Assimilation, Security, and Borders in the Member States

Résumé 0

The control of migrant flows was not a decisive function for European nation-states until the end of the nineteenth century. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European states began to document migrants’ individual identities and to implement frontier controls, activities complemented in international coordination of information and policing. Passports and other identification papers became standard tools of movement from the middle of the twentieth century, as did systems of registration by foreigners. The abolition of internal frontiers in the European Union made border control between EU and non-EU countries a sharper demarcation of state boundaries, overlaying serous tensions between Western and Eastern EU states. Historically, European modernity was characterized by outward migration and state border controls developed especially to control exit strategy and to limit the loss of population. In the contempor- ary period, the question of state borders has been made salient by mass migration and more recently by terrorist attacks. The mobilization of European-born citizens as Islamic extremists draws attention to the relative success of the US and Canada in assimilating new immigrants and their offspring. These developments are discussed in this chapter with reference to immigration integration and assimilation, and the migration and security challenge to European state borders.