Elia is joined by Anas & Elena from the Border Violence Monitoring Network to talk about the way in which the European Union is criminalizing solidarity with migrants and how the EU has turned the Mediterranean into a giant graveyard for people who look like me.
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Mentions
- Tech Won’t Save Us podcast
- Kerning Cultures podcast
- Sortiermaschinen: Die Neuerfindung der Grenze im 21. Jahrhundert by Steffen Mau
- Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova
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Episode Credits
Host: Elia Ayoub
Producer: Elia Ayoub
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: Artin Salimi
Episode design: Elia Ayoub
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
It’s in the past now, it’s been eight years, but 2015 was not that special. The number maybe was different, but all these practices have existed before 2015 and have continued since.
Elena: I am Elena; I’m involved with the Border Violence Monitoring Network since about two years, mainly in legal aid advocacy, and since one and a half years mainly working on criminalization of people on the move, and of solidarity.
Anas: My name is Anas; I also work with BVMN, mostly in the research and investigation team. I’m generally interested in border violence monitoring, what’s going down.
Elia J. Ayoub: We have so much to talk about; the overarching theme is border criminalization, criminalization of migration specifically. To start with the general before getting into the specifics, what is it about this topic that has drawn you to it, and why is it important?
E: I have a background in social work with refugees and migrants. For me, human rights are very important. As people in Europe we have some responsibility for what is happening around us. For me being engaged in this network is also part of showing what is actually happening at the outskirts of Europe, at the borders of Europe. Because I believe a lot of people are not aware of what is happening, what is going on.
Also, seeing the bigger picture, not just single incidents, but making sure to understand the systematic practices related to bigger political contexts.
A: That summarizes it really well. Especially the point about having responsibility—part of having been on the outside of the European Union and inside, and seeing the difference in rights and benefits that you get, you’ve got to understand that the fundamental rights the EU claims to provide come at a cost, and you see those costs at the borders. That’s what draws me to it.
EA: Asking that question, I thought: Why is this something we have to declare, why we care? Human rights matter. It’s a sign of where things are that at times this has to be said out loud.
There is a grave contradiction between the declarations of various officials—Ursula von der Leyen is going to come up I’m sure; the Meloni government has become even more explicit than the previous one, which is saying a lot; listeners in the UK would think of Brexit and Farage in front of that banner. I’m speaking from Switzerland, which despite not being in the EU voted about a year ago to happily send many millions to pay Frontex, the EU border monitoring agency, even though Switzerland is not on the Mediterranean, but there you go. They voted twice or three times not to join the EU, but they’re very happy to maintain Fortress Europe, which is very telling.
Let’s start with criminalization of migration. As a process, why does it happen, in your view, and what has been your experience with this huge problem that many people don’t know about? Most people in Europe, when they do think about this topic at all (which may not be that common), assume there has to be some kind of fair procedure. I’m thinking of relatives of mine who are Italians and who are genuinely surprised when I mention some of the details. I feel in their reaction that there’s a disbelief: It cannot be that serious, it cannot be that bad. Something as horrible as the Greek coast guard being caught putting people on a boat and pushing them away in the sea towards Turkey—That can’t be legal, right?
Nope! But the point is, there is this assumption that there is a system, and that system is fair, or at least logical, rational. But what has your experience been of all of that?
E: Relating to the broader picture, this links to the discussion about rights we had before. For me, criminalization of migration and of civil society supporting migration are both linked to a bigger picture of migration politics in Europe and the fortification of European borders, and the whole notion of how closed our borders should be. What I think it’s important to understand in this overall context is that narratives around “security” led to an increase in militarization of borders, and that had the side effect also of making migration a thing that is a criminal offense.
Also, doing the thing itself, migrating, gets criminalized, but people who support people on the move are also getting criminalized, and I think this all has to be understood in a bigger picture. Border Violence Monitoring Network is, in the end, a network of grassroots organizations, people working against border violence because we realized in our work and our day-to-day context that more and more people on the move are getting criminalized, while at the same time we, as a support structure for these people and the needs they have when they arrive in Europe, are facing different forms of criminalization: police investigations, or more formal forms like ID checks by the police, holding our volunteers in police stations for hours—which all have severe consequences for the work we do and also for the support structures we can give to people coming to us.
