Border guards as an alien police: usages of the Schengen Agreement in France

The creation of a common European space following the integration of the Schengen Agreement into the "acquis communautaires" through the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997, and the subsequent treaties and summits, lead Member States to consider border control as a common issue. One could have thought that the lifting of the internal borders within the Schengen space would have threatened the border guard corps at the national level. This is not the case. I will show that, thanks to a change in the "model" of French border guards, their power and influence have in fact risen in the second part of the 1990's. In response to the fear of a drastic cut in the workforce, French border guards mobilize to define a new model of border guard: the "alien police" model, which aimed at fighting against "illegal" immigration.