Research coloniality, policed solidarity and (un)expected encounters at the border

The border regime is a racialised institution, structured according to hierarchies and rules that bear the marks of colonialism and of the multiple forms of coloniality that have survived the formal end of imperial rule. The control of mobility (intended both as the prohibition to move and the forcible displacement of colonised populations) was a pillar of colonialism (Mayblin and Turner Reference Mayblin and Turner2020). The migration policy and documentation practices of newly independent countries often showed continuities with the mobility restrictions introduced by colonial powers (Minfegue Reference Minfegue2022; Natter Reference Natterforthcoming). Indeed, undocumented migrant and asylum-seeking people crossing to Europe are, in most cases, citizens of former European colonies (Genova Reference Genova2016), whose subordination to European hegemony was first established through colonial domination, then maintained through the establishment of extractive modes of capitalist production and exchange, as well as through the imposition of unequal barriers to movement (see El-Enany Reference El-Enany2020; De Noronha Reference De Noronha2020). Indeed, extractivist relations of power linking the West to its former colonies did not disappear after the end of imperialism – they survived through what Maldonado-Torres calls ‘coloniality’, or the ‘long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations’ (Maldonado-Torres Reference Maldonado-Torres2007, 243). Both in the colony and in the post-colony, whiteness works as an organising principle: relations of production, social norms and cultural production are geared towards ensuring whites alone enjoy ‘the privilege of the rights to possession and free movement across the whole of the planet’ (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2019, 103). The border thus becomes the white institution par excellence, insofar as it maintains a large proportion of the global non-white population in a state of physical or psychological captivity, all the while being almost oblivious to the white bodies that cross it (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2007; Gazzotti Reference Gazzotti2021b).

Migration studies is imbued with the same coloniality that characterises its object of research. The discipline has indeed been informed by a presentist approach, and has only recently started reckoning with the central place (neo)colonialism plays in shaping contemporary migratory dynamics (Mayblin and Turner Reference Mayblin and Turner2020). Coloniality structures the material and ontological conditions that allow white, Global North researchers to conduct research about migrant communities (both in the North and in the South). Resorting to the typology built by Maldonado-Torres, we could break this down into the possibility of travel to research sites with no or few restrictions on movement, while having access to the financial resources that allow such movement to happen in the first place (‘coloniality of power’); belonging to centres of knowledge production that orient migration research in certain ways (Sukarieh and Tannock Reference Sukarieh and Tannock2019) (‘coloniality of knowledge’); feeling the legitimacy (if not the entitlement) to conduct research on certain topics and communities (‘coloniality of being’) (see Maldonado-Torres Reference Maldonado-Torres2007, 242). Indeed, the white researcher is not a stranger: the border is a place where ‘some bodies are already recognised as stranger and more dangerous than other bodies’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2000, 4) through techniques which ‘involve ways of reading the bodies of others we come to face’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2000, 3). Such profiling heavily leans on recognising markers of un/desirability determined by histories of past encounters – including colonial encounters. The white researcher is there because others have been there before them. Especially when conducting fieldwork in former colonies, the white researcher steps on a trail first traced by European social scientists whose work was meant to support the expansion of the colonial enterprise (Rachik Reference Rachik2012). As Ahmed writes, white bodies automatically assume certain orientations, because some options are felt as ‘within reach’ due to ‘histories of colonialism, which makes the world ‘white’, a world that is inherited, or which is already given before the point of an individual's arrival’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2007, 153–54). Operating from a position of privilege derived from intersecting colonial orders, the white researcher thus cannot but embody the empire, its aftermath (Picozza Reference Picozza2021) and the implicit benefits that follow whiteness (see Harris Reference Harris1993). This is true even if the researcher does not agree with old and new imperial practices, even if they try to distance themselves from and fight against them (Tyszler Reference Tyszler2019; Moreno Nieto Reference Moreno Nieto, Mouna, Therrien and Bouasria2017). Still, this does not mean that relations of solidarity between researchers and members of migrant communities do not emerge. Much to the contrary, experiences of long-standing connection and support have been born out of research encounters. These include the personal implication of researchers in research informants’ lives (Tyszler Reference Tyszler2019; Floristán Millán Reference Floristán Millán2022), the emergence of new forms of social work inspired by research experience (Jiménez Álvarez Reference Jiménez Álvarez2011; Vacchiano Reference Vacchiano2007), the creation of professional partnerships (Bachelet and Jeffery Reference Bachelet and Jeffery2019) and the confluence of researchers into activist networks that aim to advance migrants’ rights (Intrand and Perrouty Reference Intrand and Perrouty2005; Garelli and Tazzioli Reference Garelli and Tazzioli2013). Indeed, such critical encounters can be part of broader solidarity movements that attempt to move beyond state policies and build towards the otherwise. These research encounters, though, have to be comprehended with the awareness that solidarity (including when expressed through participatory research practices (El Qadim et al. Reference El Qadim, de Vries, Hansen, Karadağ, Lisle and Simonneau2020)) is not, in itself, a panacea against the elusive and pervasive grip of coloniality: as Picozza writes, referring to refugee solidarity movements in Germany, ‘even those instances of solidarity that contest the border regime tend to unwittingly share its colonial premises’ (Picozza Reference Picozza2021, xxiii).

