As the Melilla picture shows, politically investing the border with significance is a dangerous game. More enforcement forces migrants underground and into the hands of smugglers and bandits. It spawns absurd incentives for border forces in the West and its backyards, where the migratory “threat” has become a globalised racket. In Libya, militias now hold foreigners captive in the city’s zoo or lock them up in EU-supported detention centres until their families pay “liberation” fees, mirroring similar hostage-taking by criminals in Mexico and the Sinai. Elsewhere in North Africa, police serially expel, extort and harass sub-Saharan Africans suspected of illegality, as human rights organisations have documented in the past decade. “We lived like animals,” migrants who had scrambled over the fences recalled as I talked to them about their ordeals in Ceuta, Melilla and along Spanish coasts. The ragged crowd atop the fence is a product of our very borders.
Afraid of those trespassing on our ‘golf-lawn’ world, we have let politicians build vast industries to shore up the borders (with a little help from lobbyists). The US, leading the way, has invested more than $100bn in border and migration control since 9/11 and keeps bolstering the $12bn-a-year operations of Customs and Border Protection, including with hugely expensive and ineffective drones. The EU, lagging somewhat behind in its profligacy, has nevertheless similarly poured funds into security technology R&D while bolstering “border management” through pots including the €3.8bn Internal Security Fund. These EU instruments co-exist with large expenditure by individual members states such as Spain, which has in recent years built new detention centres, bolstered its border and migration forces by 60 per cent and forged tied “aid” deals with African states collaborating in the so-called “fight against illegal migration”. And the investments keep increasing. As I show in my book, the “illegality industry” feeds on failure, with every new “border crisis” bringing further funds. As fences and detention estates grow, the industry consumes resources and ruins lives. In the process, it is not just our moral standing that takes a hit, but also our economies. Labourers labelled “illegal” clean our homes, care for our elderly and pick our fruit – or as one US lawyer recently put it regarding the country’s punitive migration laws, “no workers, no food.”