Künstler: Tadej Pogacar (Ljubljana)
Presented work: „Attention! Migrants, Distrust Abusive Regimes!” (2006)
Text by Mojca Pajnik (Peace Institute, Ljubljana) [DE] [EN] [TR] [HR] [SI] [HU] [CZ]
Migration is advocated by policy makers as a global phenomenon affecting national states and their security regimes, producing a kind of statecraft discourse, where the state deploys itself to fight migration for the sake of the alleged national security and the nation’s territorially bounded citizenship. As a constitutive part of border issues migration becomes the means for the state to claim its power, where the notion of being in control of and securing the “nationals” from migrants is performed. Apart from legitimizing the role of the state in mastering the “problem”, predominant (anti)migration policies adopt the notion that porous borders are the principal cause behind “illegal”, “undocumented”, “abusive” etc. migration, and that borders therefore need to be put under greater surveillance. As a result, the idea is pursued, best manifested in the Schengen Information System, that in order to prevent “illegality” the role of the state is to limit border crossing and punish the “perpetrators”, i.e. women and men on the move.
Such policies obviously lack any reflection on the consequences of tightening border regimes that increase the vulnerability of people on the move and force them to find other, more dangerous paths, exposed to more abuse. Restrictive borders also bypass the notion that curbing migration will not stop people from moving but drive them underground and make them more invisible. Moreover, such policies neglect people who migrate as agents, as active individuals and groups practicing transgressive lives, opening paths for imagining transnational, worldly oriented citizenship.
One of the consequences of current nationalizing states processes are claims that migrants endanger the habitual unity of the nation-state, its inhabitants as first comers, their jobs and public order in general. As a consequence, a migrant worker is first and foremost considered a “non-national”, an “intruder”, an “alien”, or a “migrant for life”. But in fact, he or she is opening paths for a new kind of deterritorialized politics and practice of active citizenship. Instead of recognizing this novelty, migrants are demarcated at the border-crossing as “abusive retailers ”. The answer to the question about what is the abuse here and who the abuser is, however, not to be found in migrants, but in the current migration management regimes, oriented to deploy prevention and criminalization strategies, instead of facilitating transnational modalities of being and living in the world.
Dr. Mojca Pajnik, Peace Institute, Ljubljana