Demand #14: Disband Frontex, Dissolve the border, Support the crossing.
(Photo courtesy of europa-links.eu)
Frontex is a European agency established in 2005 to co-ordinate the efforts of the Union to control the borders of an increasingly fortressed Europe. Frontex exists practically to militarise and secure the borders of the European Union, and culturally, to locate migration as a threat to Europe and to construct migrants, rather than the border, as a social, economic and political problem.
Whilst on the one hand the European Union promotes freedom of movement (predominantly for economic benefit) inside its borders, on the other it simultaneously furthers division between those who are ‘in’ and ‘out’, and therefore strengthens the economic stranglehold that European governments have on countries where emigration is most prevalent. Frontex is at the forefront of this ‘mega-state’ border control.
The UK’s role in this is amplified most violently through its recent refusal to participate in rescue missions co-ordinated in Italy to provide assistance to those who are risking their lives to make this crossing. In addition there has been an increase in the number of European Commission immigrant processing centres that are outside the borders of the EU. For those outside the borders of the EU, the supposed protection of very basic rights under the guise of the European Convention of Human Rights is not afforded if they do not physically reach the border.
Frontex, and the political discourses that justify its existence, promote the idea that migrants are attracted to (northern) Europe to benefit from our exuberant welfare systems (ahem). Yet contextualising the ‘problem of migration’ reveals a huge variety of forms of deprivation and violence that force people to risk the border crossing to look for work or education. Ironically, while the UK government and Frontex uses poverty and violence in an attempt to curb migration into Europe, it is the violence and poverty inflicted by Europe’s military and economic policies that pushes people to its borders.
We demand the abolition of Frontex and re-introduction of rescue missions for migrants risking the crossing to Europe.
Members of Plan C MCR
20th March 2015
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