The events of Saturday 24, 2006 in Barcelona at the Immigrant Detention Center currently under construction in Zona Franca, are one more expression of the repressive military-police methods which the current border policies adopted by Zapatero's government as well as all other EU governments. Nothing exemplifies better the arbitrary implementation and denial of rights produced by the border regimes than the Immigration Detention Centers. In these prisons, immigrants are kept for a sole crime: to exist and to want to live, work, and coexist in a place where they weren't born. Concretely, the Immigrant Detention Center (CIE) currently in construction in the Zona Franca, Barcelona, with double the capacity of the existing center at La Verneda, isolated from the nucleus of the population and difficult to access, perfects the horror and places it out of sight.

The European migration regime is part of a global system of borders and migration management which is not aimed at keeping migrants and refugees outside Europe, but at controlling their access and promoting a selective and hierarchical recruitment of migrants. They want migrants to enter but with no rights: Europe is not a "fortress", and the border regime (camps, agreements, Schengen visa policies), along with the "neighbourhood policy", the "regional protection programmes" and the reinstallation programmes, acts as a filter.

Migrants contribute to the European economy, they construct, they take care of our children and elderly, they are the main labour force in the agricultural, building and service sectors, transforming and enriching our society. In the laws of many European countries the link between labour contract and residence permit is one of the tools through which illegality is produced (not only because migrants crossed the borders without document, but because they can loose their documents if they loose their work), and then managed through the selective instrument of inclusion represented by detention centres, inside and outside Europe.

The detention centre of la Verneda is an "internal border" of Europe which also mirrors the social and political borders which increasingly precarizes the conditions of migrants as well as the conditions of all workers and citizens.

At the same time, the Eu border regimes is being more and more “externalized”. Neighbouring countries such as Morocco, Libya and the former Yugoslavia are increasingly involved in controlling European borders and in managing migration. The killing of migrants which took place in autumn 2005 in Ceuta and Melilla is a crime committed by the whole of Europe. EU exports the management of its borders to those countries and transfers its responsibilities in the area of asylum and respect of human rights. Stronger controls at the EU’s external borders actually result in a movement of the borders.
The deaths at the border fences in Ceuta and Melilla, the deportations to the middle of the Saharan desert, those stranded along the coast of the Canary Islands, the bilateral negotiations with certain African countries to accept those deportion even of non-nationals in exchange for large sums of money, the mobilization on behalf of the UE of naval and air patrols to control the coast of the Canaries and West Africa... they speak to us of a war along Europe's exterior borders against those men and women who try to travel to Europe in search of a better life.

This is why the movement fighting for migrants' rights is a European-wide movement.

Initiatives such as those which took place during the second caravan for the freedom of movement express the radical will of building a new European political space and a new European citizenship based upon rights, instead of upon the criminalization and the illegalization of migrants.

The people who came to Barcelona during these days are part of a european-wide network which includes organization of migrants, international organizations for the respect of human rights, unions and social movements which during the last years have organized initiatives and mobilizations all over Europe – such as the first and the second European day for the freedom of movement and the EuroMayDay, and are now mobilizing for the third European day of action in Brussels on October 7, 2006 (call at  http://www.noborder.org/item.php?id=372)

- the dropping of all charges against the detainees,

- unconditional legalization of all immigrants in Europe,

- end to police-military border policies and closure of Immigrant Detention Centers,


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 marta@sindominio.net and  escolane@yahoo.es