Mobility & Politics. Series Editors Martin Geiger Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

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1 Mobility & Politics Series Editors Martin Geiger Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Parvati Raghuram Open University Milton Keynes, United Kingdom William Walters Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

2 Mobility & Politics Series Editors: Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada; Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK; William Walters, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Global Advisory Board: Michael Collyer, University of Sussex; Susan B. Coutin, University of California; Raúl Delgado Wise, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas; Nicholas De Genova, King s College London; Eleonore Kofman, Middlesex University; Rey Koslowski, University at Albany; Loren B. Landau, University of the Witwatersrand; Sandro Mezzadra, Università di Bologna; Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University; Brett Neilson, University of Western Sydney; Antoine Pécoud, Université Paris 13; Ranabir Samaddar, Mahanirban Research Group Calcutta; Nandita Sharma, University of Hawai i at Manoa; Tesfaye Tafesse, Addis Ababa University; Thanh-Dam Truong, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Human mobility, whatever its scale, is often controversial. Hence it carries with it the potential for politics. A core feature of mobility politics is the tension between the desire to maximise the social and economic benefits of migration and pressures to restrict movement. Transnational communities, global instability, advances in transportation and communication, and concepts of smart borders and migration management are just a few of the phenomena transforming the landscape of migration today. The tension between openness and restriction raises important questions about how different types of policy and politics come to life and influence mobility. Mobility & Politics invites original, theoretically and empirically informed studies for academic and policy-oriented debates. Authors examine issues such as refugees and displacement, migration and citizenship, security and cross-border movements, (post-)colonialism and mobility, and transnational movements and cosmopolitics. More information about this series at

3 Federica Infantino Outsourcing Border Control Politics and Practice of Contracted Visa Policy in Morocco

4 Federica Infantino FNRS/Université Libre de Bruxelles, GERME Brussels, Belgium Mobility & Politics ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Library of Congress Control Number: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Modern building window saulgranda/getty Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.

5 To my parents and my sister

6 SERIES EDITORS FOREWORD Bordering practices have become increasingly complex as the drive for efficiency and effectiveness is combined with concerns over security and border control. But it is precisely the securitization of borders which makes ethnographic research on how borders are actually managed so difficult to do. Federica Infantino s Outsourcing Border Control is a convincing ethnographic study of the day-to-day practices of two transnational corporations implementing EU visa policy in Morocco. Infantino looks at how different state and non-state actors shape the deployment of visa policy. She traces the complexities of the outsourcing of visa application services to private sector providers in order to explore the ways in which states exercise their monopolized power over the legitimate means of movement, while at the same time increasingly relying on private companies for exercising control. The volume begins with an enticing story of a taxi ride where the author is introduced to the concept of two consulates. The vernacular understanding of the consulate as one which is client facing and becomes the gateway for immigration is in stark contrast with official understandings of consular services as the role of the government extraterritorially. But this split in consular services, first tested in India in 2001 as the travel company Kuoni took over the provision of visas through its subsidiary VFS, has become the primary modus operandi for many countries across the world. VFS has become the arbiter of the power and privilege of mobility in a differentially bordered world. Infantino discusses border and visa checks as individually experienced phenomena and the identification of national or immigrant as a relatively novel dichotomy. vii

7 viii SERIES EDITORS FOREWORD States are able to deflect responsibility by outsourcing organizational bureaucratic decision making processes to external organisations. While outsourcing has many advantages for states and does not diminish their authority and control, the exclusionary nature of many of the practices put in place are revealed through Infantino s approach to a street-level study of border and visa policy implementation. Her empirically grounded research offers insight into the ways in which decentralization of sovereign functions does not imply more efficiency and effectiveness, as New Public Management narratives tend to describe. Efficiency and effectiveness are treated as notions to be questioned. Infantino s research contributes to our Mobility & Politics series by deepening and expanding our understanding of practices of outsourcing and the practical implementation of migration and border control in comparative perspective. The Series Editors Martin Geiger, Carleton University Parvati Raghuram, Open University William Walters, Carleton University and Rudi Barwin, Mobility & Politics Research Collective

