[...]Irregular migration may not be our “business”, yet as I show in my
book, Illegality, Inc., it is certainly the business of others. A range of
sectors are fast at work at the European southern borders – among them,
European and African border forces, NGOs and international organisations,
defence contractors and policy institutes. And this “illegality industry” at
the border feeds on the two wildly different reactions provoked by the evening
news – that is, compassion and horror – while being shielded by the wider
indifference to the misery at the frontiers.
In less emotive language, advanced border control initiatives of the
kind seen in Europe, Australia and the United States of America are
simultaneously supposed to save people’s lives and stop or push them back.
Increasingly they achieve this double goal by recourse to two potent tropes:
humanitarianism and human smuggling.
