10 years of deportation center at Findel
Ten years ago, the undesirables were transferred from the prison in Schrassig, to the prison at Findel. In 2011, the first deportation center in Luxembourg opened. There, so-called illegal migrants (who are either in the country “without authorization” or whose asylum application has been rejected) are locked up before being deported. The “crime” of these people imprisoned there is that they have not obeyed the laws of the capitalist logic of migration.
“And freedom under capitalism quickly reaches its limits, literally, where one doesn’t have the valid papers”
In fact, capitalism makes a false promise of freedom all over the world. It makes people emigrate, often at great risk, to find wealth or a better existence, for example. Behind the promise hides the capitalist logic, the exploitation of people – first of all the distinction between the “desirable” and the “undesirable”. And freedom under capitalism quickly reaches its limits, literally, where one doesn’t have the valid papers.
“We asked for workers. We got people instead”, wrote Max Frisch, exposing capitalism, which can exploit people merely as commodities. In this, borders and the criminalization of undesirable migrants, play a key role in the domination of state and capital. Power can thus regulate the labor force and adapt it to the market and production. It can also make the average worker more vulnerable to blackmail by creating a competitive situation in which the person works for even less pay.
The “illegal” becomes a commodity in capitalism itself, and the criminalization of “undesirables” is a precise project of exploitation. This is not only about stylizing the “illegal” as the scapegoat for all misery and crises, thus perverting a fundamental critique of the state and capital. It also means that the system needs precarious individuals in order to better threaten the “legal” ones as well, that their miserable situation could always be worse. The mechanisms of submission and exploitation are ever more aggressive at the margins of society, whether in jail, in front of fortress europe, or at the deportation center at Findel.