Welfare Surveillance as Mobility Control in the European Union

After the last EU enlargement, state borders have been partially replaced by internal border controls of state bureaucracies to control the influx of westward migration. Existing ideas of threat associated with noneuropean migrants were accompanied by a new threat referring to criminal ’insiders’ who might profit from the freedom of mobility within the EU. Accordingly, social security and immigration policies are increasingly intertwined with surveillance practices of member states, blurring the line between welfare and crime control measures. As such, new geopolitical measures and local risk management strategies are introduced for tracing and screening mobile groups. These monitoring practices, such as spidergrams, are taking new forms in technocratic bureaucracies, changing the forms of interaction between newcomers and administrative bodies in host societies. In order to understand how these welfare service based financial monitoring structures facilitate spatial population control, we need to understand how governing bodies are able to invent incentives that try to make undesired groups voluntarily leave their executive territory. Based on empirical case studies, this paper will analyse these asymmetries of surveillance within the virtual walls of Fortress Europe, and uncover counteractions of targeted populations as well as how these reshape existing profiling strategies.