ABSTRACT
Frontex, the European Agency tasked with the promotion, coordination and development of the borders of the European Union, is more than a policing structure. Its functions by far exceed supporting physical control and vigilance over European borders. 1 Accordingly, in its 2017 risk analysis report (Frontex, 2017a), the agency appears more like an intelligence institution than a policing structure. This entity coordinates existing efforts in migration analysis and surveillance of immigration flows. It is actively collaborating with European Bodies such as Europol or the European Asylum Support Office, with EU Countries, and with third countries such as Georgia, Armenia, Turkey or Azerbaijan. It is effectively the lead node of a vast and influential network within the European defence community. 2 The analysis tasks performed by Frontex are not constrained by European borders. Algeria, Senegal, Morocco and Turkey are among the target countries of its intelligence and surveillance operations. Frontex collects collective and personal data for a broad variety of purposes such as providing advice (for example, to police services), controlling, and perhaps most importantly, creating “a picture of the situation at the EU’s external borders and the key factors influencing and driving it” (Frontex, 2017b). We might say that Frontex seeks to define migrant subjectivities. Its agents decide when a subject may represent a risk and determine which subjectivities belong to the “common law” (and thus can be policed) and which, such as refugees and asylum seekers, fall under the scope of humanitarian international law. Therefore we can consider Frontex to be the author of the interpretative framework through which other European agencies such as Europol, European Asylum Support Office (EASO) or the European Maritime Safe Agency (EMSA) will understand the complex reality of immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees. Frontex 132embodies what Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2013) have defined as a border methodology, or a technology of power designed to control, manage, distribute and multiply labour. Thus, Frontex, along with the above mentioned European agencies have turned from policing bodies to being the governmental structures that establish the classification of future underprivileged subjectivities. This apparatus announces the rise of a racialized legal structure in Europe – a legal narrative that is articulating privileged and underprivileged categories of population along the colour line. Of course, this does not bring to mind a renewal of the Jim Crow laws in the United States but a newly white supremacist ideology structured through a non-binary colour line.
