Mobility & Politics

Series EditorsMartin Geiger

Carleton UniversityOttawa, Ontario, Canada

Parvati RaghuramOpen University

Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

William WaltersCarleton University

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Mobility & Politics

Series Editors: Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada;Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK; William Walters,Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Global Advisory Board: Michael Collyer, University of Sussex; Susan B.Coutin, University of California; Raúl Delgado Wise, UniversidadAutónoma de Zacatecas; Nicholas De Genova, King’s College London;Eleonore Kofman, Middlesex University; Rey Koslowski, University atAlbany; Loren B. Landau, University of the Witwatersrand; SandroMezzadra, Università di Bologna; Alison Mountz, Wilfrid LaurierUniversity; Brett Neilson, University of Western Sydney; AntoinePécoud, Université Paris 13; Ranabir Samaddar, Mahanirban ResearchGroup Calcutta; Nandita Sharma, University of Hawai’i at Manoa;Tesfaye Tafesse, Addis Ababa University; Thanh-Dam Truong, ErasmusUniversity Rotterdam.

Human mobility, whatever its scale, is often controversial. Hence it carrieswith it the potential for politics. A core feature of mobility politics is thetension between the desire to maximise the social and economic benefitsof migration and pressures to restrict movement. Transnational commu-nities, global instability, advances in transportation and communication,and concepts of ‘smart borders’ and ‘migration management’ are just afew of the phenomena transforming the landscape of migration today. Thetension between openness and restriction raises important questions abouthow different types of policy and politics come to life and influencemobility.

Mobility & Politics invites original, theoretically and empirically informedstudies for academic and policy-oriented debates. Authors examine issuessuch as refugees and displacement, migration and citizenship, security andcross-border movements, (post-)colonialism and mobility, and transna-tional movements and cosmopolitics.

More information about this series athttp://www.springer.com/series/14800

Federica Infantino

Outsourcing BorderControl

Politics and Practice of Contracted Visa Policyin Morocco

Federica InfantinoFNRS/Université Libre de Bruxelles, GERMEBrussels, Belgium

Mobility & PoliticsISBN 978-1-137-46983-0 ISBN 978-1-137-46984-7 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46984-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930151

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by thePublisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights oftranslation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction onmicrofilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage andretrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodologynow known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in thispublication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names areexempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information inthis book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publishernor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the materialcontained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisherremains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutionalaffiliations.

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This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by Springer NatureThe registered company is Nature America Inc.The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.

To my parents and my sister

SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD

Bordering practices have become increasingly complex as the drive for effi-ciency and effectiveness is combined with concerns over security and bordercontrol. But it is precisely the securitization of borders which makes ethno-graphic research on how borders are actually managed so difficult to do.Federica Infantino’sOutsourcing Border Control is a convincing ethnographicstudy of the day-to-day practices of two transnational corporations imple-menting EU visa policy inMorocco. Infantino looks at how different state andnon-state actors shape the deployment of visa policy. She traces the complex-ities of the outsourcing of visa application services to private sector providers inorder to explore the ways in which states exercise their monopolized powerover the “legitimatemeans of movement,”while at the same time increasinglyrelying on private companies for exercising control.The volume begins with an enticing story – of a taxi ride where the

author is introduced to the concept of two consulates. The vernacularunderstanding of the consulate as one which is client facing and becomesthe gateway for immigration is in stark contrast with official understand-ings of consular services as the role of the government – extraterritorially.But this split in consular services, first tested in India in 2001 as the travelcompany Kuoni took over the provision of visas through its subsidiaryVFS, has become the primary modus operandi for many countries acrossthe world. VFS has become the arbiter of the power and privilege ofmobility in a differentially bordered world. Infantino discusses borderand visa checks as individually experienced phenomena and the identifica-tion of “national” or “immigrant” as a relatively novel dichotomy.

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States are able to deflect responsibility by outsourcing organizationalbureaucratic decision making processes to external organisations. Whileoutsourcing has many advantages for states and does not diminish theirauthority and control, the exclusionary nature of many of the practices putin place are revealed through Infantino’s approach to a “street-level study”of border and visa policy implementation. Her empirically groundedresearch offers insight into the ways in which decentralization of sovereignfunctions does not imply more efficiency and effectiveness, as New PublicManagement narratives tend to describe. Efficiency and effectiveness aretreated as notions to be questioned.Infantino’s research contributes to our Mobility & Politics series by

deepening and expanding our understanding of practices of outsourcingand the practical implementation of migration and border control incomparative perspective.