A: There’s a point there I want to build on. Like you were saying, whenever you talk to people within Europe about these things that happen, they’re like, Oh, that can’t be legal! There’s this association—things have to be “legal,” and there’s this centrality of the law even though nobody really understands the law. And laws change all the time! This focus on legalism, this idea that the law represents what’s right—in reality, that’s never the case.
Maybe it’s a lot easier for me to challenge that idea because I come from a place where most of the time people don’t follow the law. But a common conversation you’d have is that These people who maybe crossed borders have committed a crime. Yes, but not even; it’s like a misdemeanor, not that big of a deal. It’s like jaywalking. But therefore they need to be treated as “illegals.” What does that even mean? How can a person be “illegal?”
There’s this focus on If it’s illegal, they must have done something wrong, when in reality, all of us are breaking the law all the time. But for some reason, for this category of people, who are going to move regardless—people are going to migrate like they do all the time. You can put as high a wall as you want, it’s going to happen no matter what. This is one of the principles I start with. This is going to happen, and it’s going to happen more with climate change and all that stuff. And the EU is focused on the idea of No, no, we have to stop this! There must be something to be done about it!
It happened in 2015, and maybe there’s a bit of trauma that people have to go through. I genuinely believe that people in higher ranks of the EU are terrified of another so-called “refugee crisis” happening like in 2015. They know it’s going to happen; it has to. We can see that in conversations, like when Kabul fell: We’re going to have waves of people coming from Afghanistan now. It didn’t happen! Greece was pushing that; We need more money because they’re going to start coming now. It didn’t happen. Most people stopped in Iran; some of them went as far as Turkey and that’s about it.
But it’s always like, When is it going to happen next? Maybe we’ll talk to it later, but the idea of why we need to start involving technology in this comes from being terrified of the scale of the next “wave.” There’s a focus on This can’t be possible, it has to be legal, but you know, police do stuff all the time. Look at what’s happening now in France. People are realizing police sometimes do weird shit. You can’t assume that’s the right thing to do.
EA: We can dig in a few directions. I would describe it as a siege mentality—again, Fortress Europe as a metaphor. I saw a cartoon a couple days ago describing Europe’s climate mitigation plan as basically building a wall. I do cultural studies, so I look at a bunch of shit and talk about it, whether it’s anime, cartoons, series, movies. A lot of things have that metaphor, that trope, that imagery: The enemy is from the outside. Sometimes it’s from the inside, and that’s when you get conspiracy theories, and they tend to merge with one another.
Relevant side note: the right has this conspiracy theory that it’s George Soros doing this and that, and he’s the enemy from within; he’s Jewish so there’s the whole antisemitism aspect recurring, but he’s doing this because he wants all those foreign nationals to come here. The basic idea is that the enemy has to be both from within and from without. It’s almost like you’re under siege if you adopt that mentality. You’re under siege at all times, and in theory anyone is suspect.
It’s much easier to focus on those who are already racialized and already in precarious conditions. Those folks tend to look like me, in the Global South, maybe have had some experience coming to Europe before, though not necessarily, or at least have some relatives—that’s something that some folks don’t understand, that a lot of the people who try to come to Europe often have some idea or some expectation of what they’ll find. Of course they often get unfortunately surprised not to find that.
So the first aspect is the whole siege mentality, Fortress Europe. Three years ago I penned a piece called “Why Fortress Europe and the European Union Cannot Coexist,” and the idea was that there was a Belgian MEP saying something like We must protect our external border to make sure that the internal borders are open. That’s a fascinating argument. The internal borders are between European states, and the external borders are not. There’s something bizarre about that argument.
The second aspect is the tech aspect. The fact that at the end of the day—we know this from the Snowden leaks and the NSA and all that shit: a lot of the Big Data that surveillance companies or departments within governments gather, they don’t always know what to do with it. There’s just so much of it. And at some point (and we can get into AI stuff) a lot of it is getting hyped up, but because it is being hyped up a lot of the consequences could be quite bad. A lot of organizations, across multiple sectors, from government to the private sector, are increasingly saying they are going to use AI to sift through all that data, because humans don’t have the time and capacity to do that, and the risk, which feels straight out of a Black Mirror episode, is that the results are going to be taken for granted. A lot of people do not understand what AI is, and they think it’s a magic box on your screen, and it’s going to tell you the answer. That’s just not how it works.