The white researcher thus approaches the border from a position of accumulated privilege. Yet only some forms of performed whiteness remain welcome at the border. This is because liberal democracy is not only compatible with, but actively premised on, the exclusion of some from the realm of rights: enslavement and confinement become fundamental to making an élite standard of living possible, to normalise those rights as the baseline of ‘civility’ and to protect them from the claim of equal enjoyment by the undeserving (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2019, 19). Challenging (or being perceived as challenging) captivity as a societal organising principle can therefore be perceived as a challenge to democracy itself: it marks a boundary between loyal and ‘disloyal citizens’ (Carrera Reference Carrera, Mitsilegas, Allsopp and Vosyliute2019, 178) and attracts the state-securitised gaze to the latter. It is at this point that the researcher, suddenly perceived as a disloyal citizen, emerges as a figure that needs to be contained, and the environment turns from harmonious to hostile. In their study of policed humanitarianism in the wake of the European ‘migration crisis’, Carrera et al. identify three policing techniques deployed to contain individuals and civil-society organisations supporting migrant people: ‘intimidation and suspicion’, ‘discipline’ and ‘formal criminalisation’. Humanitarians might be subjected to formal and informal intimidation, or become the object of suspicious narratives depicting them as deviant and invested in criminal acts. The state might also try to regain or maintain control over humanitarian activities by subjecting organisations to seemingly neutral demands, such as increased financial accountability, funding transparency or formal authorisation for activities which were previously not under the scope of state attention. Such control dynamics can escalate to ‘formal criminalisation’, whereby the state formally accuses humanitarians of criminal conduct, thus resorting to the legal system to slow down and interrupt the delivery of humanitarian support (Carrera Reference Carrera, Mitsilegas, Allsopp and Vosyliute2019, 174–75).

Fieldwork accounts are punctuated by experiences of state and civil surveillance, on both sides of the post-colonial border (Gazzotti Reference Gazzotti2021a; Hagan Reference Hagan2018). The increasing criminalisation of humanitarian groups supporting people arriving on Europe's shores after 2015 influenced researchers’ choices about whether to provide information or material assistance to people on the move, for fear that the smallest of actions could be framed by state security as criminal behaviour (Allsopp Reference Allsopp2018). Even when it does not amount to formal policing, a general climate of suspicion and more personal experiences of intimidation push researchers to self-discipline, reducing the range of solidarity actions they feel safe taking. Your phone makes weird noises, as if it was tapped, but maybe it is just a question of bad phone reception. Someone who looks like a plainclothes policeman keeps stationing in front of your house, but maybe you are just paranoid. Psychologically, the feeling of constantly having to deal with the watchful gaze of a state that you cannot really pinpoint (it might be watching you, it might not), coupled with the solitary character of academic research (Gallien Reference Gallien, Ginty, Brett and Vogel2021), can lead researchers to develop feelings of paranoia (Tyszler Reference Tyszler2019). Migration research in a post-colonial border therefore unfolds in a racialised setting, where the researcher operates at the convergence of multiple streams of privilege and inequality, where the boundaries between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ people are policed in an in/formal way by the ever-growing security apparatus.

