The cases of Romania and Greece show that the EU's increasingly strict exclusion policy for non-EU migrants is not in the best interests of the European Union. It can destabilize the very ideological and legal foundation on which the EU rests: the Lisbon Treaty. Cases like France, however, show that this is different for individual member states, pointing to a friction between the parts and the whole. It is suggested here that the EU tries to overcome this friction through the use of language, the digitalization of border surveillance, and border agencies like Frontex. All three erase migrants' visibility, reducing them to ghostly figures that are both present (digitally) and absent (physically). However, these ghosts cannot be excluded, and thus resist the impenetrability of the walls of Fortress Europe. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

ghost Migration Border exclusion European Union

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