ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that borders as spatial manifestations of ambivalent migration policy express an ensemble or assemblage of fear and are strategically selective to sift and sort the feared and the fearful. Issues of immigration and minority integration have topped political agendas and media headlines in all of the member states of the European Union in recent years. Restrictive measures against immigration and asylum have become deeply political. Just as protectionism in the realm of foreign trade is by definition connected to domestic sectoral policies, there exist elective affinities between immigration policy and policies of integration and labour market. It is a kind of security-obsessed strawberry fields-politics inside and cherry-picking outside the European Union. In order to understand the persistence of economically inefficient political protection walls against unsolicited migration, the analysis of the borders of the European Union should encompass the politically expressed societal traumas with regard to migration.