The Series EditorsMartin Geiger, Carleton UniversityParvati Raghuram, Open UniversityWilliam Walters, Carleton University

and

Rudi Barwin, Mobility & Politics Research Collectivewww.mobpoli.info//www.mobilitypoliticsseries.com

viii SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD

PREFACE

Is the relevance of border control a paradox of our contemporary society? Inthe age of expanded and accelerated circulations of capitals, services, ideas,and images, borders remain a major topic. Rhetoric celebrates a borderlessworld, from economic to cultural perspectives, and the end of nation-states.Yet, the reality for several people is that of a bordered world divided intounambiguous national territories. “Losing control” narratives nourish publicand political debates that tend to focus on borders as means to re-establishorder.Nation-states are at the forefront of such an endeavor. Even in the caseof the European Union, an ongoing political experiment that for a philoso-pher like Etienne Balibar represented the opportunity to foster an idea ofdemocracy in which citizenship is untied from ethnos, nation-states are stillthe fundamental political units. Within the frame of European integration,the disappearance of inter-state borders has not diminished their central role.National borders are summed up into the external borders of the EU. Theexternal borders of the EU continue to define territories and identities byopposing “Us” to “Others.” Although the powerful narratives of losingcontrol and of Europe as a strainer, a policy toolbox has been deployed inorder to strengthen the external borders of the EU. Tools are wide-ranging:they include classical border policing that agency like Frontex or automaticsurveillance technologies carry out, common databases sharing national listsof banned travelers such as the Schengen Information System (SIS) oractivating internal borders for the circulation of asylum seekers such asEURODAC, liaison officers, carriers’ sanctions, visa policy. Tools discloseconceptions of linear as well as diffuse borders, as they displace and multiplythe borders of the European Union.

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This book focuses on one of the tools of border control namely EU visapolicy. It does so from a specific analytical perspective, that is the perspec-tive of the practices that put EU visa policy into action. It aims atuncovering one particular yet diffused aspect: the outsourcing of day-to-day implementation to private for-profit organizations such as transna-tional corporations. The outsourcing in such a domain is puzzling, giventhat border control is emblematic of state sovereignty. It is also extremelysignificant. Dealing with private service providers is becoming a commonexperience for more and more visa applicants on a global scale. Not onlythe Member States of the European Union have adopted visa policy out-sourcing but also other countries like Canada, the United States ofAmerica, South Africa, India, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates andso on. However, the outsourcing of visa policy implementation is moresignificant to a very large and specific portion of the world’s population.Concerning visa introduction, the principle of reciprocity is not always atplay. Countries that face a low number of visa impositions are not amongthe countries that impose fewer visa restrictions (Neumayer 2006). In thecase of the European Union, it is interesting to observe that the map of thecountries whose nationals are exempt from visa requirements overlapsalmost perfectly with the map of the richest countries of the world.Nationals who are exempted from visa requirements are less than 40whereas visa restrictions exist for nationals of 125 countries. Thus, thetopic of this book concerns in particular that portion of the world’spopulation, typically to be found in low-income countries, whose accessto the territory of Member States depends on the possession of a visa.Although significant, day-to-day visa policy implementation that is carriedout by transnational corporations remained largely unexplored.By investigating the day-to-day practices of two private service providers

in Morocco that manage the visa application process on behalf of EUcountries, this book sheds ethnographic light on outsourced border con-trol on the ground. Day-to-day implementation of migration and bordercontrol tends to be overlooked, because on the one hand, policy-making ismore often associated to policy design and, on the other hand, because ofdifficulties for researchers in obtaining access to public and private border-ing organizations. My “street-level” analytical stance allows for bringinginto focus the gap between discourse and practice, promises and out-comes. In this case of analysis, discourses represent the outsourcing ofgovernment’s functions to transnational corporations as a developmentthat facilitates the visa application process for prospective travelers and

x PREFACE

improve the performance of state bureaucracies. This kind of rhetoric istypical of New Public Management that, when it comes to border control,has specific effects. This book argues that outsourcing border controlprimarily does something else, which official discourses tend to ignore.Outsourcing has specific effects on policy outcomes, understood as theconsequences on policy recipients, as well as on state capability of govern-ing the EU border that common visa policy displaces in countries ofdeparture.In order to illuminate what is politically at stake in outsourcing border

control, I have located the analysis on the ways in which private serviceproviders put visa policy into practice. I use street-level implementation asthe site to observe the relationship between the governing and the gov-erned, political power, and state capacity. I consider outsourcing as apolicy instrument and follow the lines of the sociology of the instrumenta-tion of public policy that is interested in the reasons and the effects of theadoption of specific instruments, treating policy instruments as institutionsthat have specific effects on political and social outcomes and structurepublic policy according to their own logic (Lascoumes and Le Galès2004). I use a street-level implementation approach to contribute tothat kind of debate, because I deem it as an understudied yet privilegedvenue to question the political and social implications of outsourcinggovernments’ functions. The main argument is that outsourcing visapolicy implementation does not diminish state sovereignty but ratherexpands state capacity to order the flows since it keeps policy recipientsaway from sight and away from mind. States are thus governing throughthe distance. For European Member States, outsourcing has represented astrategic political tool within the process of adoption of European rulesregulating visa policy implementation: it has allowed for removing eco-nomic and non-economic burdens away from the state towards privatecontractors. Analyzing the outsourcing of border control from the vantagepoint of day-to-day implementation reveals de-responsabilization as theconceptualization of the relationship between the governing and thegoverned. This research focuses on the inside of border control.Nonetheless, it is also about policy recipients that experience visa policynot in abstract terms.In Chapter 1, I illustrate the theoretical perspectives on which the

analysis builds, the cases of analysis and the research strategy that hastaken into account the local, national, and European levels of EU visapolicy policy-making. Chapter 2 analyzes the mode of governing visa

PREFACE xi