The power of invisibility: Reconstructing mobility: Roma in an expanding Europe

Abstract

After the last EU enlargement, state borders have been partially replaced by internal border controls of state bureaucracies to regulate westward migration. Existing ideas of threat associated with non-EU migrants are accompanied by a 'new menace' referring to criminal ’insiders’ who might profit from the freedom of mobility within the EU. Accordingly, social security and immigration policies are increasingly intertwined within surveillance practices of member states, blurring the line between welfare and crime control measures. Therefore, new geopolitical measures and local risk management strategies are introduced for tracing and screening mobile groups. These monitoring practices, such as spidergrams, are taking new forms in technocratic bureaucracies and changing the means of interaction between newcomers and administrative bodies in host societies. In order to understand how these welfare service based financial monitoring structures facilitate spatial population control, we need to understand how selective incentives are invented in order to make undesired groups voluntarily leave the executive territory of host societies. This targeted social sorting is a dynamic process, shaped by narratives of politicians, academics and the civil society, in which economic and ethnic connotations of migrants are regularly intertwined. As full EU citizens, large Roma populations now enjoy freedom of movement throughout Europe. The long-standing prejudiced perception of Roma as profiteers living on welfare, involved in illegal activities and unwilling to integrate has become a basis for Western concerns about a “threatening flood” of westward-bound benefit tourists. This has been used to justify new control measures in several Western member states. Based on empirical case studies, this study will analyse these asymmetries of surveillance within the virtual walls of Fortress Europe, and uncover coping of Central European Roma migrants in daily bureaucratic welfare procedures in London.