A global front: thoughts on enforcement at the rich world’s borders

My book Illegality, Inc. is concerned with the “fight against illegal migration” in West Africa and southern Europe, looking in turn at the trauma and drama of deportation to Senegal and Mali; Euro-African cooperation in the policing of the frontiers; and activism and aid work in the borderlands as well as in Spain’s North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, where many overland migrants find themselves indefinitely retained. While the book drills down into one section of the emerging Euro-African border—the Spanish one—this appendix instead looks briefly towards the U.S.-Mexico frontier to unearth some deeper trends and logics in migration controls. The text, exploratory in nature, is meant to open debate about the logics and justifications behind such controls, as well as about their human consequences.