Knowledge/recognition: Counting and the predicament of the permeable biopolitical state

Introduction

Irregular migrants in Norway suffer harsh treatment and their presence is not accepted or recognized. In addition to risking deportation, they are not allowed to do paid work, and are denied social services and health care, to pressure them to return to their country of origin. Even when they die, they are not counted. In contrast, citizens are meticulously counted and recorded in every department of public administration, beginning with the ‘National Registry’.

This article examines the implications of the decisions to deny assistance and not to count irregular migrants, and suggests understanding them as answers to dilemmas facing contemporary western states. There have been numerous accounts of the miseries endured by migrants on the borders of Europe and other western countries. De Genova and Peutz (2010) are among the many authors framing border policies as a form of ‘abandonment’ in the famous phrase of Agamben (1998); Jones (2016) calls western borders ‘violent’, and Weber and Pickering (2011) describe Australian efforts to fend off immigrants as unethical and as violations of human rights. Fassin (2011), Ticktin (2011) and Walters (2010) have suggested that the terms ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘humanitarian borders’ capture some of the contradictory elements in border policies. The unwillingness to count has been interpreted as a sort of denial, and as a ‘produced ignorance’, to handle unwanted truths (Cohen, 2001; Rappert, 2012).

I apply a different framework for understanding border politics. Inspired by Garland’s (1996) classical analysis, I argue that the Norwegian state’s decision to disregard the presence of irregular migrants (Guild, 2004) makes sense in the context of ‘the predicament of the sovereign state’. Border policies are generally considered to be ways to regulate entry to the territory. Inability to administer physical borders effectively creates a dilemma within the logic of governing. States accept responsibility for citizens and acknowledged visitors, but not for irregular migrants. Yet migrants are resident in the state’s territory. They are physically ‘there’, but not acknowledged as being present. Norway, and other states, face a dilemma: whether to choose to recognize and keep track of them, or to stay ignorant of their whereabouts and send a signal that they are unwanted on the territory. This dilemma is summarized in the title. Thus, this article is not about recognition as currency within a political economy of identity (Honneth, 1996) but the matter of entering the realm of politics.

This paradox makes irregular migrants a suitable prism for studying border politics. I will highlight policies and administrative decisions targeting irregular migrants in Norway, thus providing a more complete image of border politics in general, and the choice of policies in the smaller scale. This way I set out to inspire more nuanced analysis of both.

My argument draws on previous research on irregular migrants and drug users in Norway (Johansen, 2013, 2018). Those data were not gathered for the purposes pursued in this article, but this does not affect the validity of the present argument. The aim is not to present a precise analysis, but to draw a sketch of border politics. The empirical notes support this argument by revealing elements in the politico-administrative field that otherwise are not connected: I ‘connect the dots’ (Yin, 2003) and convey a picture of the totality produced by the separate empirical sources.

The article discusses ‘border politics’ in Norway, understood as the political dimension of the public domain. When I use the plural version ‘border policies’ I refer to political decisions more specifically that contribute to the total outcome. At times, I use media coverage as a source for administrative activities. Media sources have deservedly had a bad reputation in the social sciences, but in this instance, the decision to make use of them reflects the fragmented nature of the research project. My use of media content was necessitated by a desire to bring together the array of different institutional elements contributing to the totality of border policies. My choice to do so makes the argument less transparent, but also makes it possible.

In the first part of the article, I outline the features of the predicament of the permeable state. The second part addresses how the Norwegian authorities handle them. In the final section, I discuss briefly whether border politics can be analysed as a response to the predicament in other contexts.

The predicament of the permeable state

The competence of a state is exercised within the lines drawn by physical borders, whereas political administration is mostly concerned with its citizens. In other words, sovereignty and governance overlap but do not coincide. It is possible to be ‘inside and outside’ at the same time (Stumpf, 2006).

Western states have grown accustomed to the presence of a permanent subpopulation of non-citizens. Workers and refugees are able to enter territories and, to some extent, remain in them, either without permission, or for longer than is permitted. Foreigners can thus pass through borders.