So there are two different paths we can take this in, but they are related. It adds to the sense of confusion that a lot of people might feel; everything we talk about is already linked to things like economic security; it’s linked with precarity in general; it’s linked with xenophobia, racism, antisemitism, things that are within the structures of Europe but then get exacerbated depending on some kind of crisis, like the Brexit stuff.
I’ll ask for some reflections on your part, and see where you want to take this.
E: I have a couple of thoughts. You’re right that all these topics are broadly interrelated. What popped up in my head when you were talking about politicians saying we need to secure our external borders to make sure we have internal freedom of movement—I feel the narrative often relates to rights and the protection of rights. An interesting example when talking about criminalization is that while the European Union has a lot of programs to support human rights activists outside the EU, they don’t have any programs that support human rights activists who are criminalized within the EU, which we are seeing more and more in the migration context.
This is so contradictory, how we can say, Okay, there are human rights in the EU so we don’t need to protect anybody, because everything will be fine anyway! while in reality we see things like one of our member organizations had to dissolve; a couple people involved in the network are facing police investigation for upholding the human rights of people on the move. There is a huge contradiction already.
A: While you guys were talking I remembered an MEP in the EU saying something like Inside it’s paradise, and outside it’s a jungle, and it’s the role of the EU to go outside and cultivate the people out there. I never thought about it, but it’s true, you never hear people saying we need to protect human rights inside the EU, because we have them here, and outside we don’t. Maybe there was a time when the EU was willing to expand and include more people, but that has stopped, so now it’s just like, Let’s build a fence around this and keep it in, because I don’t know how long it’s going to last.
With climate mitigation—are they going to put a fence around the sky as well? How are you going to stop the CO2? That’s the part I don’t get. Where is this going?
EA: It’s not rational. If it were rational it wouldn’t be a nation-state framework; climate change doesn’t give a shit. That’s not how the world works! Geology and oceans and whatnot—the lines in the sand that we draw on them don’t matter. We know this, that’s why there’s some recognition within the “international community” that global warming has to be tackled on a global scale. But there is also an understanding (this of course gets into politics and gets messy; there’s a lot of short-termism, thinking of the next election cycle, all of that) that we have what we have, and what we have may not have come from “clean” sources; what we have may have some blood in it, so to speak. We know this in the conversations and debates around decolonization or post-colonial justice. This is where environmental justice comes into play in the first place: the vast majority of greenhouse gases come from the Global North. That’s just a fact.
So at some point there is an understanding that Maybe we’ll have to be a bit poorer—which is not even true! We definitely see this impulse in politics: We have these privileges, we have these resources, we have this health care, and we need to do whatever we can to maintain it. This is where the mentality of a siege comes from, or how it is justified.
It is not rational, and it will not work, but the problem isn’t whether it’s going to work or not, but how much suffering it’s going to cause until they move on to the next thing. We don’t even talk about the War on Terror anymore. It’s just not in the news. Now it’s “illegal migration” or whatever it may be, while in the meantime we had two decades of private contractors that made a shitton of money. We’ll just move to the next thing now, you know?
A: And it’s not only keeping what we have, but also, Let’s figure out how to benefit from the new modes of ownership that we’re going to have. I’m keeping in mind that part of the work we are doing at BVMN is trying to track the people who benefit from all these contracts. For example, look at all the funding that the EU gives for the Asylum and Migration Fund: it’s given to companies to build technology to reinforce borders. That seems irrational.
But that’s part of the work that BVMN is doing, we try to look at all these companies that claim to use AI to improve border management (as they call it). Some of them are just ridiculous. My favorite example is this tool that’s supposed to read your facial features to guess if you’re lying or not when you’re crossing the border. We don’t want to even deal with humans anymore; we don’t want to have border agents anymore—I guess it’s imagining a world where there are billions of people crossing; let’s assume that’s the case, so we’re going to have this AI or hologram or whatever that can read your facial features. It was bullcrap. It’s like the stuff you see in movies.