8 PREFACE Is the relevance of border control a paradox of our contemporary society? In the age of expanded and accelerated circulations of capitals, services, ideas, and images, borders remain a major topic. Rhetoric celebrates a borderless world, from economic to cultural perspectives, and the end of nation-states. Yet, the reality for several people is that of a bordered world divided into unambiguous national territories. Losing control narratives nourish public and political debates that tend to focus on borders as means to re-establish order. Nation-states are at the forefront of such an endeavor. Even in the case of the European Union, an ongoing political experiment that for a philosopher like Etienne Balibar represented the opportunity to foster an idea of democracy in which citizenship is untied from ethnos, nation-states are still the fundamental political units. Within the frame of European integration, the disappearance of inter-state borders has not diminished their central role. National borders are summed up into the external borders of the EU. The external borders of the EU continue to define territories and identities by opposing Us to Others. Although the powerful narratives of losing control and of Europe as a strainer, a policy toolbox has been deployed in order to strengthen the external borders of the EU. Tools are wide-ranging: they include classical border policing that agency like Frontex or automatic surveillance technologies carry out, common databases sharing national lists of banned travelers such as the Schengen Information System (SIS) or activating internal borders for the circulation of asylum seekers such as EURODAC, liaison officers, carriers sanctions, visa policy. Tools disclose conceptions of linear as well as diffuse borders, as they displace and multiply the borders of the European Union. ix

9 x PREFACE This book focuses on one of the tools of border control namely EU visa policy. It does so from a specific analytical perspective, that is the perspective of the practices that put EU visa policy into action. It aims at uncovering one particular yet diffused aspect: the outsourcing of day-today implementation to private for-profit organizations such as transnational corporations. The outsourcing in such a domain is puzzling, given that border control is emblematic of state sovereignty. It is also extremely significant. Dealing with private service providers is becoming a common experience for more and more visa applicants on a global scale. Not only the Member States of the European Union have adopted visa policy outsourcing but also other countries like Canada, the United States of America, South Africa, India, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and so on. However, the outsourcing of visa policy implementation is more significant to a very large and specific portion of the world s population. Concerning visa introduction, the principle of reciprocity is not always at play. Countries that face a low number of visa impositions are not among the countries that impose fewer visa restrictions (Neumayer 2006). In the case of the European Union, it is interesting to observe that the map of the countries whose nationals are exempt from visa requirements overlaps almost perfectly with the map of the richest countries of the world. Nationals who are exempted from visa requirements are less than 40 whereas visa restrictions exist for nationals of 125 countries. Thus, the topic of this book concerns in particular that portion of the world s population, typically to be found in low-income countries, whose access to the territory of Member States depends on the possession of a visa. Although significant, day-to-day visa policy implementation that is carried out by transnational corporations remained largely unexplored. By investigating the day-to-day practices of two private service providers in Morocco that manage the visa application process on behalf of EU countries, this book sheds ethnographic light on outsourced border control on the ground. Day-to-day implementation of migration and border control tends to be overlooked, because on the one hand, policy-making is more often associated to policy design and, on the other hand, because of difficulties for researchers in obtaining access to public and private bordering organizations. My street-level analytical stance allows for bringing into focus the gap between discourse and practice, promises and outcomes. In this case of analysis, discourses represent the outsourcing of government s functions to transnational corporations as a development that facilitates the visa application process for prospective travelers and