In some countries, this subpopulation is visible, while in others it is absorbed into the lower strata of the labour market (as in the United States, Italy and other Mediterranean countries). To informed observers, the people are also visible in the Nordic countries, but are less conspicuous. However, the subpopulation is a constant reminder that the state is unable to control its borders, and conflicts with the image of the state as a sovereign power. In the Nordic countries, irregular migrants are also explicitly declared to be unwanted as labour), unlike in the USA and in European countries bordering the Mediterranean (Barker, 2017; Cholewinski et al., 2007; Hammar et al., 1999). Thus, while partly integrated into civil society and the labour force, they are not included in the concept of ‘citizens’, subject to ‘government’.

The presence of unwanted irregular migrants has altered the foundations of politics. As the borders of Europe and its nation-states have proved permeable, the ideal of maintaining control of who enters and who leaves a country has become unfeasible, despite the fact that deciding who enters and leaves is fundamental to the exercise of sovereignty (Brown, 2010). This creates a political crisis—a situation constantly reminding the public of the state’s inability to uphold its promise to maintain sovereign order on its territory. The situation at the borders resembles what Garland (1996) once termed ‘the predicament of the sovereign state’ (Bosworth, 2008).

As crime became ‘a normal fact’ in the 1970s, it threatened the image of the state as a provider of social order. It undermined the promise implicit in our imagined contract with the state and challenged sovereignty (Garland, 1996). The normality of crime left us with a political ‘predicament’, to which there were two distinct and conflicting responses: ‘adaptations’ and ‘denial’. Adaptations are pragmatic solutions—attempts to solve a problem. Denial is a symbolic handling of the situation aimed at the political public. Following Garland, we can identify a predicament of permeable states in an age of migration.

The dilemma posed by migration is that states accept responsibility for citizens and acknowledged visitors, but not for irregular migrants (Guild, 2004). These people are resident on the state’s territory: physically there, but not acknowledged. Their presence conflicts with the image of state sovereignty (Brown, 2010), and, as I will show, challenges the biopolitical nature of western states.

Knowledge or acknowledgement: A biopolitical dilemma

The biopolitical nature of the Norwegian state widens the divide between the treatment of insiders and of outsiders. I will demonstrate this with a brief description of Norway as a biopolitical state. The significance of this becomes evident in the question of determining how many irregular migrants there are.

Introducing biopolitics as an analytical concept, Foucault famously starts with the social contract. In contract theory, the individual is bound to the state by a hypothetical contract (Foucault, 2008). The social contract gives the sovereign the prerogative to rule, so long as they guarantee the safety of the citizens. Foucault famously contended that, contrary to its claims, contract theory inaugurated a new relation: a new paradigm of government, and a new set of power technologies, emerged alongside the political practices we now identify as liberalism. Advanced techniques forming individual bodies can be discerned in daily routines in factories, prisons, schools and so on. Foucault (1979) used the term ‘discipline’ to describe them. Of more significance here, however, is the fact that governments started to treat individuals as ‘populations’, and to pursue policies directed at ‘man-as-species’ (Foucault, 2011). Biopolitics addresses the biological aspects of the population (Lemke, 2001). It first appears as a preoccupation with birth, death, production and illness. This way, the government made a turn towards health—nurturing, so to speak, the health of the population (Rose et al., 2006).

Hacking (1990) presents the biopolitical position when he analyses the emergence of the ‘probabilistic’ perspective in the 19th century. Hacking’s term ‘taming of chance’ refers to the growing body of knowledge about the population as biology. This knowledge reduces the impact of illness, death and disfigurement. Biopolitical reason accentuates the division between members and non-members: members are nurtured and cared for, while non-members are ‘beyond the pale’ (Brown, 2010), and of no interest to the state.

Foucault (1980) famously attached knowledge to power, separating the words merely by a slash, thus indicating how power and knowledge are two sides of the same coin. As Walters (2010) comments, power and knowledge were only intertwined as long as borders were disregarded. Walters (2006) builds on Foucault’s biopolitical dictum, with the notion ‘border/control’. He points to the incompatibility of knowledge and acknowledgement. In the same vein, I suggest that, on the border, power becomes entangled in a dilemma between choosing knowledge or acknowledgement. Where Foucault strips knowledge of its innocence regarding power, I point to another dimension. Knowledge implies recognition of a person’s or a group’s relevance to power. This relation is stronger in a biopolitical state, which has a greater reliance on knowledge.

