ABSTRACT
Migrants crammed into makeshift boats, exhausted from their travels and sometimes at death’s door, landing at Lampedusa, on the Canary Islands, in southern Spain or in Greece, are omnipresent in the media. These media images construct the impression that migrants are a miserable people filled with illusions of a European El Dorado and that they are willing to face any risks to escape en masse from their country of origin. This image of clandestine migrants is constituted by an unexpected consensus of two antagonistic positions: by activists who lobby for the right to mobility, using it to denounce the effects of policies strengthening border control on the one hand; and by those who endorse migration protectionism using it to denounce porous borders and the effects on the formation of mafia networks on the other hand. Both positions conceal the realities of clandestine migration: first, in respect to the number of migrants, which is not large but in fact rather limited (El Mouhoub, 2007); second, in relation to the diversity of social groups crossing borders, contrary to media images, most clandestine migrants enter Europe legally and only become illegal afterwards — for example, when their visas expire (see Potot, this volume); and third, in respect to the hidden articulations between formal and informal economic circuits, that are ambivalent and work differently on both sides of the Mediterranean. These economies are closely linked to labour recruitment mechanisms in Morocco and labour market requirements in specific sectors in Spain and France. State borders are substituted and spatially extended by labour market borders, constituted by new kinds of temporary institutions — recruitment networks, extended family relations, transnational communities — and of a transnational workforce searching for better income possibilities. The negotiation of these new borders can be observed at the entry gates to Europe, both in Morocco and Europe, and at European places shaped by migrants such as the agricultural zones of southern Europe and popular outskirts of large urban areas (Terray, 1999).
