Fortress Europe

In the autumn of 1989, jubilant crowds hacked through the Berlin Wall as the world watched. Politicians and economists declared such barriers obsolete, hailing a euphoric era of global capitalism-of the seamless exchange of goods, capital, and ideas across national borders. The new world was to be a flat one. In Heavy Traffic,prize-winning journalist Matthew Carr probes the dark story of migration and shows that in an age in which we were ostensibly going to transcend borders, billions are being spent to keep unauthorized immigrants, from economic migrants to refugees and asylum-seekers, from entering richer European nations. Most of these migrants come from less-developed countries; many are poor or darker-skinned or both. More than two decades later after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many barriers to the movement of goods and capital have been dismantled and traditional concepts of national sovereignty upended. Yet today's Europe, journalist Matthew Carr argues, is defined by a proliferation of quasi-militarized borders--along the EU's Eastern frontier and in the waters of the Mediterranean, Adriatic, and Aegean. These "hard" borders are not intended to deter military threats. Theirs are stories of inhumanity, prejudice, and often appalling tragedy, but also of tenacity and hope. And increasingly, they have become the main objects of the West's unprecedented defenses. This book is an examination of these borders and their impact on those who have been excluded and the societies that try to keep them out. Carr visits detention centres in Malta and Lampedusa; the caged cities of Ceuta and Melilla; Moldova, the poorest country in Europe and the center of female trafficking; and the farms of southern Italy, where thousands of undocumented migrants work without papers in hellish conditions. Combining reportage, history, and insightful comparative passages on the parallel crises in the United States and Australia, Carr's critique is a must-read for any American concerned with the tragedy currently being played out at our own doorstep.