Translated into the practical handling of the predicament, it means only one of the options, knowledge or acknowledgement, can be chosen. This becomes evident when we look at the efforts made to identify the ‘extent’ of the problem. When the immigration authorities (UDI) wanted to determine the number of people illegally residing in Norway in 2007, they were faced with the consequences of non-recognition. No statistics or registers were available. For want of anything better they resorted to a complicated method based on analyses of police statistics (Zhang, 2008). On the basis of this, it was suggested that there were somewhere between 12,000 and 24,000 irregular migrants in Norway (Zhang did not differentiate between types of irregular migrants). A Norwegian organization for activists (NOAS) estimated the number considerably less, only 5000, based on their experiences in direct contact with the group. UDI later repeated the study, and came up with a new figure of between 30,000 and 56,000 (Mohn, 2014). What these studies really showed was that the authorities had no idea of the number.

By keeping a count, the state would send a signal that irregular migrants will under no circumstances be recognized. Counting does not merely produce a collection of numbers (Franko and Gundhus, 2015), it also signals the kind of people that belong in the state’s area of interest, and hence to its area of responsibility (Aas, 2011; Schinkel, 2010). This stance results in a peculiar political game, as shown by Dagne (2015). Dagne interviewed groups of Ethiopian, Palestinian and Iranian activists struggling to promote their cases as irregular migrants. They were not accepted as legitimate partners for a dialogue by the authorities. The activists appealed for public sympathy on the grounds of human rights, but to no avail. The church then took their part, and the activists set up a camp in the centre of the capital to reach out to the public. Some converted to Christianity and undertook a pilgrimage. A couple of activists sewed up their mouths, leaving only a tiny hole to take in food. A small group went on a hunger strike. But they could find no way to make the authorities discuss their position. There was still the same lack of response. Their various appeals for sympathy and for negotiation were all met with silence (Dagne, 2015). They were not recognized as having a political voice. This way they were also denied the right to argue for their interests.

The impossibility of a political voice is only one aspect of the problem of recognition. While the state (via health organizations) can deny the presence of irregular migrants by refusing to count them, not counting them leaves the state knowing nothing about them. Counting them would therefore be an adaptation to the issue; not counting them would, in Garland’s terms, be denying it.

Given the pressing need to address the situation politically, the state faces conflicting demands: how can the need for administrative countermeasures be reconciled with a clear political stance? Philosophically, as Rescher (2009) comments, there are no ‘clean’ solutions (adaptations) to pragmatic paradoxes. In the next part I will describe the ‘unclean’ responses taken by Norwegian health organizations.

At the heart of the biopolitical state: The National Registry

For the biopolitical state, knowledge implies recognition. This section outlines how the dilemmas of biopolitics appear on the borders of everyday life in Norway as a biopolitical state. The administrative procedure following births sheds light on the link between the individual and the administration of the biopolitical state.

New-born babies are registered in a ‘birth report’ by a nurse, which includes basic information about the mother, father and the date and time of birth. The information is forwarded to the tax authorities, who administer the National Registry. A tax officer registers the information about the new-born in the National Registry. In this register, all entries are given a unique combination of digits, which constitutes the ‘person number’ (literally, ‘birth number’). Birth numbers are keys to information about a set of traits of the particular individuals stored in a databank operated by the tax authorities.

Birth numbers produce information about the ‘body of bodies’. These data can also be used to deny access to welfare services to those who do not have one (Karlsen, 2015). This became obvious in 2010, when the tax authorities (by chance) discovered that more than 100 Ethiopians who had been denied asylum were mistakenly given the tax forms necessary to obtain legal employment.

Birth numbers consist of 11 digits. The first six are the date of birth. The following three indicate sex and some other characteristics. The last two digits are control digits, related to the preceding numbers by an algorithm. They make it easy for the trained eye to distinguish between birth numbers, fake birth numbers and so-called D-numbers. D-numbers are given to non-citizens who have financial relations with Norway, including foreigners owning property or working in Norway, and people involved with the welfare organization (NAV) or the formal health organization (the so-called ‘health economy’). D-numbers are constructed very much like birth numbers, but with a different algorithm for the control digits.

‘H-numbers’ (help-numbers) are generated at the local level for patients in medical databases, including irregular migrants, for whom it is difficult (unrealistic) to find a proper birth number. This is sometimes ‘necessary’ to ensure continuity in the treatment of a patient. I encountered this practice in drug-related health services and among pathologists. Karlsen (2015) also found it in her fieldwork at health centres for irregular migrants (see later).

