Book Review: Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe
| Published date | 01 September 2015 |
| Date | 01 September 2015 |
| Author | Thomas Kemp |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663915596632c |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
RUBEN ANDERSSON, Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe.
Oakland, CA: University of California Press, ISBN 9780520282520, pp. 338, £19.95 (pbk).
Illegality, Inc. opens with a provocation: ‘What can you offer us?’ The speaker is
Mohammadou, a Senegalese man, repatriated after a long and arduous journey towards
Spain. The question is directed at the book’s author, Ruben Andersson, but has been
asked many times of the sprawling mass of policymakers, journalists, activists and aca-
demics that circulate around Europe-bound migration and help constitute the book’s
eponymous industry. It is a provocation echoed on many pages following. Mohammadou
is one of many whose stories have been mined by Europeans and who have received little
compensation for their work. Those who have earned their living recording, repeating
and drawing conclusions or recommendations from people like Mohammadou, have not
been effective in changing the lives of those who have lived the stories they tell. Anders-
son doesn’t claim to be different, he barely addresses the question at all. Instead, gliding
awkwardly over their consternation, Andersson places himself as the anthropologist
within ‘the illegality industry’ that is the subject of this ethnography.
The provocation also serves as the first illustration of the book’s primary aim of unco-
vering how the diverse actors that are drawn into the networked project of preventing
illegalized migration help produce, in a variety of manifestations, the subject of the ‘ille-
gal migrant’. Developed through seven situated chapters, the book’s analysis is neatly
nestled into a rich and lucid narrative of the author’s travels through Europe’s border-
lands, beginning and ending, like many journeys undertaken by the travellers Andersson
encounters, in Senegal.
The most vivid, yet predictable, evidence in support of its thesis is found in Chapter 4.
In focusing on the Mediterranean crossings and the ‘attacks’ on the border fences of
Melilla and Ceuta, the illegal migrant is clearest in its dual character as racialized ‘vic-
tim’ and ‘threat’. But the more interesting and novel elements are elsewhere. Starting
with Mohammadou and the network of repatriated migrants telling their stories of warn-
ing and ‘sensibilization’, Chapter 1 traces the impact of the integration of development
aid with the project of stopping illegal migration. Chapter 3 shows how, throughout the
Senegalese, Malian, Mauritanian and Moroccan borderlands, Europe’s subcontractors
have the hapless job of filtering out ‘illegal’ from ‘legal’ migrants and in doing so, inevi-
tably producing the category of illegal migrant along racialized lines. The later chapters
evidence how even resistance to border enforcement in camps, and through transnational
activism, participates in the construction and solidification of the border and illegality.
These chapters are complimented by those that ‘zoom out’ to see the abstractions
through which migration is viewed in the Frontex offices in Poland, where the coordi-
nated border control efforts and the development of the EURSUR (a vast technology
of Mediterranean surveillance) take place.
The book distinguishes itself from other anthropological works on the European–
African border by claiming to investigate not the experience of migration itself but the
‘illegal industry’ that has spawned it. Although migrant’s voices are given great promi-
nence throughout, its main subject is not the ‘adventurers’ themselves but the machinery,
institutions and technologies that have become invested in the prevention of illegal
Book Reviews 477
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