Association Profile
of schleuser.net


Among other things, globalization means the free flow of digital data. But if human beings travel in the same way they are subject to restrictions, which defy the human right to Freedom of Movement. Without mentioning their 'dignity' at all, people are regarded as 'human capital' and sorted according to their estimated economic potential. In Germany this process of sorting out is manifested in the body of rules on the state border, in lingo called border regime: The immigration of people who have been declared economically useful is supported, the immigration of allegedly useless people is prevented, or, because it isn’t to be prevented, made illegal. The German immigration legislation and other administrative procedures follow this utilitarian logic. The border regime splits the cross border passenger traffic into two markets: Into a market segment of documented traveling, and into another of undocumented traveling. Documented border traffic is comprised of all acts of crossing a border that are marked legal by the existence of authentic and official documents. Undocumented border traffic means traveling without official papers, or with invalid papers, or papers that are regarded not to be genuine. The human right to Freedom of Movement, on which global traveling is based, comes with a profoundly different logic, in which those differentiations are naturally irrelevant.
The emphasis on economical considerations also shapes the production of symbols: Public transport of the documented kind is associated with 'fun' and 'joy of living' (tourism), or equalized to 'global citizenship' and 'future'; undocumented public transport, on the other hand, gets criminalized and is cynically accused to be smuggling with contempt for humankind.
In reunited Germany, criminalizing began with the so-called Budapest Trial in 1993. On a high official level it settled the end of the ‘Fluchthilfe’ (escape aid) and installed the change to the term of ‘Schlepper und Schleuser’ (smugglers). Thus, after the end of the cold war the German immigration policy was reshaped; before, Germany had been bound to the 1977 decision of the federal court: A person who helps a refugee fulfill his legal right to Freedom of Movement can refer to approved motives and does not act in a morally offensive manner. So, until close to the end of the 20th century, active federal court decisions accepted escape aid as a service and its payment as legitimate. With the Budapest Trial, escape aid has been declared an organized crime.

Here begins the specific work of 'schleuser.net'.
The change of meaning - from the noble escape aid to the criminalized smuggler - can be recognized directly in the images and in the figures of speech delivered by national public relations and opinion-shaping media. One result of the more and more polemic medial depiction is that 'Schleppen und Schleusen' (hauling and channeling) can hardly be considered as anything but organized crime at present. Only rarely is there any mention of the restrictive measures in the area of border protection, the reasons behind them and their results. Neither is it an issue, why the travel market has been split into a documented and an undocumented one by the tightening of immigration criteria and the display of discriminating, unequal treatment at customs, as through visa regulations. This way, not only men and women who engage in undocumented cross border traffic, but migrants in general are being criminalized (the German police union calls migrants, people willing to be smuggled). This nationally supported, and media mirrored, simplistic depiction nourishes the reasoning behind institutional and every-day racism.
schleuser.net works for the peculiarities and needs of the undocumented travel market to be, free of any value, realized by a greater part of the public. The ideological justification of increased border security, and the administrative obstacles to free movement are, in our eyes, devoid of any good reasons based on facts; and, in normalizing the present conditions, they give way to a wide array of bad feelings. Reinforcing the outer borders of the EU, and over-regulating the cross border rail, road and sea traffic, creates a hard to estimate danger for travelers to be physically harmed.