Fortress or prison? Europe’s dual regime of im/mobility and the emergence of a new line of flight from Dublin

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with people on the move across Europe as well as archives and institutional interviews, this paper examines the role of Brexit in the recent surge in irregular[ised] crossings to the UK from France around 2020. The reactionary phase following the ‘Long Summer of Migration’ of 2015/16 reinforced the duality of the Schengen – Dublin regime of im/mobility in which freedom of movement for EU citizens coexists with the containment of others in the member state responsible for their asylum claim. Despite – and indeed because of – these ongoing processes of digital and temporal rebordering, ‘Dubliners’ persistently challenge this regime. Non-returnable yet effectively banned from within EUrope, they develop a lived way of being – ‘fugitivity’ – through imperceptibility. Rather than a besieged fortress, Europe rather resembles an open-air prison facing mass desertions – including on small boats. The article concludes that the surge in arrivals to the UK is the result of the combined effects of the Dublin regime, the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and the enduring capacity of migration to seize the contradictions of such an event, creatively inventing new lines of flight from the actual regime of mobility control.