A border can be dangerous and deadly, but that is not necessarily due to the natural barriers surrounding it. The border, in order to keep people from crossing, needs to be ›secured‹ persistently – by installing fences and patrols, boxing in paths and possibilities of crossing, checking documents, identities and baggage, surveilling the territory with cameras, watch towers and drones, and by using military forces when needed. The border can only be ›secured‹ when it is active. Thus, with regard to this activity, we need to focus on the practices and arrangements of control as the active micro-devices of the border, and on what it does to the subjects passing it or being stopped by it. This has been mainly an issue in literary texts and autobiographic reports on the crossing of borders. With reference to the descriptions of Heinrich von Kleist, Sara Ahmed and Shahram Khozravi, this essay traces down the effects and affects of border control as a subjectification device. Two questions will be discussed in this essay: What does border control do to the people it stops or prevents from crossing? And how does this relate to the alleged elimination of border controls in the Schengen Area?”