But behind it is a million and a half euros that was given to all these companies to go play with these tools. To me it’s ridiculous. You could have used that money in different ways! I’ll take a million and a half! Because at the end, what’s happening now is the AI Act, a piece of legislation that’s passing through the European parliament right now, and it’s a pretty big deal because the CEO of OpenAI came out and said If this passes we might not be able to use OpenAI so it’s caused a whole debate. But maybe it’s moving in the right direction; it’s a regulation that will try to set up a similar system to what GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] did, and trying to be the first legislation to talk about this. And we know GDPR was a good thing, because a bunch of other countries copied it, and even a state in the US, California, had a similar thing. So it will be moving in the right direction; they just came out and said it’s not going to allow systems like the one I was just talking about that tries to predict people’s emotions in real time using facial recognition.
Other ones we saw are tools that try to predict migration movements. This was another funny one. It’s a company that’s a consortium of research universities—that’s another part: academia is complicit in this, in the sense that they’re willing to go along with it. Again, I don’t know why. I never understood academia in general; maybe this is more for you, Elia, because you’ve spent a lot of time there. I guess it’s for research purposes, but you can clearly see that it’s not going to work. But for some reason it’s worth trying for science, I guess?
I like to imagine there’s a noble goal there. Maybe this is my flaw; I try to assume that there’s some good in people. But it’s clearly just for the program’s benefit. It was like 4.5 million euros they got, for building a system that’s supposed to predict flows of migration going forward—and one of the datasets they used was Google search terms, which is just really funny. I lived in Canada for a bit, and every time at the end of a US election cycle we’d get this spike of people wanting to move to Canada on Google trends—does that mean we’re going to have a wave of people coming from the US? Maybe?
All this is to say, it’s a field that moves a lot. It’s very interesting. For me, borders are a metaphor, because everything that society doesn’t want to deal with, it ends up at the border. Everything that’s going to maybe come out and take out the inside comes from the border too. The increased militarization of the border is going to affect people living inside the EU at some point.
EA: It has to. It’s like the War on Terror; at some point, you’ve created an entire structure, and once the enemy is gone, because the media cycle moved to something else, or the election cycle has to prioritize something else, or something else happened, you still have to use that structure because now there are some people who have that as their job.
This is a problem with research. The thing about academic research is that you can do your research and you can reach certain conclusions, assuming you have the freedom and resources to do so—but a lot of the time you reach inconclusive results because you don’t have the resources. Let’s say you probably needed ten years, but you’re not going to get funding for ten years so you stop after two years, and you say, Well, this needs more research. But let’s say you do the research on whether Frontex is efficient at keeping people out (people who look like me) while also respecting human rights. Let’s say this is a research question. Clearly the answer is going to be No, that’s not possible; there’s an obvious contradiction there.
Let me give you an easier example that folks will understand. There is an obvious contradiction between the interests of the tobacco lobby and public health. It’s pretty basic. You cannot reconcile the two, and this is something that the World Health Organization has said—the WHO, based in Geneva. But also based in Switzerland are Philip Morris International, Japan Tobacco International, and British American Tobacco. They want to sell cigarettes; that’s what they do, it’s their business model. So the Swiss government has decided that they want a “sound balance” between public health measures and business interests. What that literally means is: We want the numbers of people who get sick from smoking cigarettes to be at a not-too-high level. That’s it. That’s all it means. Because you need to maintain a number of jobs for the economy to grow, and as long as our health care system can manage the consequences of that specific industry, we won’t rock the boat too much.
That’s all it means. The research has been done on that; there’s no more research necessary on the effects of tobacco. We’re done with this. This was like, in the seventies. It’s just that now you have to deal with the business element of it. And the problem now with the hype around AI, and giving one point five million to see if people laughing means they’re lying—it’s just recycled phrenology. It’s a watered-down version of eugenics in some sense, if you see what I mean. It’s not scientific, it’s not rational. That doesn’t make much sense, but there are these other motives, and they have to justify themselves in one way or another—to themselves, or to the contractors, or to the media. It ends up becoming like an open secret.