The National Registry has entries for some attributes of those registered—for example address, workplace, ethnicity, religious affiliation, legal status, civil status (including names of partner and children). It is primarily an inventory of the people residing in the country, together with some basic information about sociological attributes (i.e. ethnicity) and biological relations. It can also be used to trace individuals, which was described as a useful feature of these registers in a white paper on their development (Thomsen, 1995).

From a biopolitical perspective, I contend that the National Registry is the central source of knowledge about ‘human resources’. It provides the basis for all statistical measures and organizational activities, and for the distribution of doctors, planning of traffic, schools and taxation. It underpins databanks for health, crime, welfare and living conditions. It is the heart of the biopolitical state. I will expand on the implications for health care in the next paragraphs.

The Infectious Diseases Act provides the legal background for monitoring health (Norwegian Government, 1994). Several organizations are dedicated to this task and the scientific development of knowledge and reduction of health-related risk: the Department of Community Medicine and Global Health at the University of Oslo (Helsam, 2018); the Norwegian Institute for Public Health (2018a); and specialist institutions for particular kinds of patients. Statistics Norway produces an annual survey charting the living conditions of the population (Health, care and social relations, survey on living conditions 2016). The Directorate of Health, which coordinates the entire health sector, produces statistics and commissions research on selected topics that are considered politically or administratively important (Helsedirektoratet, 2018).

There is, therefore, a mass of information about health-related issues. Researchers can bring together information about physical and social backgrounds, personal biographies, preferences and genetic attributes. Registers can be combined by connecting information in one with that in another, down to the level of individual persons. Birth numbers are the key.

The health authorities closely follow the national health situation and the Norwegian Institute for Public Health (2018a) monitors the prevalence of contagious diseases. Doctors are obliged to report every incidence of ‘Group A’ diseases (a long list of these includes malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS and hepatitis A/B/C) (Norwegian Institute for Public Health, 2018a; 2018b). These reports include full names and birth numbers, to indicate that action is being taken promptly regarding the individual patient. Disease groups B and C are reported without birth numbers. Flu, for example, is included in Group C. The diseases in these two groups are described as follows on the institution’s website: ‘these are diseases that demand that the situation is monitored, but that do not require registration of details concerning the individual case’. The Norwegian Institute for Public Health examines the whole body of the population. Flu-like symptoms are reported by 201 chosen units (mostly doctors) operating as ‘lookouts’, from week 40 in the autumn to week 20 in spring (late September to mid-May—the typical flu season). The Norwegian Institute for Public Health (2018a, 2018d) publishes weekly updates on the prevalence of flu in the season.

Thus, through such mechanisms, the biology of the population is made transparent. The authorities monitor the population as a whole and take action regarding individual cases when this is deemed necessary to prevent epidemics. When monitoring Group A diseases, doctors include in their reports the link to the National Registry. Again, birth numbers are the key to combining registers.

The National Registry thus has two different but related functions: (1) it provides keys for producing knowledge about the whole body of the population; (2) it keeps track of residents. As a corollary, being included in the National Registry becomes a significant indication of membership.

What, then, do hospitals do about new-born babies of irregular descent? According to various sources, hospitals do send reports about them to the tax authorities, but these authorities do not enter the information into the register. Information about new-borns goes no further than a ‘drawer at the hospital’ (Vaaland, 2012). There is no file registered with their name or number. And this decision mirrors the stance taken by most other health organizations. For example, although hospitals conduct research within their specialist areas that could have been systematized for this group, this research is not accumulated to benefit the group as a whole. In the last report on health support on the issue by the Ministry of Health, one chapter is devoted to irregular migrants. Here it is argued that their conditions are poor, and it is argued that they should be afforded more health care. But there are no discussions about their actual sufferings or how to monitor them (Helsedirektoratet, 2009). The information page on ‘migration health’ (Norwegian Institute for Public Health, 2018c) lists areas for research and concern. Among the nine specified areas none relate to conditions for irregular migrants. In a study of mental health among migrants irregular migrants are not considered (Kale and Hjelde, 2017). Similarly, a government plan on migrants’ health concludes this way:

Norway has very good central health records and national medical quality records which could potentially be used in greater detail through linking of existing registers. It is important that medical quality records through documentation and evaluation of clinical activities contribute to better health and care services for the population. Different aspects (legal, ethical, economic) should be reviewed and a link to the federal register should be facilitated so that medical quality records provide knowledge about the immigrant population and so on contributing to better health and care services to these groups. Knowledge status on immigrant health should be updated so that one at all times has knowledge of various health challenges.

