While the EU is lowering the drawbridge for a few professional migrant workers, European governments have united in their fight against illegal immigration. Borders are systematically being fortified, refugees criminalized, and vast amounts of money invested in new technologies of control, surveillance, and fraud-resistant immigration procedures. But despite these efforts, the flow of "sans papiers" into the EU has increased significantly in recent years. This gap between policy goals and actual outcomes raises questions about the mobilization strategies of irregular migrants in a context that is increasingly hostile to their needs. What are the possibilities and limitations of self-organization, protest, and lobbying both for those people who do not possess a valid residence permit and the pro-migrant organizations in Fortress Europe that work on their behalf? What are the impacts and (unintended) consequences of these activities? And to what extent does the EU influence the organization of weak interests? These are the main queries Helen Schwenken, from the University of Kassel, sought to answer in her PhD research work.

The book is a refreshing contribution to the burgeoning literature on EU migration policy and on social movements in general, both of which tend to narrow their perspective to the well-established actors and elite circles of Brussels. Schwenken, in contrast, is interested in the mobilization of undocumented migrants, the advocacy work of allied networks, and the struggles at the Union’s borders. Not only, she argues, is this focus necessary to make central actors and conflicts in the field of migration policy visible, but it also sheds some light on bottom-up processes of agenda setting. Furthermore, while only a few studies on the EU and migration address the issue of gender, Schwenken is particularly concerned with the activities of female migrants, gender-specific political demands, and the windows of opportunity for linking feminist and pro-migrant standpoints in EU politics. Her ability to skillfully interweave these investigations in the book owes a great deal to the fact that the author is herself active in feminist and anti-racist networks and is an experienced researcher in gender, migration, and social movement studies.

The argument is developed in three steps. First, Schwenken outlines her theoretical and methodological approach. While basically bringing together the holy trinity of social movements research – political opportunity structures, resource mobilization, and the framing approach – she enriches these with a wide array of concepts ranging from Pierre Bourdieu’s social capital, through Foucault’s notion of power and resistance, to Bob Jessop’s strategic selectivity of the state. In the second part of the book, the development, trends, and instruments of Europe’s migration regime and its central actors are sketched in order to outline the context for pro-migrant campaigns. And finally, the author examines how people with precarious legal status and pro-migrant associations organize and represent themselves in this context. Here, she focuses on two case studies: the campaign of the European migrant network RESPECT to enhance the rights of domestic workers and the mobilization of refugees in the Red Cross Centre Sangatte, located next to the Euro-tunnel on the French coast of the English Channel.

Several of Schwenken’s findings are worth highlighting. First, she shows that political opportunity structures for pro-migrant campaigns in the EU vary across issue areas. On the one hand, windows of opportunity shrink due to the fusion of migration, crime, and security policies. On the other hand, the EU ’s anti-discrimination programs and the »velvet triangle« (p. 116) of »femocrats«, gender scholars, and women’s movement activists not only provide financial and legal resources for female migrants, but also constitute a more favorable environment for raising problems related to irregular migration than the notion of Fortress Europe suggests. In other words, linking the claim for enhanced rights for undocumented migrants with gender-specific arguments opens up opportunity structures since EU institutions are more progressive on the rights of women than they are on the rights of migrants. The RESPECT campaign consciously made use of this strategic selectivity by raising problems of undocumented migrants via the gender-specific frame of women’s rights.

This already hints at a second finding: the "sans-papiers" do make use of discursive and situational possibilities to produce collective identities, as well as coordinating everyday practices of resistance and conducting broad political mobilizations to challenge formerly unquestioned living conditions. But this does not necessarily result in an improvement of these conditions for all migrants. For example, while the »autonomy of migration« frame (p. 181), which states the right to migrate, benefited those refugees in Sangatte who were finally taken in by Britain or France, their offensive actions – such as publicly-staged collective intrusions into the Euro-tunnel – closed opportunity structures for those who arrived after the subsequent closure of the center. In any case, studies show that unwanted migrants and refugees cannot reap the benefits of some putative spillover effect of the EU ’s freedom of movement norm, as has been argued by a number of European integration scholars.

