Program:

18.00-18.30: Registration
18.30-18.40: Word of welcome
18.40-19.30: Lecture by Richard Staring
19.30-19.40: Closing remarks and questions
19.40: Cocktail in the Palais de Hollande

Speaker:

Prof. Dr. Richard Staring holds the endowed chair of Mobility, Supervision and Crime at Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam. Trained as an anthropologist, he has published extensively on irregular migration and human trafficking. In 2015 he spent six month as a visiting scholar at Koç University’s Migration Research Center MiReKoc and the Netherlands Institute in Turkey.

To attend this lecture:

Please note that there are only limited seats available and making a reservation is required. For security reasons you are required to bring a valid photo ID. Reserving is not noncommittal: we count on your attendance. Please inform us if you are unable to attend. Make your reservation via: g.gurmen@nit-istanbul.org.

Summary:
Mass (refugee) migration and transnational terrorism are seen as acute and grave threats to the national security of individual countries leading to a growing focus on border control and the technological monitoring of cross-border mobility. This increased focus on closing off territories for unwanted individuals is at odds with the principle of “open borders” that identifies the European Union and the Schengen Area. This tension between the mobility of EU and other privileged citizens within Schengen on the one hand and increasing efforts of controlling mass (refugee) movement towards the EU on the other hand is an important reason for starting a new research project with colleagues of Leiden University on consequences of global mobility in the context of border security.

During this presentation, Staring will explore from an interdisciplinary academic perspective some of the developments around controlling irregular migration towards and within the European Union during the last decade. Secondly, he would like to sketch some of the consequences of these developments for (irregular) migrants and asylum seekers in the context of mobility, (human) security and vulnerability.

Migration scholars distinguish between internal and external migration controls. Internal migration control relates to different kinds of control mechanisms that try to identify irregular migrants who already crossed the Schengen borders. By way of internal control mechanisms, governments try to identify irregular migrants within the different EU countries with the goal of deterrence or discouragement and exclusion from participating in mainstream society. Internal control mechanisms consist of deportation and repatriation policies, exclusion from services and of the creation of criminal offences that have an impact on migration control. Within the context of Europe, external migration control amongst other things focuses on controlling the external Schengen borders with the aim of preventing unwanted migrants or irregular migrants from gaining access to the Schengen countries. Both modes of internal as well as external migration control are continuously developing in new directions. National governments within the EU are for instance increasingly including private actors as partners within the domain of controlling immigration (responsibilisation). Second, there is an increasing criminalization of migration (crimmigration) going on in many member states of the European Union in which criminal law is used as a mean to control migration. In addition to these two relatively new directions of immigration control, there is also a movement towards immigration management through the development of strategic (readmission) agreements between the European Union and countries outside the EU as for instance the recent agreement between the EU and Turkey.

Click here to download the poster.