EURODAC and the Politics of Enmity. On the Embodied Identity of Migration and the Biometrics of the Border
EURODAC, the EU-wide database in which the fingerprints of asylum seekers and irregular migrants are stored in order to avoid multiple asylum applications in different EU countries ("asylum shopping"), is a dubious milestone in the technologised recording of migration in Europe. For, according to Vassilis Tsianos, the procedure establishes a biometric migration management that makes the volatility of the cross-border migrant body legible and thus has the effect that those concerned carry the border crossing with them at all times in the form of their registered fingerprints and are placed in a state of permanent deportability. This digital deportability is the result of a control-political liquefaction of the European border, along which the migrants and refugees are not fixed themselves, but the "embodied identity of migration" as the sum of their "data doubles". EURODAC is not only a technological control regime, but also places all those affected under general suspicion in the sense of a policy of hostility, to which they are defencelessly exposed through ubiquitous biometric allocation.
This lecture was held in German
With Vassilis Tsianos, Professor für Soziologische Grundlagen der Kindheitspädagogik, Fachbereich Soziale Arbeit und Gesundheit der Fachhochschule Kiel
Discussant: Stephan Scheel, Juniorprofessor Transnationale Kooperations- und Migrationsforschung, Institut für Soziologie, Universität Duisburg-Essen
Moderator: Volker Heins, Professor für Politikwissenschaft mit Schwerpunkt auf Politischer Theorie und Migrationsstudien, Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Universität Duisburg-Essen