Race and the making of the Spanish–Moroccan border

At the Spanish–Moroccan border, old and new racial formations conflate to structure exclusion, and channel containment onto bodies visualised as ‘non-white’. In Morocco, Blackness has long been conflated with inferiority and out-of-placeness. As Gross-Wyrtzen argues, such association is already present in early Islamic thought, but consolidated with the expansion of the Arabic empire (Gross-Wyrtzen Reference Gross-Wyrtzen2022). The development of the trans-Saharan trade, which was responsible for the provision of enslaved people from the Bilad al-Sudan to the Mediterranean region, and its later intertwining with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, firmly established race ‘as a marker of otherness that justified enslavement’ (Errazzouki Reference Errazzouki2021, 4). Morocco played a chief role in such a process: the country, in fact, was a departure point for ships bringing slaves to the Americas, and also exported goods produced through a domestic plantation economy fuelled by enslaved labour (Errazzouki Reference Errazzouki2021). The pillars of Morocco's positioning on the global colour line had emerged, and kept on being re-asserted over the following centuries through policies of mandatory conscription that considered dark-skinned people re-enslavable (El Hamel Reference El Hamel2012), and land distribution arrangements that disenfranchised enslaved people (Gross-Wyrtzen Reference Gross-Wyrtzen2022; see Becker Reference Becker2002). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the build-up to, and then the formal establishment of, colonial rule cemented the conflation of whiteness with ‘superiority, power, and beauty’ (Hannoum Reference Hannoum2019, 16), thus unquestionably sanctioning light skin as a marker of desirability. The stratification of Moroccan society along racial hierarchies was further accompanied by a process of divide et impera adopted by the French colonisers to ‘pacify’ dissident areas and bring them under central state rule. Such strategies relied on the purposeful essentialisation of the distinction between Arabs and Berbers (Wyrtzen Reference Wyrtzen2016; see Aït Mous Reference Aït Mous2011).

Despite sitting at two separate and distant edges of the Spanish–Moroccan border, Melilla and the Canary Islands are central to the processes of race- and subjectivity-making that structure the externalised frontier. Since the city was occupied by Spain in 1497, Melilla has banked on its function first as a Spanish garrison and, since 1863, on its status as a free port on the Western Mediterranean coast. The political economy of the city thus revolved around maritime and overland trade, the management of tributes required to people who wanted to trade and the regulation of mobility in and out of the exclave (Pack Reference Pack2019). Even though exchange with the Berber tribes living in the Riffian hinterland was necessary to the very survival of the enclave, the foundational narrative underpinning Melilla's identity as Spanish, white and Christian revolves around its conflictual relation with the dark, violent, Muslim ‘Moors’ threatening to assault the city's fortress (Suárez-Navaz and Suárez Reference Suárez-Navaz and Suárez2022). Such racist stereotyping had a particular recrudescence with the Riffian War of 1921–1926, when the military defeat inflicted on Spain by the Riffian army at Annual transformed Abd El-Krim Al-Khattabi, the leader of the Riffian Republic, into the symbol of the ‘rebel Moor’ in the Spanish imagination (Dieste Reference Dieste2017). After Melilla became a free port in 1863, its civilian population started to grow. As migrants from the neighbouring Riffian villages and from Southern Spain settled in the city, Melilla counted 52,000 people in 1925, and almost 96,000 in 1949. The end of the Protectorate determined a loss of Melilla's economic relevance in the region, and led to a decline in its overall population to less than 58,000 people in 1981. The demographic variations in the enclave have left the overall power segmentation unaltered: at the top, Spanish military officers and civil servants; at the bottom, Riffian workers (Soto Bermant Reference Soto Bermant2012).

