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Despite their prominent role in the Return Directive and the constitution of the common European border regime, entry bans and their role in the governance of unwanted mobility remain largely unexamined in migration research. Entry bans accompany removal decisions for non-compliant or criminalised non-citizens, applying by default in the whole Schengen area, excluding EU citizens and legally residing third-country nationals, who receive national bans. In this article, drawing from my research on the immigration detention system in Finland, I discuss how entry bans sanction and irregularise movement mainly inside Europe, complicate non-citizens' regularisation, and affect their mobility strategies. Despite also being intertwined with crime control in Finland, national entry bans seem largely ineffective in preventing unwanted mobility inside the Schengen area: many Estonian citizens, in particular, are detained and removed from Finland several times a year. Notwithstanding the Europe-wide effect intended in the Return Directive, national entry bans issued alongside Schengen bans reintroduce borders inside Europe. Furthermore, by prolonging the duration of removal orders for years, entry bans establish individual borders that may be faced in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 street-level 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 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]