Abstract

Foreigners’ camps have existed in Europe for a long time. If, from the French waiting zones to the camps in the Greek islands, the regulations, the average duration of stay, the status of the detainees vary, the common characteristics are the violation of fundamerntal rights and physical as well as psychological violences. A camp is also a process : not only as a space for confinement and immobilization, but as a spatialized attempt to channel movements, manage routes and make mobility productive. All of which is not taken into account by the old Fortress Europe slogan, carrying along victimary and paternalistic schemes which negate migrants as subjects. The recent European plans for externalizing camps for asylum seekers outside Europe are a critical turning point: EU states dodge the responsabilities imposed on them by the international Treaties they signed , asylum and immigration policies are openly defined, in the European doxa, as tools for police control and migratory utilitarianism, of which the camps are an essential mechanism