Irregular maritime migration in
Southern-European islands
Camille Schmoll, Ecole Française de Rome/University Paris Diderot
European Migration Network
Annual Conference
Malta 2nd December 2013
PROGRAMME
MIRIADE
(Migrations IRrégulières dans
les Iles et Archipels De
l’Europe)
2009-2012
© Elisabeth Cosimi
• Research in Malta
• in 2010 and 2011 …
• … and in Cyprus in 2013
Introduction
• Islands as intersections of flows
• Irregular migration/maritime migration
• In 2002 the estimated number of irregular migrants
residing in the EU-12 was 3.1–5.3 million. By 2008, this
number dropped to 1.8–3.3 million in the EU-12 and 1.9–
3.8 million in the EU-27 (Düvell 2011).
Structure of the presentation
1.
A short chronology of maritime migration to
Southern European islands
How and why the issue has become salient?
2.
Why look at islands?
Islands as ordinary places
Islands as ‘places of condensation’ from which to observe the EuroMediterranean migratory situation
3.
Research themes and future directions
Bordering the islands
Analysing and challenging narratives of islandness
Migrants and the local population
1. A short chronology of irregular migration to
Southern European islands
• A persistent phenomenon since Italy and Spain
introduced visa requirements in the early 1990s’
• The geography and structure of the flows evolve
constantly according to institutional factors
A chronology in 5 steps
1/ Irregular migrations in the Mediterranean – End of 1990’s
2/During the 2000’s, trajectories to Europe are constantly
reshaped according to the geography of border controls.
From Gibraltar to the Canary Islands and Strait of Sicily
3/ The Greek route
Apprehensions
Greek
border
Crete
Turkish
2007
sea 16,781
2,245
112,364
TOTAL
(including
land
borders and within the
country)
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
30,149
27,685
6,204
814
3,610
2,961
2,859
2,444
1,784
2,834
146,337
126,145
132,524
99,368
76,878
Triandafyllidou, 2014, forthcoming
4/ 2010: interruption of flows to Sicily and Malta, mainly due
to the strengthening of the long-lasting cooperation between
Italy and Libya.
Sicily
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
1,973
2,782
5,504
18,225
14,017
13,594
22,824
21,400
16
182
Sardinia
2008
2010
2011
16,585 34,540 8,282
107
50,483*
1,548
318
1,621
2009
484
All Italy 49,999 26,817 20,143 23,719 14,331 13,635 22,939 22,016 20,165 36,951 9,573 4,406 62,692
* Data here refer to Lampedusa only.
Malta
Year
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012 (as of 6 July)
Irregular immigrants
57
1,686
502
1,388
1,822
1,780
1,702
2,775
1,397
28
1,577
1,203
Source : Triandafyllidou, 2014, forthcoming
5/ The situation changed dramatically with the Tunisian
revolution and the war in Libya, exposing the fragility of EU
externalisation policies.
Irregular migrants
2011
(Frontex)
2. Why look at islands?
→ Islands as ordinary places
• A rather small number of irregular migrants pass illegally
through European islands
• They share may common features with other EU or African
places in the Euromed region
• Most of the European islands we look at – Greek islands,
Italian, Spanish islands, even Malta and Cyprus - belong to
what has been described extensively as the “South
European migration model” (King Thomson 2008)
2. Why look at islands?
→ Islands as « places of condensation »
• Islands are socially constructed as bastions of European
jurisdiction and identity
• Narratives of islandness and their interactions with the social
construction of Europeanness
• Island features, islandness and the social construction of
‘geographies of fear’ and ‘geographies of hospitality’ and
cosmopolitanism (Shirlow and Pain 2013)
The issue of size
Geographical debates on the web (Malta Today, 03/09/2013)
• “POSTED BY: Avukat — 03/09/2013 14:37:32
• In Somalia There are 16.12 Somalis per sq km In Malta there are already
•
•
•
•
•
•
16.66 Somalis per sq km. What now Malmstrom?
POSTED BY: giuseppe schembri bonaci — 03/09/2013 11:16:12
What a cunning argument. The problem is the population density not the ratio
to the population! This is the whole problem. This shows the lack of sincerity
and solidarity coming from other European countries.
POSTED BY: johnmicallef — 03/09/2013 10:34:14
What this article fails to compare is the huge discrepancy between the
population density of the 2 countries. (ppl/mil2) Malta 3,421 vs Sweden 60.
This is the most important data in my opinion.
POSTED BY: mtvmalta — 03/09/2013 08:58:34
Ahfruli li bl-Ingliz: I do not have the favour of the massive bureau Swedish
commissioner Cecilia Malmström enjoys the favour of, but I shall quote from
Asylum trends statistics for 2008, as they result in a June 2009 publication
by the Immigration and Naturalisation Service of The Netherlands reveal
that when considered according to country area size, “Malta received by far
and away the largest number of asylum applications in Europe: 8.254 per
1.000 sq km, more than 100 times more than the EU average (55 per 1.000 sq
km)”. Cyprus and Belgium ranked second and third at a large distance with
about 10 times more applications than the EU average”
The issue of size
“Dearest women,
I received your petition, and I also addressed it to the Italian and the
European institutions that could give an answer to your questions.
As the mayor of Lampedusa, the island which saves the life of many people,
forced to journeys of hope or that has mercy upon the corpses returned from
the sea, I feel the duty to take your demand of truth; and to give you my
little aid, as much little as little are my small island and my voice.
You are big, and also your sorrow , your perseverance, and your strength to
refuse the silence and resignation, your voice.
I hope that I could still go with you, and to be your sister along the way.
A big hug and greetings
Giusi Nicolini”
Letter to the mothers and families of Tunisian missing migrants (20/07/2013)
2. Why look at islands?
• Compelling places to look at new modes of migration
management. As such, they reveal the growing
complexity of the bordering process.
• Baldacchino (forthcoming) : because of their “small
(read more manageable) size, their separation and
distance from the mainland, islands are rendered as
convenient laboratories for entrepreneurial political
engineering, and equally convenient sites for research
on the same”
• The smallness allows us to have an overview of the
various actors involved in the migratory process.
2. Why look at islands?
- Being an island state….or not
- Insularism
- The evolution of migration and migration policy in the
European context leads us to rethink and question the
‘centrality’ and/or ‘peripherality’ of islands with
reference to different geo-political contexts
3. Research themes and future directions
a/ Bordering the islands
• Track the multiple configurations of borders and to go
beyond the “territorial epistemology” of the border
(Parker, Vaughan Williams, 2009, SI of Geopolitics)
• Borders as lived and managed spaces, sites of conflict
and negotiation, whose outlines are moving and
punctual, rather than fixed and linear.
Island spaces as gatekeepers:
‘sentinel’ islands
Clochard and Migreurop, 2013
b/ Analysing and challenging narratives
of islandness
• Critically engage with an univoque
conception of islands as places of transit
• ‘counter-islandness’ in order to rethink
and challenge classical arguments about
the nature of islands
• The three ‘‘I’’: imagination, immobility,
isolation
• Articulation of scales / Processes of rescaling
(Brenner, Smith, Marston)
• the analysis of movement (versus immobility) showing
how migrants concrete daily experiences consist of
multiples circulations, plural social ties and diverse
spatial practices.
Malta at the heart of a complex circulatory system:
a tentative typology
• The island as a
barrier
• The island as a hub
• The island as a place
of settlement
c/Migrants and the local population
• Protests
• Different reactions
from the local
population
• Solidarity
• New forms of
cosmopolitanism and
hospitality?