Finally, Schwenken’s case studies offer insights into the underlying, more general conundrum of the study – the organization and representation of weak interests. While accepting, to some extent, Piven and Cloward’s classical insight about revolt and the explosion of unrest as the most effective weapons for marginalized actors, Schwenken is adamant that the mobilization of weak interests does not follow any universal logic. Whether speaking of the availability of resources, the existence of influential advocacy networks, or the conscious choice of highly resonant frames, by themselves these phenomena cannot adequately explain the rationale of collective action of irregular migrants. On the contrary, these factors have to be linked with the case-specific, socio-political enabling and hampering structures, as well as the concrete spatial-physical »terrains of resistance« (p. 308) that actors are located in.

So much for the main upshot of the book. However, what makes it such enthralling and indeed inspiring reading is the manner in which Schwenken engages in a range of debates without losing her thread. Here is an author who knows her field! Consider, for example, the discussion about the changing role of national borders in globalization processes. Are borders losing their relevance and if so, does this improve migrants’ rights? Schwenken counters such an argument by identifying a restructuring and differentiation of border regimes. She distinguishes between the Union’s external frontiers, »invisible« frontiers at potential points of entry for asylum seekers such as airports, boundaries between Schengen and non-Schengen members, and lastly, »borders before the border« (p. 105), that is, national restrictions to the freedom of movement and controls which lead to an »exclusion in the internal« (ibid.). In brief, national borders are »elastic borders« (p. 101) that extend and contract according to people’s residence status.

Furthermore, closely related to such interpretations is the author’s intriguing intervention in the discussion about the autonomy of migration. The central idea of the frame is to regard migration as an uncontrollable and legitimate form of social resistance out of which the demand for open borders, freedom of movement, and the legalization of undocumented migrants is derived. Again, Schwenken takes a more nuanced position. According to her, the effects of migration policies on crossborder movements, the importance of supportive social networks, and the need for sufficient financial resources to leave one’s country show that the alleged autonomous migrants are not as autonomous as they seem. Alternatively, Schwenken proposes the terms »relative autonomy« or »obstinacy of migration« (p. 229).

Last but not least, she devotes a long section to one of the »red rags« in the field of migration – the role of unions. This role is rather context-dependent, with some more progressive union members opening up to migrants’ demands and others remaining stuck in manifest racism and unresolved internal conflicts concerning positions on precarious, informal work. But Schwenken points to one potential gender-specific window of opportunity for gaining union support: unlike undocumented workers in sectors such as construction, domestics are not looked upon as a threat to the general union membership. This leaves some scope for cooperation – a potential entry point for pro-migrant organizations that is definitely worth evaluating.

In spite of all this praise – the book has its weaknesses, albeit minor ones. Due to its denseness, the first chapters make for particularly tough reading, with farranging conceptual debates squeezed into only a few lines. For example, the reader is informed in one sentence that the concept of »the political« is widened according to the feminist critique of the private-public divide (p. 60). Equally brief, three sentences clarify Schwenken’s under-standing of gender as »social construction and structural category« (p. 36) linked to other lines of oppression such as class or ethnicity. The reader is left wishing that the author had spent more time discussing the implications of these definitions for her study.

What is more, neither the broadening of the category of the political nor the intersectionality of gender, ethnicity, and class are adequately held together in the course of the study. While the author claims to be sensitive to structural inequalities among migrant women and does indeed take into account ethnic rivalries in the Sangatte case, she loses sight of these lines of conflict in her study of the RESPECT network and does, overall, neglect class cleavages. Furthermore, she explicitly considers overseas domestic workers’ »private« strategies to deal with dequalification and sexual harassment and design self-confident subject positions as »political«. However, in the end, her main focus is on »public« campaigns, demonstrations, and lobbying activities. Doesn’t that testify to a rather »malestream« notion of political mobilization?

Nonetheless, the book’s theoretical and empirical reach, its clarity and flowing style make it a first-rate piece of scholarship. It is a substantial contribution to migration and social movement studies, as well as a long-lasting attempt to grasp the interrelatedness of structure and agency in the social sciences. Hence, it should be of interest to scholars and – despite being tough reading – pro-migrant and social movement activists.

Pia Eberhardt,
Universität Kassel