Preface to the English Edition

As a global phenomenon, migration has considerably accelerated in recent decades. According to the International Organization for Migration, over the past half century the number of people living in a country different from the one where they were born has tripled, reaching 281 million, which corresponds to 3.6 percent of the world's population - 12 percent in Europe and 16 percent in North America. Reasons for migrating are multiple, depending a lot on the economic and political situation of the country of departure and on the social and financial resources of the persons concerned. A particular configuration is that of the so-called forcibly displaced, namely, in the language of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, people who have left their home as "a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations and events seriously disturbing public order." They were 117 million in 2023, with 68 million being internally displaced in their own country and 49 million having moved to another one as refugees, including 6 million Palestinians, asylum seekers waiting for a decision regarding their status, or persons in need of international protection. It is an almost fivefold increase since 2000, when there were 21 million "persons of concern" to the international organization. This increase is attributed largely to the deterioration of peace and security in many places. Indeed, the number of "conflict-related fatalities" appears to be statistically related to the number of forcibly displaced persons: according to the same source, between 2009 and 2023, both have been multiplied by five. But Western countries have only a small share of those who have fled beyond their borders, since 69 percent live in neighboring countries, mostly in Asia and Africa, and 75 percent are present in low- and middle-income countries. For instance, Chad hosted 600,000 Sudanese in 2023, twice as many as all migrants and refugees who reached Europe during that same year, and, in 2015, Lebanon received 1 million Syrians who had left their country as a result of the civil war, twice as many as the whole of Europe, which in proportion of their respective populations represented a rate 250 times higher.

In this context of objective increased mobility worldwide, especially in the form of forced displacement, and of subjective apprehension of a migrant and refugee crisis, contradicted by the fact that, at its height in the middle of the 2010s, the arrivals corresponded only to approximately 2 per 1,000 inhabitants of Europe, the political configuration of the continent rapidly changed. The media played an important role in the representation of the situation, caricaturing it through disquieting statistics and unsettling images. The specter of an invasion was raised, the thesis of the clash of civilizations resonated with growing anxieties, and the conspiracy theory of the great replacement became widely spread. The far right found in the new state of affairs a justification for the hostile discourse against immigration that it had promoted for decades, particularly in France and Italy, but also in Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and a good part of the former Eastern bloc, while new parties emerged with xenophobia more or less disguised under the defense of national identity as their main doctrine, notably in Germany, Britain, Spain, and even Scandinavia. The conservatives often embraced these themes and, when they were in power, voted in restrictive and repressive laws. The left, which had been marginalized on most of the continent, rarely manifested a strong opposition to this deleterious trend and even sometimes endorsed it. However, such an evolution was all the more remarkable since opinion polls across Europe showed that immigration was not a major concern compared with the cost of living, environmental issues, and international instability, among others: it was actually ranked sixth among people's preoccupations according to the 2022 Eurobarometer. The subject was in fact instrumentalized by politicians. Thus, in difficulty after a series of unpopular reforms on the labor code, social benefits, and pensions, the French president tried to provoke a diversion by launching a one-year debate on immigration with the objective of toughening the legislation. He let the right prepare the text, which was praised by the far right and voted in by his own party, the law being then partially repealed by the Constitutional Council.

But it is the European Union that became the major player on the topic. Dominated by the right and center right, it adopted policies sometimes dictated by hardliners led by the Lega Nord, the German CSU, the Austrian FPÖ, and the Visegrád Group, composed of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, four countries which have the lowest rates of asylum seekers in Europe, thus demonstrating the discrepancy between the reality of the situation and its construction as a problem. At the end of the twentieth century, the European Union had already confused in its approach to the topic two questions that were supposed to rely on completely distinct logics and therefore be treated separately: asylum, which protects refugees under international law, and immigration, which is left to the initiative of sovereign states. From 2015 on, it deployed an array of measures not only to prevent irregular immigration but also to restrain the rights of those who tried to reach its shores. The border control agency Frontex, whose director was discharged for organizing pushbacks and was later elected to the European Parliament for the Rassemblement National, had its budget multiplied fivefold in seven years. Reception centers sometimes designated as hotspots were created at the gates of Europe, serving in fact as detention camps where people were crowding in and violence became endemic. Paradoxically, while the Schengen Convention had created an area comprising twenty-nine countries which had abolished border control, the latter was reestablished and sometimes even extended to a larger territory - but only for people deemed non-European on the basis of racial profiling. However, the most significant innovation was the externalization of immigration policies, with a series of agreements signed with Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon, to prevent by any means people from crossing the Mediterranean, and with sub-Saharan countries, notably Niger, to enact restrictive laws and organize harsh repression against smugglers and migrants. This process has rendered journeys much more perilous and caused the deaths of tens of thousands of men, women, and children in the Sahara and the Mediterranean.

Such is the historical and political background of the research we conducted during five years in the Alps, at the border between Italy and France, which had become in the late 2010s one of the two main entrance sites for people coming from the East, through the Balkan route, and from the South, via the Sahara and the Mediterranean.

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Why did we choose this region, called the Briançonnais on the French side and the Val di Susa on the Italian one, with the Échelle and Montgenèvre passes in between? The first reason is that it has been, at least for the past two thousand years, a strategic crossing point for warriors, invaders, vandals, troops, deserters, refugees, hawkers, peasants, masons, industrial workers, and, more recently, tourists. Over the centuries, passage has been alternately free or prevented. Migrants were sometimes needed, sometimes rejected. The border was actually an invention of the eighteenth century, as were passports to control the mobility of people. In other words, facts that tend to be taken for granted were the result of human interventions whose direction changed with time. The second - and more important - reason for choosing this territory is that we found out that significant events had occurred in recent years. Local mobilization had started to denounce the antiimmigrant policies of the state and prevent the accidents people were exposed to in the mountains. A spectacular and ephemeral alt-right operation had been organized to block one of the passes and call public attention to irregular crossings, with, in response, an important demonstration by citizens of the region to reclaim the border and condemn xenophobia. Subsequently, the government had sent police reinforcements and announced the militarization of the zone.

There were of course other actors - those who were attempting to enter French territory and who remained at a distance from the sound and the fury of these confrontations, as they wanted to be as little visible as possible. We call them "exiles," a term increasingly used by those who work with them or study their experience, as it avoids making the decision as to whether they are "migrants," as officials name them to ignore their request for protection, "refugees," as nongovernmental organizations tend to call them, although this is not their status, or "asylum seekers," as many of them would want to be recognized, although they are not even permitted to file an application. In sum, a scene was taking place with three main protagonists: exiles; activists who strive to rescue them, host them, and claim their rights; and law enforcement agents who endeavor to prevent the former from crossing and the latter from assisting them.

The literature on borders and migration is immense and global. Legal scholars, political scientists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and, quite often, geographers have studied on the six continents the...