(Helsedirektoratet, 2013: 39, author’s translation)

This summarizes the biopolitical rationality and the potential with current registers in case of migrants, but again, irregular migrants are not mentioned.

State agencies undoubtedly benefit from in-depth information about irregular migrants. Their presence means that they need to be included in forecasts for the future, in the interests of ‘taming social chance’. However, including them in the National Registry would also mean including them in the biopolitical sphere of interest.

Not counting irregular migrant births is one way to handle the predicament described earlier. But this choice comes at a price: a weakened information base and reduced capacity for surveillance. It appears to be a trade-off between gaining information about the group the state seeks to control versus the risk of committing to responsibility for them.

Ideally, the authorities want to address political issues with the measures available in the administrative toolbox, but the predicament rules this out. Their predicament demands there should be no counting, but is there no way both their goals can be met? The resulting ‘unclean’ policies are the subject of the remainder of this article. These become evident in negotiations about who should be included—who should ‘count’—which revolve around the National Registry and birth numbers.

Counting and caring in the biopolitical state

The predicament caused by the presence of irregular migrants divides the political landscape and creates a situation where two kinds of interests come into conflict. In his analysis, Garland pointed out that there were two different solutions in the field of penal policies: denial and adaptation. For our purposes, the first solution means denying recognition, while adaption means regulating and providing for the targeted group. In the current political climate in Europe, denial is the dominant solution, but there is also room for compromise and adaptation. The pragmatic needs of the state are not pursued openly. Adaptation tends to go on in the background of political deliberations. It is nevertheless important, not least to an understanding of the duality of politics.

In the present case, it is easy to find examples of denial. Refusing to include irregular migrants in the National Registry is a symbolic gesture, as well as a practical barrier (a barrier to prevention and other forms of ‘taming chance’). However, there are reasons for not accepting this as the whole picture. Police practice sheds light on this point. Contrary to political rhetoric, the police have been reluctant to deport irregular migrants (Valenta, 2012). Providing irregular migrants refrain from committing crimes, they are quite safe from police intervention. The police decide on their priorities, and non-criminal irregular migrants have yet to become prioritized targets, except for random frisking in public spaces, as in the Swedish REVA project (Barker, 2015). So, there is more to policing and to government than denial.

Adaptation is most evident in the realm of administration. Karl-Trummer et al. (2009; Karlsen, 2015) developed a taxonomy for administrative adaptation. They distinguish between individual solidarity, functional ignorance and structural compensation. Individual solidarity refers to ‘frontline’ workers and how they provide services that are not supposed to be accessible to the users. ‘Functional ignorance’ describes a form of rule-bending in which a frontline worker defines situations creatively, and deliberately turns a blind eye for the benefit of the user. Structural compensation refers to permanent activities, typically carried out by activists or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), designed to ameliorate the living conditions of the users. These three approaches will now be dealt with, to show how the Norwegian government handles the predicament of being a permeable state.

Counting deaths

Death creates counting problems all over the world (Heller and Pezzani, 2016; Nelson, 2015; Weber and Pickering, 2011). On a less dramatic scale, this is also the case in Norway. In a population of 18,000 residents in reception centres for asylum seekers, one-third of whom were irregular migrants in 2014, some deaths will naturally occur. But there is no official register of these deaths. The Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) contacted all the asylum centres and found that 22 people had died in them in 2012, half of them from ‘unnatural causes’ (NRK, 2013). The authorities, however, are reluctant to keep a record of these deaths. Notification of a death is sent to the Norwegian Institute for Public Health, which is responsible for statistics on causes of death. But the immigration authorities do not collect this information. The news agencies enquired further into the matter and found that 83 people had died between 2006 and 2012 (Tirillsdottir Heinesen, 2012). When confronted with this information, the leader of the Directorate of Immigration said that they do not have the authority to collect such data; they do not have a licence to do so, since it is a matter of ‘sensitive information’ (Mon and Honningsøy, 2013).