Like Melilla, the Canary Islands have also played a historical role as a colonial, trade and (forced) migratory juncture at the intersection between Europe, Africa and the Americas. The archipelago was occupied by Spain in the fifteenth century, in conflict with and then subjugation of the Guanche, the local indigenous population, allegedly of Berber origin. Over the following centuries, the Canary Islands consolidated as a lynchpin for Spain's colonisation of the Americas. The archipelago was the last stopover for European fleets needing to load reserves and a cheap workforce before heading to the other side of the Atlantic. This in-between function turned the islands into a laboratory for export-oriented, plantation-based farming (Parsons Reference Parsons1983). This model of plantation economy – which would then be replicated across the Atlantic – was based on the exploitation of a cheap workforce, mostly indigenous or West African enslaved people. The high poverty rates affecting the inhabitants also turned the Canary Islands into an emigration hub, especially to Spanish colonies – such as the Caribbean, Latin America and, in the twentieth century, Western Sahara (Andreu Mediero Reference Andreu Mediero2017) and the Spanish colonies in West Africa (Fundacion Mapfre Guanarteme 2008).

The externalisation project reworked the colour line along the Spanish–Moroccan border by leaning on older forms of racism to produce new forms of exclusion. Dark-skinned migrants in Morocco are often harangued by slurs evoking slavery and inferiority. Phenotypical Blackness is also taken by border bureaucrats as a marker of illegality that makes darker-skinned migrant people vulnerable to arbitrary arrest and displacement (regardless of their actual administrative situation) (Hannoum Reference Hannoum2009). To the contrary, white Europeans and North Americans can afford to be oblivious of the border, often living in situations nearing administrative illegality, because their light skin acts as a marker of desirability, of being above suspicion, thus keeping them free of the fear of encounters with the authority (Gazzotti Reference Gazzotti2021b). In the externalised border, the body becomes a travel document: (not) belonging and (il)legality are determined based on the visual markers one displays, before or as a substitute for one's papers being verified. In Melilla, the solidification of the border following Spain's signature of the Schengen Agreement in 1985 directly supported the replication of what Soto Bermant calls an ‘ethnocracy’: power in the city is concentrated in the hands of a Christian, white élite that has historically relied on border control and citizenship rules to confine Muslim citizens of Berber or Arab descent to the underclass. Even though active resistance by the Muslim community resulted in the achievement of legal rights for thousands of long-term residents in the late 1980s, racial politics remains a tangible reality regulating relations of domination in Melilla (Soto Bermant Reference Soto Bermant2012, 86). Both in Melilla and in the Canary Islands, reception centres have emerged to host a population of non-white, unwanted irregular migrants. Located at the geographical edges of cities, reception centres confine and distance the unwanted from the rest of society. The racial hierarchies of the border are reflected in the reception centre, where a population of non-white ‘residents’ live under the authority of white workers (supported by non-white mediators that do not occupy the hierarchy of the organisation) (Sahraoui Reference Sahraoui2020).

Rabat – Tentative coexistence

Rabat, summer 2017. ‘Whenever I speak to you, I feel like your recorder is always on.’ The aid worker stopped talking, chasing food on the small plate they had previously filled from the buffet and avoiding making eye contact with me. The atmosphere suddenly grew tense, the flow of small talk froze. We were at a house party, hosted by a common acquaintance. I could hear the people around us continue talking, a sudden sense of incipient awkwardness filling the space between us. The person I was talking to was someone I had interviewed for my research. She first met me as a researcher, but I had bumped into her many times afterwards, as happened with other interviewees as well. That night, our relationship was polite, we had acknowledged each other's presence and engaged in small talk. Then a wall came up: ‘Whenever I talk to you, I always feel like your recorder is on.’ The tone she used made it sound like: ‘I don't trust that your recorder is off.’

