[-empyre-] Hotspotting-technology and immigration management

Wed Feb 10 02:23:33 AEDT 2016

Hola Huub,

Thanks for the notes on how hotspotting is shutting down social support  
by civil society from the roots in a number of regions and
also aggressively making flight facilitation-an making them equal 
criminal acts.

And yes, please do, give your sense of creating re-visibility during 
these E.U. acts of erasing.

Very best,
Ricardo

P.S. As a side note in relation to Ana's figuration of camps in recent 
history-how long do people stay in camps:

/“...Refugee camps are the cities of tomorrow ... The average stay today 
in a camp is 17 years. That’s a generation. In the Middle East, we were 
building camps (as) storage facilities for people. But the refugees were 
building a city…”/

/— //Kilian Kleinschmidt/

On 2/8/16 12:59 PM, Huub Dijstelbloem wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
> Hi Ricardo,
>
> “I was wondering how your work traces out the question of how virtual 
> fences function in creating targeted visibility (as expanded 
> formssurveillance) of immigration, how does migration hotspot* 
> management function shutdown invisibility and escape routes?”
>
> Thanks for bringing in that question, it goes right at the center of 
> some things I have recently been working on. As I mentioned in my 
> first post, border surveillance policies in Europe in general and this 
> new strategy of hotspotting in particular mistakenly assume you can 
> define a region as a border just by taking in a North-West 
> perspective. Defining the Aegean as a border is a denial of history 
> and a denial of transactions and exchanges that have been going on 
> culturally, socially, economically and religiously between different 
> regions for centuries.  So by defining a region as a hotspot the first 
> thing that happens is that all kinds of existing relationships between 
> a state and civil society on the one hand and between different social 
> organizations on the other are put under pressure. Some of the 
> consequences we see already. Following the questionable (to say the 
> least) Greek example, several European member states are studying on 
> jurisdiction to arrest people who support migrants (“irregular 
> migrants” as they are officially referred to) on the accusation of 
> smuggling. Another example that has been going on for a couple of 
> years now on islands like Chios and Lesbos is that the state closes 
> down refugee camps that have been created with the help of local 
> people and grassroots organizations. So what first was welcomed as an 
> initiative from civil society to support the state in housing migrants 
> and providing them with food and health care because the state lacked 
> all kinds of resources (the result of a combination of years of 
> austerity with a lack of migration policy) is now condemned as a 
> criminal act, as illegally supporting illegal people. To come down to 
> my point, this strategy of hotspotting by defining an area as a high 
> voltage border and putting it under permanent control demolishes the 
> visual manifestations of solidarity and voluntary support and turns 
> the long existing relationships between state and society invisible. 
> In doing so it takes away one of the most important democratic tools 
> of a group of people namely the possibility of imaging itself as a 
> community in relationship with others by visualizing its deeds and 
> performing public acts. So I think the paradigmatic interplay between 
> the visible and the invisible is not just performed on an instrumental 
> level by covering things up and exposing others but on a political 
> level as it interferes with a society’s possibilities to be visible to 
> itself as a society.
>
> I can share some examples of activist’s attempts to re-visualize the 
> society’s concern for migrants on the Aegean islands in a next post,
>
> Best,
>
> Huub
>
> *According to the E.U. Commission: "A Hotspot is characterized by 
> specific and disproportionate migratory pressure,
> consisting of mixed migratory flows, which are largely linked to the 
> smuggling of migrants, and where the Member
> State concerned might request support of better cope with the 
> migratory pressure."
>
>
> Prof. dr. Huub Dijstelbloem
> WRR - www.wrr.nl <http://www.wrr.nl>
> UvA - 
> http://www.uva.nl/over-de-uva/organisatie/medewerkers/content/d/i/h.o.dijstelbloem/h.o.dijstelbloem.html
> Academia - https://amsterdam.academia.edu/HuubDijstelbloem
>
> 2016-02-08 13:55 GMT+01:00 Ricardo Dominguez <rrdominguez at ucsd.edu 
> <mailto:rrdominguez at ucsd.edu>>:
>
>     ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>     Hola Huub y Tod at s,
>
>     I was wondering how your work traces out the question of how
>     virtual fences function in creating targeted visibility (as
>     expanded forms
>     surveillance) of immigration, how does migration hotspot*
>     management function shutdown invisibility and
>     escape routes?
>
>     *According to the E.U. Commission: "A Hotspot is characterized by
>     specific and disproportionate migratory pressure,
>     consisting of mixed migratory flows, which are largely linked to
>     the smuggling of migrants, and where the Member
>     State concerned might request support of better cope with the
>     migratory pressure."
>
>     Very best,
>     Ricardo
>
>
>
>
>
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>     empyre forum
>     empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>     <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
>     http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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