Trubeta: ‘Rights’ in the grey area: undocumented border crossers on Lesvos 63 (fences, walls, etc.), is intended to inhibit unauthorised border crossings and ensure ‘security’. Such measures can be classified as positive surveillance technologies through which the state seeks to ensure social consensus and cohesiveness. By applying such surveillance technologies, the state demonstrates its willingness to support and advance the interests of its national population, both economically and socially. As has been pointed out by several researchers, the state’s enforcement of migration control makes ‘illegality’ serve ‘productive ends’ such as ‘protecting capital accumulation within industry and ensuring the state’s own political legitimacy in the eyes of the public’.9 Thus, the building of a screening centre on Lesvos was assumed by state representatives to have benefits for the local society; increasing public security and giving a boost to the local economy by using local skills and professional services.10 Yet, despite all the measures for inhibiting border crossing by constructing more and more detention centres and walls, the ungovernability of the borders becomes ever more apparent, insofar as borders remain porous in the current globalised order. However, it is inherent to surveillance technologies that their failure does not lead to re-examining the regimes of power, but rather to enacting new technologies of surveillance and techniques of control. As a consequence, Lesvos became once again a target for undocumented immigrants and refugees in the autumn of 2012. This happened as soon as the Greek state decided on the construction of a wall in the north-eastern Turkish-Greek frontier (in Evros). The crossing point shifted from the north-eastern Turkish-Greek borders (where it had been since 2010) once again to the Aegean Sea. These repeated shifts in crossing points gave an impetus to the building of new barriers and so to a screening centre on Lesvos in September 2013, funded, this time, mostly by EU funds. ‘What will happen with all the investment in the new screening centre if the crossing point shifts again to other frontiers, or if the border crossing ceases all together?’, we asked the Major General in charge of establishing the screening centre on Lesvos. ‘The construction is modifiable and can be transported to other places’, was his response.11 What counts is the goal of applying surveillance technologies, even though their failure is always within sight. The second factor that serves to give a positive gloss to surveillance technologies, especially immigration detention, is the conceptualisation of such measures as somehow incorporating the politics of human rights. The very designation ‘screening centre’ perhaps indicates an intention to dissociate state politics from the totalitarian institution of the prison and the repressive incarceration of refugees, shifting the focus to the detection of ‘fake identities’.12 In this view, the very conception of a ‘screening’ centre is that it is the ‘proper place’ in which undocumented immigrants may claim their rights, including the right to asylum. But, crucial to how those rights are defined is the system of humanitarian protection in operation, in which, first, security regimes predominate, and second, the permanent status of refugees is weakened in favour of temporary protection. Moreover, the refugee condition becomes more and more bureaucratised, increasingly Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on June 3, 2016