The setting where I had bumped into the aid worker was not a research setting, and I had not gone there for research purposes. We were at a house party in central Rabat, hosted by another aid worker and attended mostly by Europeans and Moroccans who worked in the aid industry. I had arrived there, as I had arrived at all the other places where I had bumped into aid workers before: invited by a friend, spotting an event shared by an acquaintance on Facebook, seeing an ad on the door of a café on my way home. Whether I had gone to places for research purposes or simply for leisure did not really matter. Nothing in our encounter was due to chance: I had arrived at that house party, at that cinema, at that café, because my white body was oriented by the same inherited history that oriented other white bodies – a history of privilege created through (neo)colonial dynamics that durably structure Moroccan society (Gross-Wyrtzen Reference Gross-Wyrtzen2022; El Hamel Reference El Hamel2012). The élite lifestyle NGO workers and I automatically had access to was very much linked to the inflated privilege that the post-colonial border granted to Global North passport holders. My PhD salary, which was very similar to the salary of other aid workers, was just above minimum wage in the UK. In Morocco, it was three times higher than the monthly income of 50% of local householdsFootnote ² once translated into local currency. From a member of the low-middle income class in the UK, I had become a member of the élite in Morocco overnight, by virtue of crossing a post-colonial border from North to South. The wage differentials that allowed me and other European migrants to live such élite lives were the product of almost a century of economic, labour and border policies aiming at making local labour as cheap, exploitable and immobile as possible.Footnote ³ Referring to Europeans in Tangier, Hannoum writes that ‘a European […] becomes in Tangier mainly a European, a white man or a white woman—a person with high social status conferred on him or her by a long history of colonial domination (the politics of which have almost been forgotten but the effects of which are deep and long lasting)’ (Hannoum Reference Hannoum2019, 180). Whiteness thus acts as both shortcut and credential: aid workers and I thus kept on bumping into each other not because I had developed particularly robust professional networks in the development sector, or because I had any other professional credential that justified access. We kept on bumping into each other because coloniality made bodies with shared inherited histories take up the same institutional, professional and social spaces.

If coloniality made us converge, the nature of our work set us apart. Whereas my interviewee work involved the elaboration and implementation of aid-funded projects in the field of migration, the goal of my work – like an entire body of research committed to ‘studying up’ (Nader Reference Nader and Dell1972) – was to understand how the aid industry (that the interviewees were part of) worked, and how border power flowed through it (and by extension, through them). In other words, my research tried to sidestep the infrastructures of information management set up by aid organisations. My whiteness allowed me to elude the boundaries between the inside and outside of organisations because it oriented me towards places which racialised ‘beneficiaries’ of the aid industry were priced out of, or did not have the network to access. Crucially, these were also mundane sites that aid workers did not have complete capacity to control access to: cafeterias, cinemas, parks, beaches – places that did not belong to the institutional premises of the aid industry. In research settings, my interviewees had complete control over which part of our conversations I could retain or which details of the institutions I could observe. The offices of UN agencies were hosted in villas surrounded by high walls and protected by private security guards, that I could only access with an appointment and by presenting an identity document. Some diplomatic delegations obliged external visitors to deposit all electronic devices into lockers before entering. The number and type of documents related to aid-funded projects that were accessible to the public were often reduced. What I could gather as data was heavily conditioned, and relied on my capacity to frame questions in non-threatening ways, to remember the conversation afterwards and to triangulate information by approaching multiple interlocutors. At the house party, however, there was no security guard or metal detector at the entrance to check whether I indeed had a recorder on me or not. At the entrance of a cinema, there were no waiting rooms that could limit my capacity to see who was spending their free time with whom outside of work (information that allowed me to more efficiently approach and understand the field even if it did not amount to research data) (Infantino Reference Infantino2019). My interviewees and I coexisted and interacted in the same non-research spaces, and I, the researcher, became a trespasser. But, like the walls that physically surrounded the headquarters of some institutions, barriers could sometimes suddenly come up during non-research conversations. Irony, implicit comments, or indirect references to past experiences of interaction with researchers worked to recreate boundaries in informal spaces that my whiteness allowed me access to, but that the containment structures of the institution could not govern.

Las Palmas – On being puzzled

Las Palmas, summer 2021. The nurse standing outside of the healthcare centre was triaging the people queuing. Patients with a medical appointment were directed upstairs; people needing to sort out administrative paperwork were sent to another queue on the ground floor. I was there with Mohamed, a young Senegalese asylum-seeker who had arrived in Gran Canaria by boat the previous fall. Mohamed had asked me to accompany him to the healthcare centre because he wanted to get vaccinated against COVID-19. As his Spanish was very poor and the healthcare bureaucracy too complicated for someone who was digitally excluded, he needed some help navigating the protocol. The nurse gave us a ticket with a number, then told us to join the queue on the ground floor.

