In Casablanca, the economic capital of Morocco, red taxis are the main modes of transport. It is precisely in one of those taxis that I first realized something puzzling, which immediately attracted my attention. I asked the taxi driver to take me to the consulate of Italy. Like the majority of foreign consulates, the consulate of Italy is also located in the central and rich quarters of Casablanca not far from the main railway station. Since I was at the railway station, I was surprised to hear the taxi driver warning me about the length of the journey and the high price. I reacted by saying that the consulate was not far, but just in Gauthier. The taxi driver deducted that there was a misunderstanding and promptly replied: “Ah, you mean the other consulate!”
Although that statement is contradictory if taken at face value, since two consulates of the same foreign country are not to be found in one city, I would discover later on that my taxi driver was absolutely right. Ordinary people used to see in the visa application center run by the multinational company VFSGlobal and located in a residential area of Casablanca, far from the city center, “the other Italian consulate.” Two consulates existed as a result.
In the last 15 years, two transnational corporations, VFSGlobal (Visa Facilitation Services) and TLSContact, have taken large shares of a new market: providing services to diplomatic missions. VFSGlobal and TLSContact are the main private service providers for EU Member States. Other smaller companies mostly operating in just a single country exist, but they are not eager to become global players. VFSGlobal and TLSContact have expanded their activities swiftly. Rapid diffusion is the most striking feature of visa services outsourcing.
Beginning in the 2000s, private service providers multiply their customers in little time. In November 2007, VFSGlobal was partner of 17 states among which were 11 European Member States (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom).1 Each of those states cooperates with VFSGlobal in 8 countries outside the EU (Bangladesh, China, Ghana, India, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Russia, Ukraine) and in the United Kingdom. Within one and a half years, in May 2009, 5 more EU Member States (Czech Republic, Denmark, Malta, Portugal, Switzerland) had begun to cooperate with VFSGlobal in other 4 third countries (Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa, United Arab Emirates). In such a short period, the number of VFSGlobal visa application centers almost doubled, jumping from 30 to 59.2 Created in 2010, TLSContact’s customers have also increased rapidly. In 2012, TLSContact had 5 customers, 4 EU Member States (Denmark, France, Italy, Sweden) plus Canada and operated in 8 third countries.3 After one year, in 2013, Germany and Switzerland also opened TLSContact centers in several countries.
The growing numbers of visa application centers are the measurement of the success of contracted visa services. The implication of the International Organization for Migrations (IOM) – according to which services in support of the visa application process partake in the Border Management strategy via “facilitating migration”4 – also encourages the acceptance of contracted visa services as a standard mode of implementing visa policy. In 2014, IOM Mission in Guyana opened a visa application center for the diplomatic mission of the United Kingdom under a partnership with VFSGlobal.5 After only one year, in the end of 2015, IOM/VFSGlobal visa application centers for UK are 9.6 Before 2014, IOM and VFSGlobal were cooperating with the Canadian Immigration and Citizenship Department and the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship.7
Opponents of contracted visa services argue that it results from transnational corporations’ aggressive lobbying practices and that the state cannot give away its authority. Supporters claim that the state only gives away time-consuming, administrative tasks while maintaining the authority on deciding who gets in. According to this view, private service providers are more effective than the state and allow for reducing costs. In either set of arguments about contracted visa services, little detail is given for the reasons that have led to the adoption of visa services outsourcing and the actual effects on day-to-day policy-making. This book analyzes how European Union migration control is practiced in Morocco and offers an appraisal of the ways in which transnational corporations are substantially transforming the way that migration control is being carried out. The analysis builds on views from the inside of state and private for-profit organizations. This book pierces the “corporate veil” that “works not only to separate legal responsibilities but also cloak the practices of private actors” (Gammeltoft-Hansen 2013, p. 141). Behind the corporate veil, we will see what private organizations actually do beyond what they say or what they are expected to do, most notably the fact that they are not expected to influence visa processing in whatever manner. This is a “street-level” study of private contracting in visa processing based on pioneering ethnographic research in original fieldwork settings: consular visa sections and private visa application centers. By using the term “street-level,” I aim at directing attention to visa policy implementation on the ground, to the state and private actors that achieve the filtering work of borders through their daily work routines.
