english text 185 ment of war against immigrants and refugees”. Migreurop has been denouncing this for years: it is a war in which the law is a basic instrument, which means the destruction of the rule-of-law state and of what gives meaning to law, the struggle for rights. I shall repeat something that is obvious: war is a kind of negation of law. It is not a continuation of politics by other means. It is evil. And therefore I think I am justified in saying that the drift of the EU’s migration and asylum policies represents a resurgence of a legal and political tradition that is developing a negation of law. In fact, this “war against immigrants and refugees” has its excuse (I refuse to call it a justification) in that inversion of the logic of law that is the principle of discrimination of the other. It is on that negation that the legal architecture of the non-recognition of them is constructed, and it in turn is given concrete expression in the negation of equality (in the negation to the other of recognition of him as a person) and therefore in the absence of a legal status of security. Moreover, this conception has the reinforcement of its functionality from an economic viewpoint; in other words, it serves to feed the business of the exploitation of labour, which shows all its cruel ambiguity in the two extremes of the politics of overexploitation, characteristic of the “bubble economy”, casino capitalism and policies of closure (which in turn, in another way, foster the clandestine networks of exploitation). All this clearly shows the extreme condition of precariousness – the epitome of the condition of “disposability”, of their “liquidity” – that is assigned to immigrants. In a way, as has been denounced, this use of immigrants points to the link between the new form of slavery that affects immigrants (as workers) and the policies of migration (and of asylum). The thesis is well known. In the same way that we speak of institutional racism and xenophobia, the other face of racism and xenophobia, the policies of migration (and asylum) are the institutional framework that creates favourable conditions for new forms of slavery that affect immigrants (and seekers of asylum); the framework that makes possible policies that cancel fundamental rights of immigrants because of their situation of being immigrants, as repeatedly denounced by rigorous reports by NGOs such as CEAR, Cáritas, APDHA, SOS Racismo, Sanidad para todos, Red Acoge and many others. Those policies form part of a conception which shows that migratory movements are structural pieces of a system and not incomprehensible, wild, spontaneous waves, or invasions. No, migrations are part of a global economic system, which we call the process of globalisation, governed by the neo-fundamentalist logic of global market capitalism, which spreads inequality and exploitation over the supposed mobility and free flow of the market. The denial of equality (the denial to the other of recognition of him as a person) takes concrete form in the absence of a legal status of security and in the breakdown of the principles of legality and equality before the law, of the guarantee of equal liberty, and the reduction of those subjects (infra-subjects, if not actually non-subjects) to property. In other words, in what is instrumentalised by means of the law of exception which is what migration law is (rather than an aliens law); for, as Lochak points out, it opts for a “state of siege” rather than a rule-oflaw state and makes a permanent situation out of the exceptional, provisional, extra-ordinary situation of a “state of exception”. In fact, those infra-subjects are even denied their condition of being immigrants, the right to be immigrants, specified in the right of free circulation (a complex right, as the much-lamented Professor Chueca maintained), which links up directly with the principle of autonomy and its corollary, choosing one’s own plan for how one lives and moving in accordance with it. The construction of the legal concept of the immigrant as an infrasubject or non-subject also has to do, obviously, with the use of the immigrant as an obstacle/problem for purposes of internal partisan consumption. The immigrant as a scapegoat, an external aggressor from whom citizens have to be protected. In this way the system reestablishes its legitimacy, albeit in accordance with the oldest of the models of legitimation, which, as we saw, in primus in orbe deos facit timor, is fear. For that reason I think one can say that those policies of migration and asylum are policies of war, that they seek to inspire fear, to make us afraid, to make us give up our freedom and rights, beginning with the freedom to criticise, for the sake of the supposed protection that they offer us. I think it is hard to deny that this model of “border policy” violates the inherent logic of the rule-of-law state, its principles and values, its rules: the primacy of the legal rights and interests that are established as having priority because they serve our basic needs. When the whole effort of the migration policy is to conceptualise immigration in times of crisis, as a threat to public order and even to security and defence, it is understandable that it demands the institutionalisation of instruments of exception, such as internment camps, the use of armed forces or their equivalent (the FRONTEX system) and the criminalisation of immigrants. On that basis a legal logic has been established that unfortunately has penetrated into public opinion and that “justifies” limiting, reducing and eliminating the fundamental rights of immigrants and refugees because of being what they are. What is worse, in this process of stigmatisation the refugees are even denied the right to be refugees, the elementary right to ask for asylum. Moreover, this border policy imposes an old territorial logic of the state, serving notions of market and power and even of sovereignty that are now obsolete: because this version of borders violates the universalist logic of legal and political globalisation, which follows the path of legal cosmopolitism, at least in matters related to equal recognition of universal human rights and their guarantees. A path in which we see the oxymoron of a notion of state sovereignty that still seeks to place
Entre el mite i l'espant
To see the actual publication please follow the link above