Once our turn arrived, we sat in front of an administrator, and I explained the reason for our visit. After asking for Mohamed's documents, the man started processing our request. Halfway through, he called a female colleague to second him, so she could learn the procedure to assign a healthcare centre to ‘a foreigner arrived by boat’. Mohamed and I waited as the two administrators input the data on the registration software. As I scrolled down my Twitter feed to kill time, I heard the man explain to his colleague: ‘so when they [the migrants] come here from the [reception] centre, they always come accompanied by an interpreter’. I looked up. The administrator was accompanying the explanation with gestures seemingly to explain the ‘case study’. While the word ‘migrants’ was accompanied by a vague gesture towards Mohamed, the word ‘interpreter’ was accompanied by a nod towards me. I hesitated. The first administrator seemed to think that I was an interpreter working for one of the state-funded reception centres hosting migrant people in Gran Canaria. Conversely, Mohamed was understood to be one of the residents of such centres. Neither of these assumptions was true: Mohamed had been living outside of the formal reception system for months, and I was not an interpreter – ironically, the first administrator had witnessed me speaking to Mohamed in slow Spanish the entire time because I could not speak Wolof and Mohamed did not understand French.

Even though the assumptions that the administrator seemed to be making were factually incorrect, I was not sure I wanted to correct him. A few days earlier, I had accompanied Alioune, another Senegalese man, to a different healthcare centre to help get a physician assigned to him. That time, the two nurses triaging people at the door had asked me whether we came from the Red Cross or the White Cross – the two charities managing reception centres for migrant people in Las Palmas. I shook my head, and answered that we were from neither. The two women at the door did not reply. They gave each other a questioning look, as if they did not know how to process this information. Although neither said anything, the vibe at the entrance had suddenly turned slightly hostile. It felt as though the fact that Alioune was not from a reception centre and I was not a humanitarian worker was, somehow, wrong – a fact out of the ordinary, a fact that needed further explanation. Other people who used to accompany migrant people around Las Palmas to complete administrative procedures had reported similar incidents – where the volunteer had felt compelled to overexplain their relation to the person they were accompanying to ‘puzzled’ border workers who had made awkward comments afterwards. Tatiana, a Spanish woman who had volunteered as a language teacher in a reception centre, at the airport bumped into Ahmed, a Malian man who had been her student at the camp. Ahmed was being transferred to mainland Spain, and was accompanied by one of the camp workers, a man that Tatiana vaguely knew from her volunteering time. As the camp worker had been staring at them from a bench in the waiting lounge the entire time, Tatiana went to greet him. Her explanation as to why she had been chatting to Ahmed was met with a dry: ‘Oh, I thought you were his fling.’ Tatiana left this conversation unsettled. Back in the healthcare centre with Mohamed, all of this kept echoing in my head. I knew perfectly well that the rights to healthcare assistance in Spain were the same for asylum-seekers regardless of whether they were housed in the formal reception system or not. However, I also did not want to risk saying something that could compromise or delay Mohamed's paperwork. Shortly afterwards, the administrator printed the proof of Mohamed's registration with the local healthcare system, as well as a ticket listing the time and date for his COVID-19 vaccination appointment. Mohamed and I left the building, satisfied of our successful endeavour.

At first sight, street-level civil servants read the proximity between myself (a white woman, who spoke Spanish fluently) and Mohamed or Alioune (two Black men recently arrived by boat, who could not speak Spanish very well) according to the categories that the state used to govern the racialised border. Upon their arrival at the border, irregular migrants (as well as people who then decide to apply for asylum) are lodged in reception centres. Such facilities, at least in Las Palmas, kept people spatially distant from the rest of the population: they were lodged in neighbourhoods far away from the city centre, or on the edges of impoverished residential areas. There, they were tended to by (mostly white) humanitarian workers, who in many cases constituted the only Spanish people that camp residents had regular contact with. In a climate of institutionally fostered social segregation, welfare workers could not help but comprehend a white woman accompanying a Black man in the context of the racialised border script. My whiteness was read as a credential, as a marker of professionalism (I was believed to be an interpreter even if I obviously did not speak the language of the person I was accompanying) and of desirability (I was perceived as a white humanitarian figure moving as prescribed by the border apparatus).

