Borderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover.
By Miriam Ticktin.
Borders as infrastructure
As I looked out the car window in Calais at the enormous white mesh razor-wire lined fences, the surveillance towers and the starkness of the militarized landscape, I felt an eerie sense that I had been there before. I looked back at my photos from my trip to the border zone at Ceuta, between Morocco and Spain: the same mesh border fence structure, barbed wire and militarized landscape, and people and cars being funnelled towards guard booths. I had the same sense of foreboding, the same disorientation. The space felt at once uninhabited, and yet it seemed that eyes were everywhere. The local birds nesting in the Calais barbed wire were the main differentiating feature.
This visit to Calais with MMB last April made it very clear to me that national borders are transnational creations. Even though border walls purport to be the materialization of national sovereignty – deriving from and protecting an essential, inner national identity – they are created by transnational, border-crossing technologies, designs and networks. They are recognizable transnational types; indeed, there is very little that is nationally unique. Calais and Ceuta felt similar because they are constituted by the same designs and infrastructures, possibly even built by the same companies. Such border walls and zones could not exist without the transnational circulation of commodities and architectures.
To aid in this process, there are annual global Border Security Expo’s, which draw tech companies and government officials from around the world in the name of fighting transnational organized crime and terrorism. I attended one of these in 2018 in San Antonio, Texas, with the Multiple Mobilities Collective. Israeli companies lead the way, profiting from the fact that Gaza ‘is a great laboratory’ (Miller and Schivone 2015), creating what some have dubbed the laboratory of ‘the Palestine-Mexico border’ (Miller 2019) where technologies are tried out and data is shared.
Humanitarian infrastructures are also part of this transnational border complex; various types of migrant and refugee camps can be found alongside border walls to simultaneously rescue, contain and incarcerate people on the move. I saw these in Ceuta and on the Moroccan side of the border crossing. In Calais, the container camp that eventually replaced the so-called Jungle – photos of which were displayed at the Fort Vert bird blind, overlooking the now destroyed and remade area of the Jungle – was one such infrastructure (Figures 3 and 4). While the Jungle had complex beginnings, including a mix of organized state abandonment and autonomous organizing (Van Isacker 2020), it ended up being run by humanitarians, who replaced the informal housing and living spaces with shipping containers they could control and surveil (Ticktin 2016). Humanitarian structures such as refugee camps have their own architectures, meant to demonstrate temporariness while anchored in hard, material realities. They are at once ephemeral and carceral (Siddiqui 2024).
These various transnational technologies and designs circulate in the name of national closure. As they travel, they produce and reproduce a political imagination of what a border looks like, what it means to be a secure nation-state, and even what it means to rescue people without compromising borders. Such transnational technologies and infrastructures both produce and justify exclusion and carcerality, rendering racism legitimate.
Borders as people
The transnational nature of borders is also created, marked and made by the people who travel to counter them, to unmake them; that is, by the activists, organizers and academics (like myself!) who work to document, undo, undermine or subvert borders. In other words, many of the movements that challenge borders are also, unsurprisingly, transnational. They are predictably found at many border zones, part of the infrastructure even as they work to undo them. I want to focus on the people-part of the infrastructure (Simone 2004), and the making of the border by way of complexly layered forms of antagonism and cooperation.
No-borders activists, for instance, share knowledge about how to enact sea rescues; they track migrant boats to help when they land; they support people on the move in preparation for their journeys, from providing ziplock bags to keep cell phones dry, to giving informal legal advice. Some call this a version of the ‘underground railroad’, referring to the network of safehouses for those who were enslaved in the United States during the early to mid-19th century, to escape into free states and Canada. Yet while visiting Dover and Calais, it became clear that not only do the knowledge and strategies travel, there is a transnational circuit of people who embody this knowledge, and who circulate too. There were people who had cut their teeth on organizing around the Mediterranean, from Lesbos to Lampedusa, and by fighting border regimes like Frontex. Calais was another stop on this circuit, where people came to help with small boat crossings from Calais to Dover.
The same groups also regularly work with people on the move to occupy abandoned buildings and set up collective living spaces or squats. Informed by scholarship on the topic, they are artists, anarchists, academics and lawyers. I became keenly aware that I, too, am part of these circuits: I have traveled to many border zones, to research and act against them. We embody knowledge to challenge border regimes, attempting to enact unpartitioned visions of the world. Perhaps paradoxically, this layering of political movements and the movement of people working for and against borders helps to create the transnational border and render it recognizable across national contexts.
Borders for whom?
If national borders are created by transnational movement and movements, how about the people they are designed to catch, stop, protect or enable? Even as there is a commensurability between the infrastructures of borders and no-borders, perhaps counter-intuitively, it is harder to name those that we are there to either work with or against; they are the least recognizable as transnational ‘types.’ To be sure, there are social and political movements that have created migrant collective subjects. As I wrote in my first book (Ticktin 2011), the ‘sans papiers’ movement both created and was created by a different collective political subject, the sans papiers themselves, who worked against criminalization by changing their name. Yet, those who move across borders today are perhaps not as easily named or recognized. In part, this is because of the transnational nature of the border: these are not just national struggles, but transnational ones. People move for all kinds of reasons, in all kinds of ways.
‘People on the move’ is a name that migrants and no-borders activists have used to get away from legal categories like refugee or economic migrant, which are built on hierarchy and exclusion. And yet, there was no consensus when talking to activists in Calais about what term to use in French: each had a lack. While the term ‘sans papiers’ was still used, it was not ideal, because not all people on the move are without papers; some have temporary papers, some have the wrong papers. They suggested that some use the phrase, ‘personnes exilées’ (people in exile, or exiled people); and yet it is not clear that all people on the move feel to be in exile, not least because there is not always a consistent place from which to be exiled. They mentioned ‘personnes bloquées à la frontière’ or those stopped at the border, but some are stopped in national interiors, and some stop for other reasons. There was the concept of ‘personnes en transit’ – people in transit or transitory people – but the activists pointed out that this has been appropriated by the right, to suggest that people should NOT stay, that France and other places should be transit zones and not permanent residences.
New scholarship is starting to explore the different concepts used to name people on the move, each of which have their own political histories and ontologies: from ‘harraga’, or those who burn borders, in the Tunisian context (M’Charek 2020) to ‘touduke’, or those who steal across borders, from the Chinese context (Chen 2023).
Even as many of us try to create alternative political imaginations of the world to enable everyone to move, to stay and to flourish – politics is, after all, a battle over imagination (Dunne and Raby 2018; Ticktin 2022), where the imagination can help us maintain pre-existing realities or denaturalize the ‘real’ – the inability to ‘capture’, name or fully know those who move suggests that they will remain elusive, their desires and reasons opaque. While borders have an increasingly material, transnational presence, this unknowable Otherness continues to exist, and rather than trying to overcome it, we should respect it as a basic source of freedom.
Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center and Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics (CPCP). She publishes widely on topics such as migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care. Her latest book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World, is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press (2025).
Listen to Miriam’s Insights and Sounds interview with MMB Director Bridget Anderson on ‘Invasive Others: Plants? People? Pathogens?’.