A: I’ll add one thing: Philip Morris is now making most of their money in the Global South; that’s where they’re growing. So it’s like, We’re going to make money, but it’s not going to be you guys, it’s going to be the other people over there, so we don’t really care.
EA: And the tobacco they use in Switzerland is not the same tobacco they use in Indonesia, for example, or Tunisia. I’m working on a case study now: the cigarettes that Philip Morris International sells in Tunisia are more toxic than the cigarettes that they sell in Switzerland. Because if you have a bunch of Swiss people dying, that could be politically complicated; but a bunch of Tunisians dying? The Swiss don’t give a shit. It’s really that simple. I wish it was not. It sounds cynical, but that’s just what externalization of costs means. That’s quite literally what it means: Other people will pay the price for it.
See how these two are linked—there’s not really any separating them. I can rant about AI as much as you want. I’m fascinated by technology, but ninety percent of what’s written on AI is people who don’t understand what it is. It’s just a magic box—there’s something happening on the screen, it’s magic, it’s making rhymes, it’s weird, and we’re going to give it a billion dollars to fix our world. That’s basically what’s happening. I wish it wasn’t that dumb, but it is.
E: The tobacco industry links back so much to what BVMN is trying to do—a lot of the discussions we are having right now are all linked to the same narrative features: which lives are more valuable? Which narratives do we give, and at what cost, and whose cost? And no matter how high the costs are, do we invest in technology that might then not actually lead to the outcome that would be good if you zoom out to a broader picture? For me, this is a lot of the work BVMN tries to do: counternarrate stories, showing where things lead. This is where AI and other technologies are used on the borders; this is how this leads to criminalization, and this is how this can be traced back to funding, and it might not be what we actually want Europe or the world to be.
EA: And they often end up funding research to resolve a problem that the previous round of “research” or investments have caused! The premise is that there must be more “bordering”—creating a border, creating the process of a border. This can be literally a border, as in an actual physical border, but it can be psychological or cultural or linguistic: a separation between the German-speaking parts of Switzerland and the French-speaking parts of Switzerland. There is no actual border there, because there are cantons that speak both. But there is this bordering process that gets institutionalized: They are there; we are here. Same for Belgium and other places where this happens.
If the premise is that we need more bordering, if that’s your answer, then you’re going to find ways to frame the question that justifies the answer. Otherwise you have to re-question the answer. If you’re a politician, you’re not the researcher here, your goal is not to find the objective or best answer or solution. Your goal is to take in a hundred different factors and go whatever you think is best for you or your party. If Ursula von der Leyen understands, and maybe she does, that this thing is just not good, and it does not work, what can she do about it? It’s an institution. Suddenly you have to admit that you wasted money on these ten thousand people, to whom you gave all this money to develop this technology that is clearly not good, and is cruel. And the EU doesn’t like to admit this, usually. They prefer spending more money to admitting that the money they spent was “useless.”
There’s still a “use” in the sense that people obviously get hurt from it. But it doesn’t achieve the supposed intended purpose. For example (maybe we can get into this now), tackling smuggling is a huge thing that the EU is very concerned with, clearly—there’s a huge problem of a billion smugglers coming every day, and they smuggle people and they are mean people and bad!—and even if they don’t find any smugglers, they will create one, they will invent one. It’s what’s called “ghost smugglers.” They decide, I don’t know, fifteen migrants from Sudan and Eritrea came through Libya to Italy, and two of them look suspicious!
In one of the examples you mentioned, Anas, in that document you were preparing before coming here, Italian officials decided that This person seemed suspicious because he was laughing weirdly, so they decided it was probably him. That’s it! AI and all of the billions they’re going to spend—it comes down to one police officer having a gut feeling that this dude looks suspicious. That’s what it’s going to come down to in the end, and I don’t know if it’s better or worse than what they will probably externalize even more once they decide AI is going to make that decision for us.
A: I want to jump on that. I just found out about that piece. You were referring to a famous case in Italy that involved some Libyan footballers. This is a good thread to have, because every institution we’ve talked about today is involved in this.
