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Discourse played a crucial role in upholding the "Border Spectacle" throughout the "refugee crisis". This essay seeks to explore the discursive components of migration governance throughout the "refugee crisis" in Italy by drawing on Sayad's observation that the state thinks about itself when it talks about migration. The analysis shows that the national categories through which states think about immigration are significantly influenced by the colonial legacy. I rely on discourse analysis approaches to explore the speeches of the two Ministers of the Interior who oversaw migration governance between 2013 and 2018. I argue that the "crisis" offered Italy a key opportunity to showcase its national community as a good-natured and selfless one, while also emphasizing its unique performance within the Mediterranean space. As the Italian case demonstrates, unpacking the national categories through which states conceive migration can contribute to exposing and challenging the historical sanitization of migration governance discourse throughout the "refugee crisis". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a critical analysis of the current literature on visa studies, particularly with regard to its methodological limitations and how they impact our understanding of worldwide migration patterns with the fortress Europe conception. The first half of the manuscript is a critical review of studies that study visas. Although, numerous studies initially relied on the insights of authors such as John Torpey and Marc B. Salter, who examined the rise of passports and visas to regulate global flows of people, later studies chose to use a dyadic methodology, which is a reflection of a reductionist understanding of global flows and networks. The second half uses the Demig Visa database to show that the EU, which has been hailed as creating an area for free movement of,‘people, goods and services’, proved to be an obstacle for many countries in Asia and Africa, including neighbouring Mediterranean countries, which had enjoyed visa-free travel until the EU ‘Europeanized’ its immigration policy with the Schengen agreement in the mid-1980s. In summary, the subsequent EU ‘Great Shutdown’ does not stop population flows, but rather attempts to direct the flows at will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I deconstruct the distinctive facets of mediated framing of integration through a textual analysis of Flemish newspapers. Using Entman's framing theory, I identified four primary integration frames: Fortress Europe, Streamlined Labour, Solipsistic Representation, and Competing Integration Frames. Specifically, I describe the ambivalence of media framing, which intertextually borrows from dominant representation of (im)migrants. The papers simultaneously frame integration as an assimilative social contract to be agreed to by (im)migrants and as a responsibility of the host society to integrate (im)migrants. Counter-framing, present in all four media frames, is critical to both dismantling systemic marginalization and ameliorating processes of integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines representations of migrants and asylum seekers in some recent documentaries, largely made by white Europeans. I pay particular attention to questions of agency, voice and individuation, and the mediation, distribution, or evacuation of these elements of subjectivity. In contrast to the indifference or outright hostility with which migrants and refugees have often been treated, a well-intentioned but Eurocentric trope, evident in Ode to Lesvos, is the attempt made by 'ordinary' citizens to offer hospitality to those arriving at the continent's borders. On the other hand, Les Sauteurs (Those Who Jump) presents migrants' own actions as in part a form of political resistance. Finally, I consider how Gianfranco Rosi's Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) and Thomas Østbye's Imagining Emanuel interrogate the scrutiny, discipline and control endured by asylum seekers and migrants, processes that form part of the unmarked and unremarked upon Žižekian 'objective violence' that sustains the European system. These documentaries also offer reminders of the common technologies and routine procedures shared by filmmakers and the modern state's legal apparatus, as both test veracity and attempt to produce the human subject as knowable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The events that took place during the 2015-16 refugee crisis in the southeastern EU region boosted unprecedented bordering processes. Borders were reinforced and extended and a costly and difficult deal with Turkey was undertaken; the western Balkans were turned into a vast buffer zone made up of multiple buffer states with fences of all types and sizes; while Greece was ring-fenced and to this day struggles to manage thousands of refugees stranded in camps all over its territory. By seeking to contain the refugee flows, the EU turned its southeastern region into a fortified EU borderland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clandestine migration, particularly along the Southern sea borders, dominates the debate on migration control in Europe. On the contrary, even if most irregular migrants are visa over-stayers, remarkably little is known about the management of the EU visa supply. This paper analyzes the role played by visa policy in the European immigration control system. It shows that visa policy has never been exclusively a tool of irregular migration prevention and that the overall trend of short-term visa supply highlights an asymmetric visa regime, increasingly open to Eastern European countries while remarkably rigid across the Mediterranean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1989, Europe has shifted radically—from ‘open society’ to ‘Fortress Europe’. Does the current racialization of immigration signal a return to the 1930s? Contrary to the old antidemocratic nationalisms, the new sexual nationalisms today claim to defend democratic values against various ‘others’. However, this instrumentalization should not lead to a rejection of sexual democracy, but rather to a clear distinction between ideals and identities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the relationship between lesbian independent cinema and transnational cinema in Europe. The first part of the article outlines two main directions—one thematic and the other aesthetic—in which independent lesbian films in Europe utilize aspects of transnational cinema. The next section considers how these films articulate lesbian desire in relation to new discourses of sexual citizenship and immigration in Europe. The third part of the article examines lesbian independent films that seek to underscore the violence of immigration controls in Fortress Europe. What is significant about this group of films is that they encourage us to rethink the issue of sexual citizenship from a transnational perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how Ariadna Pujol's prize-winning documentary, Aguaviva (2006), creatively addresses the complexities of contemporary invited migration from Argentina into rural Spain in the context of tightened migration policies. The film thus places Latin American immigration into a context different from the US focus on undocumented movement from south of the US-Mexico border that is based on considering Latin American migrants as racially different from the majority US nation. Aguaviva documents a repopulation project that invited carefully preselected migrant families from Argentina to the small Spanish town of Aguaviva based on the notion of a shared ethnic affinity between Spaniards and Latin Americans as symbolized in the notion of Hispanidad. Through its use of traditional documentary formats, the film explores the ensuing conflicts between the townspeople and the newcomers, especially their diverging ideas about national identities, assimilation, and spatial imageries, in order to question the efficacy of an ethnically-based local immigration policy such as the one undergirding Aguaviva's repopulation project and its relationship to the larger context of tightened Spanish and European immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 1 May 2004, the external border of ‘Fortress Europe’ was shifted to the east to bring Poland into the fold of the European Union. Hans-Christian Schmid's 2003 film Lichter (Distant Lights) is a contemporary German film produced at the cusp of this development. It presents a shift away from the dominant mode of depicting the German-Polish borderlands guiding discourse in Germany during the decade prior to the EU enlargement. Throughout the 1990s, the German-Polish border had been depicted as a barrier protecting the German (European) self from a non-European other defined by endemic economic underdevelopment, social malaise, and criminal propensities. Schmid's film transcends this East-West divide by shifting the categories of spatial identity to global vs. local. Lichter generates a new portrait of the German-Polish borderland as a transnational but nonetheless local space situated at the disenfranchised margins of a new global order—one in which Warsaw joins Berlin as a privileged seat of wealth, power, and mobility. Lichter constructs this cross-border symmetry through both its narrative structure and its visual and aural aesthetics, both of which are treated at length in the article. These film strategies work together to inhibit the viewer's ability to correlate the films elements (individual scenes, agents, and emotional affects) with particular (national) spaces. On the one hand, this aesthetics of dislocation allows for the transcendence of the East-West dichotomy and an erasure of the stereotypes through which it had been structured. On the other hand, it has led many reviewers of the film to appeal to precisely such stereotypes of East and West to locate those elements spatially estranged by this aesthetic stratgy. The article thus questions whether viewers are prepared to engage with the critique of globalization the film presents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]