10 PREFACE xi improve the performance of state bureaucracies. This kind of rhetoric is typical of New Public Management that, when it comes to border control, has specific effects. This book argues that outsourcing border control primarily does something else, which official discourses tend to ignore. Outsourcing has specific effects on policy outcomes, understood as the consequences on policy recipients, as well as on state capability of governing the EU border that common visa policy displaces in countries of departure. In order to illuminate what is politically at stake in outsourcing border control, I have located the analysis on the ways in which private service providers put visa policy into practice. I use street-level implementation as the site to observe the relationship between the governing and the governed, political power, and state capacity. I consider outsourcing as a policy instrument and follow the lines of the sociology of the instrumentation of public policy that is interested in the reasons and the effects of the adoption of specific instruments, treating policy instruments as institutions that have specific effects on political and social outcomes and structure public policy according to their own logic (Lascoumes and Le Galès 2004). I use a street-level implementation approach to contribute to that kind of debate, because I deem it as an understudied yet privileged venue to question the political and social implications of outsourcing governments functions. The main argument is that outsourcing visa policy implementation does not diminish state sovereignty but rather expands state capacity to order the flows since it keeps policy recipients away from sight and away from mind. States are thus governing through the distance. For European Member States, outsourcing has represented a strategic political tool within the process of adoption of European rules regulating visa policy implementation: it has allowed for removing economic and non-economic burdens away from the state towards private contractors. Analyzing the outsourcing of border control from the vantage point of day-to-day implementation reveals de-responsabilization as the conceptualization of the relationship between the governing and the governed. This research focuses on the inside of border control. Nonetheless, it is also about policy recipients that experience visa policy not in abstract terms. In Chapter 1, I illustrate the theoretical perspectives on which the analysis builds, the cases of analysis and the research strategy that has taken into account the local, national, and European levels of EU visa policy policy-making. Chapter 2 analyzes the mode of governing visa

11 xii PREFACE policy with private service providers by bringing into focus the actors and the mechanisms of the initial diffusion of visa services outsourcing, the characteristics and novelties of day-to-day implementation in terms of settings, modes of interaction, and work routines. I shed light on private contractors bureaucratic policy-making that is invisible to public scrutiny but tacitly authorized by the high-ranking national and European civil servants in charge of visa policy. Chapter 3 discusses the gap between discourses in official European settings justifying the outsourcing and the views at national and local/consular levels. Observing day-to-day practice is crucial to seize the advantageous effects of institutional distancing for the state, since they emerge in the street-level implementation stage. The local level has indeed influenced the national and European ones for adopting the policy instrument. Visa policy outsourcing started as a local and state practice that is institutionalized later at the European level. This analysis of day-to-day outsourced border control puts forward that governing through the distance is a crucial dimension of the devolution of state s functions to private actors. REFERENCE Neumayer, E. (2006) Unequal Access to Foreign Spaces: How States Use Visa Restrictions to Regulate Mobility in a Globalized World, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31(1):

12 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research would not have been possible without all the persons that I have interviewed, observed and spent time with. The consuls-general of Belgium, France and Italy in Casablanca deserve very special thanks for authorizing my research and putting me in contact with private service providers. I am very grateful also to the managers of VFSGlobal and TLSContact and each worker who generously gave their time to speak with me during the course of my fieldwork. The workers of private service providers have always warmly welcomed me; I thank them for spending also time outside work hours. I am profoundly indebted to Virginie Guiraudon who has provided amazing advice and comments during the entire research process. This research has benefited in particular of Didier Bigo s precious critiques and Andrea Rea s inspiring comments and extraordinary pieces of advice. I am extremely grateful to them. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their support and valuable comments, the editors of Palgrave Macmillan and the editors of the Mobility & Politics Series, Martin Geiger, Parvati Raghuram, and William Walters for their trust and comments. A very special thanks goes to Martin Geiger for encouraging the writing of a proposal to this series. This research would not have been possible without the financial support of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS-FRS) for which I am very grateful. Finally, I would like to thank Benjamin Savill for his attentive reading of these English pages. xiii

13 CONTENTS 1 Bordering Outside the State 1 2 Outsourcing in Practice 27 3 The Politics of Public-Private Cooperation 61 References 83 Index 91 xv