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Culture and Conflict
No. 26, Summer 1997
Frontiers and Identities at Stake: Control of Immigrants and Asylum Seekers in Western Democracies
Greek immigration policies have been modified in 1991 following three different and often contradictory priorities: maintaining internal security, complying with the general pattern of immigration policies drawn up at the EU level and, as far as Albanian immigrants are concerned, protecting Greek political and socio-economic interests in the Balkans.
This essay emphasises the contradictory quality of US immigration history and politics. Special attention is paid to the issues of race and security and to the Californian debate on Proposition 187. US immigration policy, normally the undisturbed preserve of agribusiness and union lobbies, political economists and lawyers, genealogists and Ellis Island curators is now shaped less by the normal and pragmatic politics of pork barrel and regulation and more by ideologically charged politics.
In the U.S., although the production with NAFTA of a discourse on globalisation, one can notice these recent years, the development of a securitarian discourse. It transforms migrants coming from the South, especially Mexicans (and other Hispanics), into a threat not only to the state but also to the society and the identity. In this discourse, themes of security and identity are interrelated, and the latter is more likely to be transformed into a priority concern.
Contrary to popular belief, frontiers are complex institutions and have a variety of political processes associated with them. The role of frontiers, after a long period of neglect, has returned to the centre of political debate and should be the focus of renewed intellectual reflection. But the analysis of frontiers poses difficult philosophical/methodological questions. This article suggests that a modest political science approach is to be preferred and that a descent into a postmodernist confrontation of irreconcilable "stories" about frontiers should be avoided. Within the political science literature, frontiers have typically been conceptualized as a basic influence on the core characteristics on political systems or the expression of those core characteristics. This article argues that frontiers should be regarded as a new field of enquiry, opened up by developments in Europe, and a multidimensional approach to the study of frontiers is likely to be the most fruitful.