Illegality, Inc., Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe by Ruben Andersson (review)

255 history. There is no doubt that students as well as professional art historians and Assyriologists will heartily welcome this volume and its very useful supporting plates and illustrations. Ito, S. 2015. Royal Image and Political Thinking in the Letters of Assurbanipal. PhD Diss. Helsinki. available at: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-51-0973-6 Winter I. J., 1976. Phoenician and North Syrian Ivory Carving in Historical Context: Questions of Style and Distribution. Iraq 38, 1–22. Winter, I. J. 1981. Is there a South Syrian Style of Ivory Carving in the Early First Millennium B.C.? Iraq 43, 101–130. Omar N’Shea University of Malta Ruben Andersson, 2014. Illegality, Inc. , Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. California: University of California Press, 360 pp. ISBN: 978-0-520-28252-0. As I write, news-stations worldwide are broadcasting endless images of weary travellers marching into Germany. These have followed a summer of drama involving the urgent rescue of migrants impossibly packed into rickety boats that often pour their passengers into the Mediterranean, where they wash up dead, days later, on European beaches. Andersson’s book, therefore, arrives at a perfect time to ask a simple question. Migrants crossing into Europe in such dramatic ways constitute but a tiny fraction of those entering illegally. So why is so much time and money invested in these particular travellers? Andersson’s answer is that a strange economy has been constructed by a number of actors who see in this traveller an opportunity for redemption, political leverage or plain monetary gain. This ‘Illegality Industry’ produces three things. First, it develops organisations, buildings, equipment, projects and technology to manage this migrant. Second, the industry hammers the African traveller into the ‘illegal migrant’, producing the very figure it seeks to combat (but which it needs to maintain itself.) Third, this system creates resistance (e.g. migrant protests) as well as further illegality (e.g. crafty ways to beat Europe’s formidable borders). Such failure, however, becomes proof for the need to invest more in the business of bordering Europe against this determined nemesis. Thus, the book’s first ethnographic chapter describes the recent repatriation agreements between Spain and Senegal. These deals were followed by Spanish money financing embassies promising work visas, still-born agricultural programmes, and NGO-led ‘sensibilisation’ campaigns trying to deter young men from migrating northward. This money, therefore, never reaches the deportees for whom it was intended. Trapped between poor prospects at home and dangerous journeys abroad, the deportees are forced to attract funds by playing the role of living deterrents set out by ‘sensibilisation’. Chapter 2 takes us into the offices of the institutions operating Europe’s border regime. These organisations, relying on high-tech data-gathering and analysis software, abstract migrant activity into ‘Risk’: the calculation of migrants’ ability to penetrate into Europe and/or harm themselves in the process. Managing this humanitarian risk in turn legitimises the expansion of Europe’s powers of surveillance and intervention beyond its territory. Europe’s border is no longer a geographical line, but a constellation of institutions extending ‘order’ into an African ‘frontier’ characterised by irrationality and unpredictability. These organisations’ success would be limited if not for African police whose difficult job is to catch illegal migrants before they become illegal migrants. Chapter 3 looks at the techniques these officers use to sift the illegal migrant from masses of others on the move. Andersson notes, however, that it is the chase itself that creates the pursued, impoverished, paranoid migrant they are looking for. These hunts occur within the context of a Spanish-African gift economy, whereby Spain funds its neighbours do its ‘dirty work’ while African states find that their newfound control over the flow of migrants gives them political leverage in international affairs. Chapter 4 describes how migrants reaching the northern coasts of Morocco are bottlenecked into storming the fortified fences of the Spanish Enclaves en-masse or attempting to cross the unpredictable Straits of Gibraltar in unreliable vessels. These dramas feature other actors whose image also changes through their performance: Spain’s defunct border guards are recast as a humanitarian force; Humanitarian NGOs find new relevance in...