unique within the realm of Ventimiglia studies, as it incorporates a visual counter‐narrative of the border city, unveiled through the various stages of the research process.…”