The Italian police came in—some people had died on the boat, so they had to get the bodies out. So they got a Frontex ship to come in to help, and Frontex started interviewing people. The EU data protection office came out last week saying that practice might be against Frontex’s own regulations, the practice of interviewing people who just arrived on boats and forcing them to tell Who smuggled you here? (when there’s no one), because they collect personal data, and maybe they are using it for different purposes. They use a database for it, and then they pass that information to Europol. That part is potentially against Frontex’s own regulations.
That already involved two institutions that we mentioned. And they use an AI system that’s supposed to guess the person who did it. In this case, the whole thing went to court, and you see people who have been criminalized breaking down in front of the judge, crying, saying, I didn’t sign this witness statement saying I saw this person driving the boat. I didn’t say this! I wasn’t there! They went through trauma as well.
The whole thing—I read it and I was like, Is this the EU they want? Because honestly, I don’t want this EU. I don’t know what the alternative is, but this one is not good. The last bit was that people were offered temporary legal status in the country in exchange for giving allegedly false information and testimony; for most people, they have to go through the process of asylum.
E: I just wanted to add—you’re talking about the different authorities involved in the process and the different actors; I just wanted to say again, linking back to what I said before, that what we often forget and what EU policymakers often forget is what consequences these kinds of laws and their enforcement might actually have. What we see in Greece now, for example, is that every single boat that arrives, two people are randomly picked to be the “smugglers,” and it might just be that they were the ones sitting closest to the engine of the boat. And this leads to absurd prison sentences for people who are new to the country and have no lawyers and no contacts to reach out to for support. We’re talking about prison sentences of three hundred or a thousand years; absurd sentences.
At the same time in Greek prisons, more than sixty percent of prisoners are foreigners, actually. This may be linked to them being charged for allegedly smuggling. It’s a very random charge, and it’s crazy, but I think it’s important when we talk about this narrative: oftentimes the consequences are not known, they are not spread. This also leads back to what you said, Elia, in the very beginning about your relatives being shocked about what it actually means in practice, and this also links to the example Anas just gave about what it means in court, and not reflecting on backgrounds people have.
A: We’ve been talking about what seem like very dystopian systems so far. Maybe the call to action (this is me trying to be a bit more optimistic) is that this idea of the “war on smuggling” isn’t new. I just found about this on a thread by Laura D’Agostino, who talks about the reason we hear about this now is because it’s a narrative that’s being pushed—and it’s being challenged as well by journalists. My call to action to people listening is—I understand this is a hard topic to listen to, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt because you’re listening to this cool podcast. I think you’re capable of absorbing this information. 2015 happened, it’s in the past now, it’s been eight years, but 2015 was not that special. The number maybe was different, but all these practices have existed before 2015 and have continued since. My call to action is to continue to be informed about this stuff. You don’t necessarily have to join a campaign if you don’t want. That would be nice, but just continue to be informed.
There are really good journalists that are doing really good work showing all this stuff. All the stuff I mentioned is on the news; you’re probably not hearing about it because in the past three years we’ve had the pandemic and all this other stuff. But staying engaged, while it can be hard, is helpful, because it creates all these connections that we’ve been talking about, and makes you understand that maybe while the people—don’t assume malice; it’s probably just incompetence, but there are these threads that show up and people are like, Why did this happen? Well, pretty clearly it came from somewhere. And this is a really good way to be aware of the situation.
EA: We’ll slowly wind down. At the end I’ll ask you two to reflect on this conversation, maybe also what we didn’t get into as much. But what I’m going to do before that is read to listeners a text from ROBORDER (see how creative these people are), funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020:
“Border authorities and law enforcement agencies (LEAs) across Europe face important challenges in how they patrol and protect the borders. Their work becomes more problematic considering the heterogeneity of threats, the wideness of the surveilled area, the adverse weather conditions, and the wide range of terrains. Although there are several research tools and works targeting these areas independently for border surveillance, nowadays border authorities do not have access to an intelligent, holistic solution providing all aforementioned functionalities.”
This was a proposed project, start date 2017 and end date 2021; their budget was almost nine million euros, and the EU contributed nearly eight million euros to it, and it went to a Greek company called Ethniko Kentro Erevnas Kai Technologikis Anaptyxis [Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, or CERTH]. What I find interesting about this specifically is that if you’re in the research world, in academia, like me, you read this and a lot of question marks pop up. A lot of: What do you mean by this term? What do you mean by “important challenges?” What are these challenges?
