AMIS Post Doc Martin Lemberg Pedersen interviewed by Le Monde Diplomatique, Norway (in Norwegian)
AMIS affiliate Martin Lemberg-Pedersen has been interviewed to a feature on European migration and border control in Le Monde Diplomatique, Norway. In the feature, Lemberg-Pedersen explains how the increased focus on advanced, high tech border control infrastructure, like drones, satelites, robots and radarsystems, is also the result of a rapidly growing market on border control, worth billions of euro annually, the key players of which are major Italian, French, British, Greek, Israeli and Turkish military companies from the European arms industry. The companies also receive heavy subsidies from the EU Commission in order to allow them to compete with the American and Chinese arms industry.
However, says Lemberg-Pedersen, this outsourcing becomes a democratic and humanitarian problem because these security actors are oriented towards profit and have no competence to structure humanitarian protection, which ought to be a key aspect of any border control system. Instead, the technologies developed by the border control industry revolve around detecting "illegal immigration" and government seem all to happy to introduce these actors as a buffer zone, protecting their restrictive and somtimes inhuman asylum policies from moral and legal critique. Yet, the massive investment in control infrastructure risk leaving the fundamental problems untouched, he says, such as the asymmetry in asylum intake between Southern and Northern European countries, and the multiple refugee-producing conflicts in EU's neighboring regions.