« No finger print! » : Les mobilisations des migrants à Lampedusa, ou quand l’espace compte

Abstract

This article focuses on mobilizations put into motion by asylum seekers who are confined in a detention center for undocumented migrants in the little Italian island of Lampedusa. Our analytical perspective focuses on the importance of spatial context regarding where these mobilizations took place: an island, representing one of the European Union borders. On July 2013, 200 people, mostly Eritreans, marched through the streets of Lampedusa and occupied the church square to claim the right to leave this "open-air prison” without having their fingerprints registered by the police. The data collected over the summer of 2013 in the context of a first qualitative field survey discusses the form and the reception of this episode of migrants’ mobilization, undertaken by protagonists who are officially confined in a detention center and who are destined, by definition, to be deported rapidly to another detention center or to their country of origin. This research contributes to the debate on the political and emancipating scope of undocumented peoples’ mobilizations, especially in frontier territories.

Keywords

• mobilizations of undocumented people
• immigration
• Lampedusa
• mobility rights
• borders