For members of the biopolitical state, things are different. Both Statistics Norway and the Institute for Public Health produce statistics on the deaths of citizens; they also record the causes of death. Reports from the asylum centres are not included in the statistics, however, because the residents in these centres have no birth number (Mon and Honningsøy, 2013). Information about causes of death is therefore not systematically collected for asylum centre residents, of which many are irregular migrants.

In the biopolitical state, the dead are an important source of information, not only in aggregate numbers but also as individuals. One in 10 deaths are examined by pathologists, who carry out autopsies, half of which are forensic (Aarseth, 2011). Pathologists believe that there is a huge potential for gaining knowledge by increasing the number of autopsies. For example, one in four autopsies find a different cause of death from the one recorded on the death certificate. The declared aim is that 25 per cent of all deaths should be examined, but this requires resources. The draft legislation referred to suggests an even higher figure, echoing the title of the white paper by Aarseth (2011), ‘Death to serve life’. The death of irregular migrants (and asylum seekers) ultimately brings information to the medical profession as a whole, but it is not collected as knowledge about them as a group. There is no accumulated knowledge of irregular migrants as a group which could help develop medical assistance for them that catered to their special needs.

What do pathologists do when the death of an irregular migrant comes to their attention? Who pays? The problem with irregular migrants is that they have no birth number. It is therefore necessary to make up a number, which is automatically filed in the local municipality (Oslo).

When reception centres and immigration authorities choose not to count deaths, they repeat the demarcation of the limits of the biopolitical sphere. What could be more important than ‘taming death’, to rephrase Hacking? The predicament leaves the state with little choice but to carry out harsh decisions. Immigration authorities claim that the data protection authorities prohibit them from producing lists of deaths, but it is hard to believe that they would not receive permission, were they to push for it, by putting forward the same argument as the white paper by Aarseth (2011) on the need for more pathology. It is, of course, also possible that reception centres and/or the immigration authorities keep track of deaths informally.

Thus, despite their inflexible public stance in regard to recognition, administrators have some leeway in handling the predicament. In regard to non-native Roma, a group resembling irregular migrants in some ways, the police adopt differing attitudes (Gullestad, 2014). They are instructed to register beggars: according to news reports, the police in Bergen do what they are told, while in Trondheim, they do not. The police claim that they are not licensed by the Norwegian Data Protection Authority to register these people. There is thus room for manoeuvre within the legal framework, and this example supports the impression that Trondheim’s political culture is significant.

Similarly, a little ingenuity would probably have made it possible to register deaths at reception centres. Was permission sought to do so? Would it be possible to depersonalize the information in the archive? And who knows, perhaps there is a secret register? The police in Malmö, Sweden, secretly (and illegally) keep a register of the Roma population in their district (Barker, 2015). Who knows which organizations keep secret sets of figures?

Concluding discussion

How is it that the Norwegian state chooses to deny assistance and not count irregular migrants? This choice seems unintelligible in light of human rights and modern methods of governance. I have proposed seeing border politics as resulting from the predicament of the permeable state. In the first section, I outlined a model for understanding politics, centring on the fragility of sovereignty in contemporary western states. Sovereignty under threat requires unambiguous public statements, undermining the mundane and practical reduction of crime. The presence of irregular migrants is an embarrassment to sovereignty and creates the predicament. The predicament is deepened by the biopolitical rationale of the Norwegian state. In border politics this creates a slightly different dilemma: one must choose between gaining knowledge or displaying sovereignty.

Border control is partly maintained by denying irregular migrants access to resources available to visitors and citizens. Public displays of the stern stance against irregular migrants dominate border politics. At the same time, the effects of their refusal to assist the group are softened. In the second section I point to examples of the state’s toleration of action taken to lessen harms inflicted because of this stance. Health care is central to approaches to irregular migrants, since they suffer from policies that force them into destitution and deprive them of means of sustenance. There is scant public concern over the consequences of these policies, but there are some adaptations that alleviate their harshness, though they do not compensate for it. However, a proper understanding of border policies must take them into account. I have presented examples of structural compensations, individual solidarity, and functional ignorance, which refer to strategies to alleviate the consequences of policies by bending the rules in various ways. These circumventions generally require some sort of approval from above, and this is a reminder that incompatible solutions to the predicament are sought simultaneously. The ambiguousness of Norwegian border politics reflects the importance of the predicament.

