Abstract
How one views migration fundamentally determines the scope and responsibility of states and the nature of services rendered to those crossing borders. For some, migration is a response to basic violations of human rights and as such demands that governments involve care agencies and legal institutions to determine that status of individuals and obligation of the state to protect migrants. For others, migration is a security issue that goes to the heart of sovereignty and the responsibility of the state to protect its own citizens. Policing, law enforcement, and border guards serve to detain, isolate, and ultimately return detainees in order to preserve the state. These frames not only guide the action of the state but serve as reference points for citizens, social institutions, and the media. These frames also serve to guide policy considerations at the supranational level in which issues of human rights protection and international law often give way to national sovereignty. The complexity, transnationalism, and international business connections that typify migration can oftentimes lead to strange bedfellows and encourage policies and processes that are at cross-purposes resulting in a cycle of violence against migrants.
Albahari’s work addresses the one of the most profound border areas in the discussion of migration. The Mediterranean has been host to migrants from all over the world and encouraged sophisticated and harmful means of smuggling that endanger the lives of those on the boats, encourage transnational criminal networks, and provide remittances and revenue for sometimes improvised towns. As an anthropologist, Albahari draws on years of fieldwork to create an ethnography based on the personal lives most deeply affected by migration. His ethnography most squarely focuses on Italy as a destination point as well as imagined space and the epicenter of European Union (EU) policy debate. While Albahari addresses the policy ramifications and failures of EU policy and broader considerations of how the political world intersects with migration, the strength of this work is not in its analysis but ethnography. His narrative is compelling, as he weaves the various threads while addressing the plight of those that cross the Mediterranean border. Albahari not only examines the migrants but those that benefit from their plight as well as role of government and nongovernmental organizations involved with migrant and refugee issues. This is one of the strengths of the volume—it paints a picture which privileges policing over investigation, fear over compassion, and shows the weakness of the systems that he have in place to protect the most vulnerable.
The stories that he captures humanize the statistics and news reporting that has become all too common about the plight of migrants in Europe. He leaves the broader questions of definition and policy to others and instead explores the psychology that prompts migration and adversity that confronts those that brave the border. For this reason, the volume does not put forward a normative, policy prescription about what should be done. The policy debates are explored here but as a frame to the larger ethnography he creates. Therefore, some may not be satisfied with the work if they are searching for a magic bullet that guides how to balance human rights concerns with sovereignty or even a theoretical account for a new form of sovereignty. Rather, this volume chronicles the life and death of those involved in Mediterranean Sea crossings and personalizes the impersonal. This is not a volume that creates concepts with theoretical import nor guide policy making. Instead, this is an account that provides voice to the voiceless which can frame a larger and more nuanced view of migration in this part of the world.