This article examines the governance mechanisms regulating migrants’ presence in Ventimiglia—an Italian city on the north‐west border—and migrants’ agency, following the reintroduction of French border controls in 2015. The study looks at different kinds of camps: the formal one run by the Red Cross and the makeshift camps and settlements that sprang up over time. This work contributes to the academic debate on the interplay between migrants and border regimes by arguing two fundamental points. First, migration governance changed the nature of the makeshift settlements, pushing them from being spaces of autonomy, however precarious, to ones characterised more by exclusion and uncertainty. Second, the relationship between formal and informal spaces and migrants’ agency is ambiguous and changes over time. Using a diachronic perspective and without underestimating migrants’ agency, this paper denounces the inadequacy, fragility and violence of the border regime which migrants move into and within.

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This paper looks at the so-called ‘secondary movements’, namely, migrants’ unauthorized movements across Member States of the European Union (EU). Over the past few years, secondary movements have become a main concern on the EU political agenda because they seem unstoppable, despite the more rigid migration regime designed at different levels to manage them. Secondary movements are a relatively understudied topic within the vast critical migration debate on border regimes. This paper bridges this gap by looking at unauthorized movements within Europe on two levels. Firstly, it explores them by focusing on the emergence, conceptualization and embodiment of the term ‘secondary movements’ within the EU agenda; secondly, it sheds light on this kind of movement from the migrants’ perspective. Based on empirical research carried out along the Italian–French border and in Rome from September 2018 to December 2018, this paper aims to highlight the tensions between unauthorized mobilities and the EU asylum system, which forces migrants to stay in (or move to) specific countries without taking into consideration their personal plans. Thanks to a bottom-up perspective, this analysis shows how complex migrants’ reasons for movements are and it sheds a necessary light on how EU asylum policies and border control mechanisms influence migrants’ journey without stopping them. Reading the border regime of Ventimiglia through the lens of ‘secondary movements’ allows for a more nuanced account of the systems of power within which this EU internal border regime takes form.