Visas and Walls. Nazli Avdan

      Globalization, Security, and Border Control

       The Question

      Threats to state security are sometimes carried on the backs of individuals. And once they cross borders, these threats can wreak harm on destination countries. The Christmas market attack in Berlin in 2016 is a vivid example: a migrant to Germany carried out a terrorist assault against German citizens, on German soil. In December 2016, a Tunisian citizen, Anis Amri, drove a lorry into the Berlin Christmas market, killing twelve and wounding forty-eight (Eddy 2016). One of the deadliest incidents in German history, it brought the connection between migration and terrorism into sharp relief. The Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attack. Amri was linked to another militant, an Iraqi Salafist who had also made it into Germany. The Berlin attack highlighted the fact that migration could expose the country to infiltration by foreign militants. Amri had indeed crossed international borders several times, initially reaching Italy in 2012 and then Germany in 2015. Furthermore, he had gone through Germany’s asylum system, obtaining papers to remain in the country. Not surprisingly, critics of Germany’s welcoming refugee policies cast blame on Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had in the previous year opened the country’s borders to half a million migrants.

      A string of terrorist attacks in recent years has fueled the debate over terrorism and migration control. With each fatal attack on European soil, the migration-terrorism linkage has become more pronounced and states have been quicker to exhort policy stringency. Terrorist events have been publicized widely and the media has been quick to draw attention to target states’ demands for tighter control over borders. After the Brussels attacks in March 2016, the Eurasia Group released a report noting, “Combined, these attacks will increase xenophobic and anti-immigration sentiment across the E.U., which has already been rising in light of the E.U.’s ongoing refugee crisis” (Erlanger 2016). The attacks gave ammunition to right-wing leaders in Europe to demand draconian policies. For example, after ISIS coordinated attacks in Paris, France’s far right leader, Marie Le Pen, urged European states to abolish freedom of movement, a cherished pillar of the Schengen regime: “Without borders, neither protection nor security are possible” (Troinanovski and Walker 2015). After the March 22 attacks in Brussels, Mike Hookem, a member of the European Parliament from the UK Independence Party, declared that the “horrific act of terrorism shows that Schengen free movement and lax border controls are a threat to our security” (Erlanger 2016). The common thread in the responses to the attacks was that unmonitored flows of migrants are dangerous and that transnational terrorism warrants greater control over borders.

      Clearly, for some European leaders, the knee-jerk reaction to these attacks was to emphasize the dangers of migration—terrorists gain access to European states’ soil—and to then call for tighter border controls. The Christmas market attack vividly exemplifies the connection between transnational terrorism and border and migration policies. Border crossing was at stake in other attacks in Europe, and of course countries outside of Europe have suffered terrorist violence perpetrated by migrants. The Reina nightclub attack on January 1, 2017, in Istanbul, for example, was staged by an Uzbek national. One of the 2013 Boston marathon bombers was a Chechen, and the other was a naturalized American. Regardless of their immigrant status, the perpetrators had crossed borders and migrated to the United States. These events stirred latent fears over lax border control and the vulnerability of migration systems.

      Increasingly in U.S. politics, migration and border control have occupied the headlines. The campaign trail to the November 2016 presidential election was littered with polemic and controversy over the need for harder borders. The Trump administration spelled a restrictionist bent in migration policies. Since taking office, Trump has barred travelers from select Muslim-majority countries, limited the number of refugees from certain countries, increased immigration arrests and deportations, and proposed a controversial bill aiming to drastically reduce legal migration (Baker 2017). In 2017, Trump reiterated his campaign pledge to build a border wall and to have Mexico pay for it. Shortly after that, he proposed tougher measures for screening greencard applicants (Kopan 2017). Trump often justifies his demands for a com prehensive tightening of migration and stepped-up border control with references to the terrorism-migration nexus.

      We would thus conclude that the specter of terrorism will orient states toward harder borders. We might expect transnational terrorism to universally spur states to adopt tighter policies. Countries vary tremendously in how they control their borders. Some countries have walls; others are calling for walls. Some countries have open visa policies and others do not. What explains the variation in how states monitor their borders? This is the subject of my book. Do security concerns drive border closure? Speculation abounds on this question, but thus far scholars have not marshaled hard evidence to explain the complexities of this relationship. I argue that the answer to this question is not a straightforward yes. For one, not all terrorist events are fatal, and even when they are, they do not elicit the same reaction. For another, very rarely do countries enact wholesale border closure. Border closure is a misnomer because border control is multifaceted. Put succinctly, “immigration and border policy is much more nuanced than terms such as ‘open’ or ‘closed’ can capture” (Rudolph 2006, 27). Also, globalization further complicates the situation. On the one hand, countries need open borders for trade and free flow of workers. On the other hand, open borders have been heavily criticized for leaving countries open to terrorism.

      Fortunately, states have multiple tools at their disposal with which to control borders. How politicians manipulate these various border controls is a careful balancing act between the state’s economy and security. Two of these tools are border walls and visa policies.¹ What both instruments share in common is that they allow states to monitor migration upstream—that is, before individuals have crossed borders. In contrast, naturalization and citizenship policies control migration downstream—after individuals have crossed borders (Meyers 2000). Naturalization and citizenship policies deal with longer-term migration while visas and barriers regulate short-term migration. The scholarship on policies for short-term migration is rather thin (Mau et al. 2015). This scarcity of research is all the more glaring when we consider the connections between short-term and long-term migration policies (Koslowski 2009). Visa controls significantly influence longer-term migration patterns, including asylum applications and settlement practices (Czaika and Hobolth 2016).

      Visa policies and border barriers differ on one significant component: visibility. Visa policies are formulated behind the veil of bureaucracy and are not directly observable by the public. A country’s citizens are often unaware of which states their own government grants visa waivers to. In contrast, border barriers are readily observable by the public and are high profile. They afford symbolic value, independent of their objective effectiveness in forestalling illegal entry.² Andreas (2009) contends that high-profile enforcement initiatives are a form of security theater whereby governments demonstrate control without needing to prove the effectiveness of policies. Installing fences are about the spectacle of state authority through which governments signal that the state can defend its borders. Insofar as border instruments perform different functions, we cannot anticipate that states will stiffen policies across the board. Given these differences, the balance between economic and security incentives will depend on the functions that border instruments serve.

      The trade-off between security and economic gain has come to light time and again after fatal transnational terrorist events. Politicians face mounting pressure to seal borders after attacks. After the Brussels attacks, for example, criticism turned to the Schengen system, which allows individuals to cross borders within the Schengen bloc of twenty-six countries without passport checks or immigration controls. Some commentators wondered if it should be scrapped and replaced with a tougher system. Despite pressure to seal off borders, politicians must also bear in mind economic security. Responding to calls to reinstate border checks within the Schengen zone, Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Group’s president, stressed the possible ill effects of such a move: “There’s going to be a lot of social instability that comes with that. It will tear at the fabric of what we think