ABSTRACT
The identity of ‘global outsider or ‘global alien’ that is currently assigned the forced migrant has come to the fore as an essential component of the ideological underpinning of a Europe-wide ‘security regime’. This regime manifests itself in, among other things, an increasingly repressive, centralised body of asylum and immigration legislation; the growth of a widespread and unaccountable surveillance system, targeted in the main at the trafficking/smuggling of ‘illegal aliens’; the fortification of European borders and the projection of border controls far beyond their geographical remit into Europe's neighbouring ‘gatekeeper’ countries and the so-called ‘migrant-producing’ regions; and the criminalisation and incarceration of what Bauman (2004) terms ‘disposable populations’, including the construction of a vast carceral estate (across the continent and within neighbouring regions) of centres for the mass detention of forced migrants.
