I had no idea that Europe had internal borders: Migrants’ ‘secondary movements’ before the EU internal border regime

Silvia Aru

Environment and Planning C, 2022, vol. 40, issue 7, 1421-1436

Abstract: This paper looks at the so-called ‘secondary movements’, namely, migrants’ unauthorized movements across Member States of the European Union (EU). Over the past few years, secondary movements have become a main concern on the EU political agenda because they seem unstoppable, despite the more rigid migration regime designed at different levels to manage them. Secondary movements are a relatively understudied topic within the vast critical migration debate on border regimes. This paper bridges this gap by looking at unauthorized movements within Europe on two levels. Firstly, it explores them by focusing on the emergence, conceptualization and embodiment of the term ‘secondary movements’ within the EU agenda; secondly, it sheds light on this kind of movement from the migrants’ perspective. Based on empirical research carried out along the Italian–French border and in Rome from September 2018 to December 2018, this paper aims to highlight the tensions between unauthorized mobilities and the EU asylum system, which forces migrants to stay in (or move to) specific countries without taking into consideration their personal plans. Thanks to a bottom-up perspective, this analysis shows how complex migrants’ reasons for movements are and it sheds a necessary light on how EU asylum policies and border control mechanisms influence migrants’ journey without stopping them. Reading the border regime of Ventimiglia through the lens of ‘secondary movements’ allows for a more nuanced account of the systems of power within which this EU internal border regime takes form.

Keywords: Secondary movements; European Union asylum system; border regime; agency; Ventimiglia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23996544221082383 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:40:y:2022:i:7:p:1421-1436

DOI: 10.1177/23996544221082383

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().