Current border politics in Europe and elsewhere reportedly lead to death and ill health on a scale that can only be guessed at. Future generations may judge today’s policies harshly, but the reluctance to reach out to migrants and count deaths does not justify a blanket conclusion that states do not care. I conclude this article by asking if my framework is relevant to other countries and the EU. Overall, the predicament of permeable states describes an objective dilemma for every liberal democracy that experiences unwanted mass migration. But whether the predicament is handled openly, with public consideration of the pros and cons of different approaches, or ambiguously, is both an empirical question and a matter of framing.

Weber and Pickering (2011) describe how states shape the rate and distribution of deaths among migrants. Border policies create structures of risk, and sometimes directly employ lethal measures. These authors demonstrate how states produce ‘death at the global frontier’. Direct and/or indirect responsibility for fatalities goes hand in hand with a conspicuous absence of any count of the number of deaths. Weber and Pickering go on to show how states refrain from counting, and how they invest energy in problematizing definitions of categories and outcomes where numbers are actually produced. The practice of not counting is symptomatic of a disturbing lack of concern with people dying, and the authors frame their book as a response to this. They are ‘honouring lives’, the same lives that states destroy, let die and disregard. According to the authors, preventing deaths is an ethical and political duty. Not counting them is problematic, because it prevents states from developing measures to prevent future fatalities.

For Weber and Pickering, sovereignty is at the core of the problem. They work from a cosmopolitan point of view (Morris, 2010). But such a framework requires that states take responsibility for all humans, irrespective of citizenship. Nation states are, however, the providers of human rights (Benhabib, 2004), and there are no indications that this will change in the foreseeable future. Thus one cannot take for granted a cosmopolitan stance, as Weber and Pickering do. While sovereignty is undoubtedly the key to understanding current border policies, it is misleading to describe it as the core of the problem.

The tragedy in Lampedusa in October 2013, in which more than 350 refugees died, may serve as an example. In the aftermath Italian authorities held a day of mourning for the deceased. The Italians had previously attempted to ignore the presence of migrants entering their territory; according to numerous reports by PICUM (2018), their ships had ignored refugees in distress at sea (see also Follis, 2015; Heller and Pezzani, 2016). Following the day of mourning, they launched ‘Mare Nostrum’, an operation in which the coastguard came to the rescue of people in migrant boats. One year later, and after several tragedies at sea, this operation was discontinued. The EU replaced it with ‘Triton’, a smaller operation. This is evidence that humanitarian values matter, to some extent. Frontex, also refers to its activities as a ‘rescue operation’ (Franko and Gundhus, 2015).

Thus, I am not alone in pointing out dualities, ambiguousness and compromises. I have structured my presentation in the second part of the article on the taxonomy of Karl-Trummer et al. They summarize their findings as indicating a compromise between sovereignty and ‘higher values’ (human rights) (Karl-Trummer et al., 2009). Walters also allows for nuances, observing that different policy regimes can coexist on the borders (Johansen, 2013; Walters, 2010). In a similar vein Franko and Gundhus highlight the importance of humanitarianism (Fassin, 2011). Pointing out the development of new information systems, Franko and Gundhus (2015: 10) conclude thus:

The system has […] created advanced possibilities for creating better maps of the border, collecting a number of information [sic] about irregular border crossings, etc. […] While the technical possibilities for seeing and recording are considerable—and getting better—the will to do so seems to be weak at the institutional level.

Information is useful and accessible, but Frontex still leaves it to NGOs to collect numbers, the authors say. Contrary to their interpretation I frame border politics as a response to the predicament. Is it not also a plausible interpretation that they allow the NGOs to collect numbers, thus avoiding doing so themselves? This way they avoid acknowledging the presence of irregular migrants. Franko and Gundhus find that Frontex activities are made part of a discourse of humanitarianism. Unlike these authors, I wonder whether this humanitarianism reflects a sensibility that conflicts with the possible outcomes of recognition. It appears as a risk too high and a threat to sovereignty to be associated with responsibility. I have not researched border politics at the supranational level, but it seems possible also to frame this finding as an instance of structural compensation and an adaption to the predicament of the permeable state.