They explain: “The work becomes more problematic considering the heterogeneity of threats.” What are these threats? Who are they? Is it only smugglers? Or are you suggesting that there is something else? “Range of terrains” is hilarious. Basically, this is the premise. The premise is that there is this problem. You cannot question that premise in the abstract when you are applying for funding. At the very least, what there ideally should be is a bunch of people in the EU infrastructure being able to put question marks on those applications. Because those guys just got eight million euros, just like that!
I just wanted to make that point, and also challenge listeners to go watch a Black Mirror episode and tell me whether this feels familiar. Because at the end of the day, they want to externalize the responsibility of “dealing with migrants” (racialized migrants specifically, because Europeans going to other places in Europe don’t count as migrants) to an algorithm, or a bunch of different algorithms. I would hope that most folks listening understand that this doesn’t seem to be a great idea.
I’ll ask both of you to reflect a bit and recommend stuff to our lovely listeners.
A: I can be very quick on that.You said “intelligence,” and I’m like, We already have that intelligence, it’s called humans! Like, you’re just trying to replace humans with a robot! It’s a conversation for another day—we can talk about why AI hype is so bad.
I don’t want to go off on another tangent, but speaking about AI, one of my recommendations is an episode of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us by fellow Canadian Paris Marx. He invited a former Google employee who had been part of the “ethical AI” project, and they just talk about how AI hype is the worst. For the average listener, it won’t really explain what AI is, so it’s not really a good introduction, but it’s probably a good one to listen to if you start feeling like we should give more power to machines and AIs, because we shouldn’t.
The second recommendation I have is of a podcast from a media company out of Dubai called Kerning Cultures. They’re really cool, despite their VC funding. They have a series of interviews with this person named Aizen from Afghanistan, and his dream is to go play football where Messi plays. He has the craziest story ever. He makes it from Afghanistan and crosses the EU border—he says it’s the hardest one he crossed—going into Bulgaria, being pushed back, and then going to Serbia, being pushed back. My recommendation is to listen to it and sit with it. It’s in four episodes plus an epilogue. Eventually he makes it to the UK because he finds that France isn’t all that great. It’s a good listen.
E: Reflecting about the podcast, what we managed as well as you can manage in forty-five minutes or an hour is the link between broader politics and what they lead to, and what this means on a grassroots level or in practice, and what we experience. There’s a million topics we could go deeper into. The core idea of BVMN is to collect testimonies of violence and to use it as evidence, to do advocacy work on it, to show the trials, and then also come in with research, analyze where the money comes from, where the connections are, where technology is used. There’s a million topics related to it, but always hard to cross it all in such a short time.
My recommendations—I don’t know if I can recommend a German book; I tried to see if there is an English translation but I couldn’t find any. So my German recommendation is a book by Steffen Mau called Sortiermaschinen: Die Neuerfindung der Grenze im 21. Jahrhundert. It talks about what we just talked about: how in the twenty-first century, while borders were opened, others were closed, and how borders themselves are identifying who can cross and who can’t; on one side we have a globalized world and on the other side borders are like a fence differentiating between people who are allowed to pass and not allowed to pass. It talks about how the story is always narrated in a way that it’s a globalized world and you can travel everywhere, but actually this led to borders being far more closed than they ever were in history.
Another book I had is called Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova. She grew up in Bulgaria, and travels back to this border area between Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria, talking about how this was always a tense border, and how past political conflicts and migration movements in this area are linked to fortification of the border now, and how this is all interlinked.
Apart from that, I can always just recommend staying informed as Anas was saying before. Read BVMN publications, we also try to create awareness by publishing things. We have a monthly report; we have a Black Book of Pushbacks, where all the testimonies are published, giving a lot of background information and introductory chapters into countries, into what is happening at the borders and what trends we are seeing. There is also a database and other cool things.
I agree with what you said; I think staying informed is the most important, and not to look away, and also to try to engage in countering narratives that are present within politics and mainstream discourse, while at the same time when we look at their consequences, they might not be good narratives or really thought-through.
EA: Thanks a lot for doing this, guys.
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