The Role of Surveillance Technologies in the Securitization of EU Migration Policies and Border Management/AB Goc Politikalarinin ve Sinir Yonetiminin Guvenliklestirilmesinde Gozetim Teknolojilerinin Rolu.

• Author: Sadik, Giray

Introduction

One of the most challenging subjects occupying the EU's political and security agenda in recent years has been the large-scale movement of people, fleeing from political, social and economic crisis in their home countries, and the substantial rise of asylum-seekers waiting at the doors of European states. The unprecedented level of asylum applications has led to chaos among EU member states on how to handle the process, and this is recognized as a 'refugee crisis. This has resulted either in new technology investments or the upgrading of various tools and means of migration and border management. Automated decision-making, artificial intelligence, biometric data collection, facial recognition, iris scanning, and fingerprinting are some of the tools used to enhance European border surveillance.

This study aims to examine the role of surveillance technologies in the securitization of the EU's border-management and migration policies. In light of these practices, this article critically evaluates the impact of these policies on the EU's normative international identity. The securitization of migration and normative power are issues that have thus far been studied separately, as there is limited understanding about their interaction in practice and policy development. To address this gap in the literature, we aim to explore their relationship by integrating their analyses, and critically reflecting on their implications for the global credibility and influence of the EU. Evidently, these implications are likely to be more far-reaching than merely affecting EU member states, and thus are expected to have significant repercussions for the wider European neighborhood, especially on the transit and source countries for refugees in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The first section of the paper discusses the concept of securitization with reference to the EU's migration and border policies in theoretical and practical terms. In the following section, we assess the technologies of surveillance and control, particularly the EU's information technology (IT) systems--Schengen Information System (SIS), Visa Information System (VIS) and Eurodac--to exemplify the EU's securitizing practices. The third section discusses ethical concerns about the deployment of surveillance technologies, and the last section tries to describe the foreign policy behavior of the EU by looking at the goals, means and results of deploying the above-mentioned information technology systems. The study arrives at the conclusion that IT systems are securitizing migration and border management through their everyday practices, rather than exceptional or extraordinary means as expected by securitization theory, and that there is an essential need for impact assessment of the EU's surveillance technologies. Left unchecked, these technologies could lead to a systematic violation of basic human rights and the founding norms and principles of the Union, placing under controversy and even discrediting the EU's claim as a normative power in its relations with the non-EU world.

Securitization of Migration Policies

The Europeanization of migration policies--the convergence of member states' national migration policies at the European level--are primarily motivated by the internal security concerns of member states, particularly with the abolition of internal borders after the 1985 Schengen Agreement. This has mostly determined the course of EU migration policies. Since the 1980s, the direction of these policies has been predominantly determined by the security-oriented interests of EU member states and societies, indicated in the presentation of migrants as criminals, terrorists, troublemakers, or 'unable-to-assimilate' in political discourses and public debates. (1) According to Ceyhan and Tsoukala, this securitarian discourse has steadily increased the adoption of new control mechanisms by member states, such as external controls before and at the borders that include selective visa-granting systems, penalties for carriers of illegal migrants, creation of databases, cooperation with third countries on border management, and the deployment of law-enforcement agencies, military forces, and new technologies to strengthen border controls. (2)

The issue of the securitization of migration is usually treated within the Copenhagen School's theoretical framework, which basically defines securitization as the discursive construction of an issue as an imminent threat by the securitizing actors through speech acts. (3) This is the most referenced theoretical perspective in security studies. Proponents of the Copenhagen School would argue that when the issue is declared an existential threat, extra-ordinary measures, not legal in normalcy, concerning the issue are deemed legitimate. (4) As an alternative to this constructivist approach, the Paris School's sociological approach pioneered by Didier Bigo privileges practices over discourses. Although this study does not undermine the role of language and speech acts in the securitization of migration in Europe, it finds the argument of the second approach more promising in explaining securitization of migration in Europe.

How can the sociological approach, particularly as elaborated by Didier Bigo, explain the securitization of migration even in the absence of an explicit declaration of an issue as a security threat? This approach conceives bureaucratic routines, day-to-day practices (rather than extraordinary measures), policy tools, and technological developments as the major indicators of migration securitization. (5) However, Bigo does not diminish the role of speech acts and the construction of myths by politicians regarding immigrants in the securitization process. For him, "the securitization of immigration (...) emerges from the correlation between some successful speech acts of political leaders (...), and the specific field of security professionals (...)." (6) By criticizing the Copenhagen School's overemphasis on 'exceptionalization', Bigo stresses that "securitization works through everyday technologies, through the effects of power that are continuous rather than exceptional (...)", which shows how discourses work in practice. (7) In this regard, the technological advancements in control and surveillance are causing, and are not caused by the securitization of migration. Bigo defines the securitization of migration as "a process that creates continuous unease and uncertainty" and links it to "computerization, risk profiling, visa policy, the remote control of borders, the creation of international or nonterritorial zones in airports", which are conducted by professional 'managers of unease' such as customs, intelligence services, police forces, border patrols and suppliers of surveillance technologies. (8) Practitioners of these offices are, by the nature of their duties, managers of what may be referred to as unease, that is the risk and fear that may emerge in the absence of their duties. According to Bigo, although these security professionals claim that they are just reacting to new threats that necessitate extraordinary measures, this is not the case in practice as they try to guarantee their immediate interests such as competition for budgets and missions. These professional 'managers of risk and fear' transfer the legitimacy that they have gained from their struggle against terrorists and criminals towards other targets such as transnational political activists or people crossing borders. (9) Thus, professional managers of unease, who define threats and risks and claim that they are equipped with the necessary technologies to handle these threats, now target migrants and asylum seekers as experimental objects to test and utilize their technologies so that they will maintain their existence and authority in the management of migration. (10)

A deeper analysis on the securitization of migration requires going beyond the discourses of political leaders and looking at the practices and instruments that might "embody a specific threat image," as suggested by Balzacq. (11) As emphasized by Huysmans, although asylum may not be spoken off as a threat, its inclusion in policy frameworks that focus on internal security and border policing, as in the case of the Schengen Agreement, renders asylum a security problem. (12) As seen from the main activities of Frontex, such as the coordination of joint surveillance and control operations at the external borders and operational assistance to member states in coordinating and organizing return operations, there is no need for discourses from political leaders to declare asylum-seekers a security threat, since the routinized practices, complex technologies, and military equipment deployed by the Frontex give the message that they are fighting against a security threat. This is because they are normally used to tackle traditional security threats such as terrorism or a military attack. (13) It is this security rationality that integrates asylum and immigration in policy frameworks dealing with more traditional security issues such as terrorism, rather than an act of explicit threat definition of immigration as suggested by Huysmans. (14)

In a similar vein, Neal also goes beyond the language of exceptionalism and urgency in the securitization of migration and suggests that the establishment of Frontex was not the outcome of the EU and its institutions' urgent response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks as expected by the classical logic of securitization theory of the Copenhagen School, but rather it appeared as a technocratic project, in a sense, that emerged as a logical continuation of integration processes and not an urgent or extraordinary measure. (15) Although EU institutions overtly linked migration to terrorism and border security in their policy statements and extraordinary meetings as a response to 9/11, the language of...