If I had revealed my non-conformity to the script (by explaining that Mohamed was not living in state-funded accommodation and that I was not hired by an NGO subcontracted by the government, thus implying that we had met outside of state structures) that would have instantly transformed me into a hostile presence – someone who had gone too far, someone who had breached the rules, someone who was no longer desirable. Being read as a ‘disloyal citizen’ would have probably produced a reaction of disapproving surprise. Disapproving surprise would also have probably led to further questioning, as if living outside of state structures and supporting people whom the state was trying to marginalise were actions that required justification. There does not need to be an exclusionary policy in place for the environment to turn hostile: for example, a raised eyebrow, a disapproving look, unnecessary questioning. In the case of Tatiana, a white woman showing friendliness to a Black man was read as deviant, the smallest act of closeness being qualified as sexualised, as not closely adhering to the border script, sparked the most primordial racist fears and archetypes (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2019). Showcasing proximity to ‘undesirable’ people that the state is trying to physically distance from the rest of the population is also read as a form of trespass, evidence of having overcome spatial and behavioural boundaries that the state has set up as part of its broader border policy. In a context where sidestepping government-funded humanitarian assistance seems to raise moral questions, letting the state see what the state is used to seeing thus becomes a tactic for preventing being perceived as a trespasser, the erection of barriers and the environment becoming hostile.

Melilla – On policing

Melilla, Spring 2022. Unlike most Spanish cities, Melilla does not have a community kitchen that undocumented foreigners can easily access. Most newly arrived border-crossers are lodged in the Centre for Temporary Immigrant Stay (CETI), built in the early 2000s on the outskirts of the city, close to the border fence. This option, however, is not available to Moroccan citizens whose asylum application has not yet been admitted to examination. Undocumented Moroccans above 18 years of age are therefore barred from accessing any state resource catering to the homeless in the city. It is to make up for this purposeful absence of the state that a group of volunteers gather in the city centre most evenings of the week to run a food distribution stall. Two or three times a week, I would go to the stall – either to help distribute food, or simply because this is where I knew I would certainly find migrant people whom I was supporting but could not otherwise reach as they did not own a phone. One night, as I was about to go home, a Moroccan man, Aziz, stopped me and asked if we could have a quick chat. Aziz had recently applied for asylum, and his interview was scheduled for the following day. He asked me whether I could go with him to the asylum office, located in the area hosting the border post dividing Melilla from the Moroccan village of Beni Ensar. I warned him that the police would not allow me to sit in at the interview, because I was not a lawyer. He told me that it did not matter; he just wanted someone he knew to go with him. I accepted, and we agreed to meet the next day close to the asylum office.

The asylum office in Melilla is located within the precinct of the border post of Beni Ensar, next to the point where travellers have their passports checked by the Spanish police before being able to cross into Morocco. The location has a double effect. First, it shields what happens inside the office from public scrutiny. Before the land border between Spain and Morocco reopened in May 2022, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 closure, no passers-by walked past the office which was solely inhabited by asylum-seekers, police officers, interpreters, NGO workers and, sometimes, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees workers. After the border reopened, people queuing to enter Morocco would pass by the fence separating the asylum office precinct from the border corridor, but police officers worked quite intensively to keep the two groups separated and the queue running smoothly. Second, the location had a high symbolic and anxiety-inducing effect on people applying for asylum. In the weeks immediately before and after the reopening of the Spanish–Morocco land border, prospective asylum-seekers feared that the Spanish police could send them back to Morocco if they were apprehended in the area close to the asylum office (and thus to the border). The office was also a place where arbitrary rules were regularly enforced: asylum-seekers had to show up very early in the morning to get an asylum appointment, even though the office was known to be open until the early afternoon. Appointments for asylum interviews were sometimes postponed, without offering a clear explanation why. Asylum applicants who did not have any sort of identity documentation were generally told to come back when they had at least a copy of an identity document – a requirement not listed by Spanish asylum law.

