B1 | The Production of (Im-)Mobility: The Visa as Border Infrastructure
Project B1 analyses the functioning of the visa against the background of German law. The visa has been a central element of the border infrastructure for more than a hundred years. It is thus involved in the production of (im)mobility in the form of preventive control of the entry and residence of foreign nationals. The visa represents a mobility filter in which the examination of a residence permit already takes place in embassies and consulates in the region of origin of potential travellers and migrants. In this way, against the background of the meanings that are socially attributed to spatial mobility in complex negotiation processes, it is possible to control and sort migration before the actual cross-border movement.
The project examines selection mechanisms in the processing and issuance of visas for short-term stays as well as for employment- and education-related migration, drawing on both a legal and a sociological study. In this way, the selection criteria behind the legal regulations and their scope of application are to be worked out.
The legal analysis examines the Schengen visa as an instrument for enabling short-term mobility within the Schengen area. The requirements for the granting of visas and the practice of issuing them have changed considerably as a result of case law, changing legal frameworks and political reforms. Focusing on the filtering function of the Schengen visa, the criteria that determine who is granted or denied short-term mobility are analysed. The focus is on legal requirements such as the assessment of willingness to return, as well as questions of legal protection in the visa process.
The sociological study examines the selection mechanisms produced by law and by the administration in granting access to German visas for employment and education purposes. Foreign applicants must already meet all requirements tied to the intended purpose of stay during the visa procedure. In this process, both legally defined selection criteria and more subjective factors—shaped by the handling and decisions of caseworkers in the various authorities—influence outcomes. At the same time, visa procedures and issuance are embedded in global structures of power and inequality that affect both legal criteria and subjective assessments. Against the backdrop of recent reforms in skilled labour migration and through the use of various qualitative methods, the study analyses the explicit and implicit dimensions of selection.
In combining these studies, the analysis shows how the visa functions as a selective instrument for regulating mobility and migration.