The book sheds ethnographic light on border control on the ground. It focuses in particular on local and day-to-day EU visa policy policy-making. Its primary object of reflection is not the world of European migration policy-making and the network between ubiquitous rationales, discourses and narratives that Gregory Feldman (2011) aptly calls “the migration apparatus.” I deal with the practices of ordering flows. Yet, I reveal ubiquitous narratives depicting the virtues of New Public Management that partake in EU’s migration management regime. I take policy implementation as the site to observe political power and contestation – how power is experienced, practiced, and challenged – not at the center but in its extremities (Foucault 1980) to argue that private actors’ involvement in day-to-day making of borders is a mechanism that expands state capacity and enhances the (dis)ordering of flows. States achieve goals by governing through the distance. The distance with the governed emerges as the most valuable outcome that underlines the adoption of private-public cooperation despite the adjustments that this latter implies for state actors.
The “illegality industry” – as Ruben Andersson (2014) has termed the interactions among people, technologies and environment that fight and forge illegality – builds in particular on the obsession with clandestine migrants, which appear as objects of concern rather than indifference. However, day-to-day implementation practices produce indifference towards the recipients of control while keeping them away from the sight and away from the mind.
Through its focus on the practices that enact state sovereignty, this book offers an ethnographic account of governance understood as “political power beyond the state” (Rose and Miller 1992), and therefore aims to contribute to the “encounters” of governmentality and political science (Walters 2012).
Bordering and the State
The construction of modern states, the appearance of borders, and the emergence of bureaucracies that allocate paper identities are three aspects of the same story. Modern states have not only monopolized the legitimate use of violence, as Max Weber has stated, but also the “legitimate means of movement,” that is the “authority to determine who may circulate within and cross their borders” (Torpey 2000, p. 7). States have embraced their populations by tracing limits to territories. Such limits distinguish an inside from an outside, a member from a non-member. The edges of state territory define identities as a result. Techniques of identification have been intrinsic to the formation of modern states. John Torpey’s history of the invention of passports (Torpey 2000) and Gerard Noiriel’s research on the carte and the code (the identification of foreigners and the nationality code) (Noiriel 1988) have documented the emergence of unambiguous paper identities attributed by the state. Gerard Noiriel has related identification techniques to the invention of immigration and of the dichotomy national/immigrant, which are relatively novel terms. Likewise, Torpey has proposed that the modern international passport and visa systems originated recently, during the First World War.
Modern states’ monopolization of people’s coming and going as well as the emergence of paper identities have depended on the development of bureaucracies. Bureaucracies issue identity cards and passports, which determine the belonging to a nation-state, and visas, which identify legitimate travelers as they authorize the crossing of the borders of a state. The term “visa” is particularly interesting in this respect. Its first known use dates back to 1831. It originates from the Latin verb videre, to see, and means literally “something that has been seen.” Generally associated with paperwork, that term indicates that an individual has examined, verified, and approved the validity of an official paper. However, the meaning that is currently associated with “visa” is an official mark or stamp on a passport granted by the proper authorities that allows its holder to enter or leave a state, usually for a particular reason. An entry or exit visa may be a stamp that border guards put on a passport; or a consular visa – an authorization to cross the border of the state that is issued away from the border, in national bureaucracies located in countries of departure.
Controlling the movement of people away from the edges of state territory and before the arrival at the country of destination has been characterized as “remote control” (Zolberg 1999). EU visa policy is one of the instruments of such a strategy, since EU visa policy turns consulates abroad into frontlines of migration control. As Virginie Guiraudon (2003, p. 194) has noted:
Remote control however is a strategy that seeks to achieve all goals at once, i.e. to circumvent constraints in cost-effective ways, simultaneously appealing to public anxieties over migration, short-circuiting judicial constraints on migration control, while allowing wanted trade, labor, and tourist flows. In practice, this means ensuring that aspiring migrants or asylum-seekers do not reach the territory of the receiving countries.
States respond to novel “control dilemmas” (Guiraudon and Joppke 2001) by reactivating old instruments of remote control. Contemporary liberal states face novel control dilemmas encapsulated in the analogy of a triangle whose...