The next day, Aziz and I walked towards the prefabricated building hosting the asylum office. We sat down in the waiting room, waiting for Aziz's turn. After a couple of minutes, a policeman came out of the office and walked across the waiting room, giving me an inquisitive look. As he walked back, he looked straight at me, seemingly ignoring the other people in the room, and announced that they were about to start interviews. I nodded. He then asked: ‘What is your relation to the asylum-seeker?’ I answered that I knew him from the food distributions, and that he had asked me to accompany him to the interview. ‘You can't enter the interview room, though; only lawyers can’, he pointed out, even though I had not made any request to sit in. I replied that I was aware of that, and that I would wait for him to finish the interview in the waiting room. Shortly afterwards, an interpreter called Aziz and invited him to go upstairs, where the interview was due to take place. I sat back on the plastic chairs lined up against the wall, waiting for Aziz to return.

After some time Aziz came down the stairs, holding a bundle of paper in his hands. We left the office and went through his paperwork together, to make sure that everything was in order. I had noticed time and again that Moroccan asylum-seekers were not always provided with a copy of their interview transcript. Aziz's copy was missing, too. The first policeman came out of the prefabricated office and nodded at me. I stopped him and asked him whether Aziz's copy of the asylum interview had remained in the office. The policemen gave me another inquisitive look, as if he did not understand what I was talking about. He looked through the paperwork, then said: ‘The number of the lawyer is on the paperwork, he can ask him.’ I hesitated again. A lawyer friend had assured me that asylum-seekers can ask for a copy of their interview transcript directly at the asylum office, so what the policeman was advising seemed like an unnecessary complication. I feigned ignorance, and asked: ‘So we can't ask for a copy here, we need to call the lawyer and ask him?’ ‘He needs to call the lawyer and ask him,’ the policeman said, gesturing towards Aziz. ‘You can't do anything,’ he concluded.

The asylum office is a further example of an extremely racialised space, where the distinction between ‘the powerful’ and ‘the powerless’ is reasserted through the application of arbitrary rules (like limiting the access to asylum appointments according to changing criteria, or postponing asylum interviews without a clear justification). Yet, it constitutes a very different space from the house party, or the healthcare centre. The asylum office is a place whose boundaries are jealously and zealously protected by traditional security actors (in this case, the National Police): access is tightly regulated, with no room allowed for mistakes as to who might or might not be a trespasser. At the house party or at the healthcare centre, my whiteness allowed me unscrutinised access. At the asylum office, my unfamiliar whiteness triggered warnings. The non-familiarity of my face within the border environment induced the street-level border worker to immediately ascertain ‘my relation to the asylum-seeker’ (and to the border more broadly). Whereas in other border spaces a white person would go unnoticed or mistaken for a humanitarian worker, at the asylum office such mistakes are not allowed to happen because the border worker tolerates (not welcomes) a humanitarian whiteness that the law prescribes to be present. Giving an out-of-the ordinary answer (I was not a lawyer, I was not an interpreter, nor did I work for any of the NGOs that had a scripted interaction with local authorities) immediately flagged me as not part of the humanitarian whiteness prescribed by the law, and thus an outlier to the border space. The outlier is immediately perceived as a potentially disruptive presence before they have pursued any disruption: my sole presence in the waiting room prompted the policeman to remind me that I could not sit in on the asylum interview – even though I had made no request to do so. If quiet presence was already read as a sign of potential disruption (that was tolerated only because I was being passive), my request for clarification about the missing interview transcript (which pointed to a possible irregularity in the follow-up administrative steps to the completion of the asylum interview) was read as a form of interference (and subjected to a firmer form of intimidation). The presence of the outlier in the domain of traditional state actors is thus zealously watched, never welcomed and threatened to be cut short at every minimal anticipation of disruption.