The 27 nations of the European Union spend over half of their “migration management” funds for border enforcement, giving rise to the “Fortress Europe” moniker that civil, human, labor, religious, and immigrant organizations use in daily, derisive language about the collective mentality driving migration policy.
“The entire policy is designed to keep Europe white,” holds one outspoken German church leader. “It allows the EU countries to blame the EU and the EU to blame its members” for the harshness of the sweeping, criminalizing crackdowns on migrants carried out by Frontex, the Warsaw-based “specialized and independent body tasked to coordinate the operational cooperation between Member States in the field of border security.”
“Frontex—it sounds like some kind of chemical,” the same church leader stated. And as if Frontex alone were not sufficient, each member nation maintains security of its own borders, while local law enforcement watches over the neighborhood. Security on top of security. Fortress Europe. Keep Europe white.
All this has a familiar ring, of course. In plain-speak U.S. English, Frontex sounds like ICE on steroids.
Listen long enough to Europeans engaged with im/migrant communities across the EU and you realize you just had the same conversation in Fortress America. Look at the composition of the EU Parliament and the outcome of its recent elections and you realize that the anti-immigrant House Immigration Reform Caucus (HIRC) has a big, burly, bully brother across the Atlantic. Hear how European im/migrants are criminalized, arrested, beaten, discriminated against, and sometimes left to die and you realize that you just read a similar story about Arizona and Arpaio. One can only begin to imagine the intricate links, cross-trainings, policy and regulatory initiatives, and even harsher enforcement methods being cooperatively developed and/or carried out by the two northern Fortresses, to say nothing of the links between their white nationalists that give rise to those enforcement policies and “protections” in the 27 + 1.
The growing, forced migration of peoples is a global phenomenon that may be temporarily slowed by economic crisis, lost opportunity, or Fortress strategies and enforcement, but it will not stop. The people will keep coming. The Fortresses need their low-wage labor, just not “too many” of “them” to threaten “western culture,” as the white nationalists say. But the people will keep coming. They will definitely keep coming.
There are innumerable stories in history, myth, and legend of walls and fortresses thought by principalities and powers to be impenetrable, only to be broken open and torn down by the indomitable spirit of peoples seeking freedom, life, survival itself. So it will be with Fortress Europe and Fortress America. No Frontex, ICE, or white nationalist organization can or will keep them out. It is futile and foolish to think otherwise. The walls will indeed come tumbling down…