The Scars of the Erasure_web

Erasure_4a 10.1.11 20:29 Page 55THE ERASURE AS A TESTING GROUND FOR EUROPEAN MIGRATION POLICIES55the Slovenian government stated: “In Europe, which is one of the global immigrationregions in the absolute and relative sense, the issue of migration policy isone of the main political issues. On the one hand, the globalization of theeconomies and regional integration efforts, such as the European Union, by establishinga common market and encouraging economic growth and competitiveness,exact the removal of internal frontiers between member states. On the otherhand, there has emerged the need to control inflow and immigration of aliensfrom other parts of the world, the so-called ‘third countries.’”Migration policy is therefore a Janus-faced policy, with both faces servingthe purpose of perpetuating the dominant social order. Much like the eliminationof internal frontiers, “control over the inflow of aliens from other parts of theworld” is also aimed at “encouraging economic growth and competitiveness.”The economic system of which the EU is part needs the workforce “from otherparts of the world, i.e., third countries,” but in order to ensure its successful reproduction,it must systematically keep away these workers from its own socialresources. “This specific mixture of policies that at the same time meet the circulationneeds of the global liberal economy and the security needs of the etatistnational economies has been termed ‘domopolitics’ by William Walters. […] Thepurpose of domopolitics as the main lever of European migration policy – in contrastto the popularized but entirely mistaken concept of ‘Fortress Europe’ – isnot to stop mobility but to tame it.” (Beznec 2009, 16). European migration policyand its various aspects are not therefore a mechanism for diverting migrantscoming from “third countries,” but a refined mechanism for channeling these“aliens” in accordance with economic needs. This was also confirmed by Slovenia’sformer Minister of the Interior, Dragutin Mate, when he said, in his speechfor the XXXIX session of COSAC: “In the area of migration, we are in the phase ofbuilding a common European immigration policy. We are working in two directions:stemming irregular immigration and facilitating legal migration. In practice,we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. Our economy needs a labour force,and according to demographic calculations, in 20 years the European Union willrequire more workers than it will have available; therefore, immigrants will be urgentlyneeded. This need is already evident today, as illegal migrants who cometo Europe get work easily. Those that we see in the streets are a minority comparedto the numbers of migrants working behind factory walls.” 1 During the periodof cyclical upswing, the EU states open their doors to immigrant workers,while at the same time introducing rigorous measures to prevent their lastingsettlement and equal inclusion in society, including access to the institutions ofthe welfare state. The instruments used to achieve this primarily involve the conceptof circular migration and various formal and informal obstacles. These preventmigrants from certain countries from accumulating the years of “legal”residence in a host country which would over time enable them to obtain per-1 See http://www.eu2008.si/si/News_and_Documents/Speeches_Interviews/May/ 0507MNZ-COSAC.html (27 November2009).