The recent transformations of £U migration policies have been subject to critical analysis by many scholars in the last decade, allowing for a re-thinking of the role of transit centres' such as Lesvos as part of a regime of 'selective' or 'differentiated inclusion', and focusing on their temporal dimension (Mezzadra, 2006; Neilson and Mitropoulos, 2006; Rigo, 2007; Papadopoulos et a/., 2008). These arguments are useful to understand the functioning of Pagani in the frameworkof the £U regulation called Dublin II. Greece and Dublin II: the (il)logic as a means of illegalization of circularity The purpose of migrants' fingerprinting and registration in Lesvos into the EURODAC, (the EU-wide data base containing the details of undocumented migrants) is aimed at ensuring that, as soon as the migrants claim asylum in any other country of the 6U, the authorities can quickly identify the first country of entry and send them back to that country. This practice is proscribed by the EU regulation called Dublin II, according to which the Member State responsible for examining asylum claims will generally be the one in which an asylum seeker first sets foot (13 Council Regulation (EC) No. 343/2003 of 18 February, 2003, cit. in HRW, 2008: 20). Despite evidence in both Greece and Turkeyof summary expulsions, degrading conditions of detention, police and coast guard brutality against detainees, lack of access to asylum (HRW, 2008), most of the EU countries return migrants to Greece as the first country of immigration. Therefore under the Dublin II agreement the migrants, once fingerprinted in Greece, lose hope of being able to seek asylum in their preferred destinations (usually Sweden, the UK and Germany). International NGOs workingin the field of refugees rights emphasize the aspects of 'immobilization' generated by the regime of Dublin II: they are prevented from moving on, while at the same time they cannot move back as they often risk war and persecution in their countries of origin (HRW, 2008). In contrast to the depiction, by human rights organizations, of migrants 'stuck in a revolving door', the voices encountered during the experience of the No Border camp in Lesvos tell a story where patterns of circularity, periods of mobility and immobility,spaces of negotiations and escape, indeed complicate and blur the 5 The shrinking options for migrants to have their asylum claim accepted may be the reason why, despite the extremelylow approval rate, the numberof asylum seekers in Greece increased from2006 to 2007 (a 105 per cent increase as opposed to an 11 per cent in other £U memberstates HRW, 2008: 12). contours of the EU borders. As effectively illustrated by Papadopoulos et al. (2008) the practices of migrants' detention in the islands of the Aegean constitute a regime that functions through time rather than immobilization. These 'transit points' on the edge of Europe become 'centres for the control of the speed' of migratory movements, playing a crucial role in the regulation and de-regulation of the labour that migrants embody. As exemplified by the function 142 feminist review 94 2010 acrosstheborders ofLesvos This content downloaded from 163.1.255.60 on Fri, 10 Apr 2015 17:57:53 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions