Border Control and Undesirables in Britain and Australia (original) (raw)
Related papers
The UK's hostile environment: Deputising immigration control
Critical Social Policy, 2021
In 2012, Home Secretary Theresa May told a newspaper that she wanted to create a 'really hostile environment' for irregular migrants in the UK. Although the phrase has since mutated to refer to generalised state-led marginalisation of immigrants, this article argues that the hostile environment is a specific policy approach, and one with profound significance for the UK's border practices. We trace the 'hostile environment' phrase, exposing its origins in other policy realms, charting its evolution into immigration, identifying the key components and critically reviewing the corresponding legislation. The article analyses the impact and consequences of the hostile environment, appraising the costs to public health and safety, the public purse, individual vulnerability and mar-ginalisation, and wider social relations. We conclude by identifying the fundamental flaws of the policy approach, arguing that they led to the 2018 Windrush scandal and risk creating similar problems for European Economic Area nationals after Brexit. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0261018320980653
Historicising Australian Deportation of Suspect and Undesirable Migrant Communities
International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2023
The overall aim of the paper is to present evidence on the factors underpinning historical deportation cases, by exploring the reasons, explanations and patterns related to deportation in Australia. The purpose is to consider whether these historical factors are antecedent to current forms of deportation occurring in Australia, and to bring to the fore potential recurring patterns. Deportation is currently conceptualised by border criminologists as a punitive tool of discipline and control, within the realm of penal powers. Some of this work on the ‘deportation regime’ asserts that certain migrants, or groups of migrants, are undesirable: their identity, (not)belonging and punishment have become inherently intertwined, and their mobility has become politicised and criminalised. This article theorises that deportation has been used in Australia, now and in the past, to expel individuals who are viewed as detrimental to the ‘health’ of the host society. The ‘deportation categories’ demonstrate that migrants’ desirability has historically been a temporary condition, shifting over time in line with the state’s requirements. They also demonstrate the historical regime of criminalisation of undesirable others enacted through Australia’s border control regime.
Critical Criminology, 2020
In the context of heightened debate around increasingly hostile immigration policies, the detention and deportation of people with long-standing connections to the United Kingdom (UK) have, within the last few years, received public attention. Such individuals—people who were born in or came to the UK as children—make up a significant proportion of the “foreign criminal” population in detention. This article examines how those individuals with long-standing links, who also have criminal convictions, are often “erased” by the British state. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with men currently and formerly held in immigration removal centers, I argue that institutional failings in immigration and local authority care “guide” some who grow up in the UK toward (and into) the criminal justice system. Shunning responsibility for these failings, the British state enacts a further punishment through immigration detention and attempted deportation. Despite acts that resist and problematize foreignness, detained “Brits” experience specific harms that change the way they feel about identity and belonging in Britain. These processes highlight the ways that national identity and immigration status intersect with class, gender and race to produce traumatic experiences of cultural denationalization.
British Migrants, Criminality and Deportation: Shaping the Australian Post-war Approach
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2017
The British preference of Australian immigration policy was challenged by the demands of a rapidly expanding postwar program overseen by the newly-established Department of Immigration. An essential function of the Department was the screening of prospective migrants against criteria shaped by national population policy preferences. This paper examines Australia's postwar immigration security screening policies in domestic and international contexts. It compares the immigration department's approaches to immigrating British subjects with their approaches to those from other national and ethnic backgrounds. We explain how assumptions about the free passage of British subjects across empire could persist until the 1970s despite revelations that Australian authorities were powerless to stop those with serious criminal histories gaining entry to the country. These revelations about risky British migrants exposed the limits of Australian control over entry and exclusion, while illuminating the emerging frameworks of postwar border controls.
Report and deport: Public vigilance and migration policing in Australia
Theoretical Criminology, 2018
Recent escalations in migration control involve the criminalization of non-citizens. In assessing this punitive turn criminologists have highlighted drastic expansions in state sovereignty and coercion. Focusing on the Australian context, this article examines a less noticed trend: the civilianization of migration policing. To facilitate irregular migrants' removal the government has created tip-lines that encourage private citizens to conduct surveillance and anonymously 'dob-in' or report unlawful non-citizens. Approaching the initiative as a distinct responsibilization strategy that enrolls the entire citizen body as policing agents, this article explores its instrumental and symbolic goals, whether expanding official gazes or restoring an exclusive sense of national citizenship. Assessing the functions and effects of public vigilance reveals important tensions and ambiguities within the responsibilization process. In particular the case of participatory surveillance demonstrates how 'adaptive' approaches to order maintenance are not external to, but potentially promote and perpetuate, punitive forms of sovereign power.
The Sociological Review
Paul Gilroy’s theorisation of conviviality has proved exceptionally generative in (urban) sociology. But any announcement of a ‘convivial turn’ should be approached with caution. In much of the literature on ‘everyday multiculture’, racism is insufficiently theorised, structural relations of hierarchy and inequality fade from view, and culture loses its unruly potential. This article seeks to rethink and reclaim the radical potential of conviviality, by working with the narratives of people deported from the UK to Jamaica. The article first argues that the social and political implications of conviviality can be better registered when placed in relation to state violence and state racism. The article then analyses the accounts of deported people who show that conviviality is about much more than getting along across difference, but can represent a wider ethics of ‘refusing race and salvaging the human’. Indeed, when people subject to extraordinary forms of state racism – overpoliced...
The Libertarian Ideal, 2016
In this essay I look at how the British state engenders unnatural inclusion and exclusion of migrants and asylum seekers through theoretical definitions, xeno-racist policies and entry barriers to socioeconomic realms of life which limit the capacity of these groups to integrate and participate in civil society. Rather than looking at the framework of migration and inclusion through the lens of either settled populaces and their feelings of racism or through the blaming of migrants for not integrating, I want to see how state policies allow for such narratives to expand which limit the development of both bonding and bridging capital, and, when pushed through certain defined variants of community, create the kind of conditions seen in Sighthill, Glasgow. This then breeds misconceptions about migration, and means the fragmentation of communities among settled populaces and migrant networks.
Theoretical Criminology
This article examines institutional practices designed to control criminalized migrants in the UK and advances three arguments. First, these practices have evolved, since the early 1970s, into a bespoke ‘crimmigration control system’ distinct from the domestic criminal justice system. Second, this system is directed exclusively at efficient exclusion and control; through a process of adiaphorization, moral objections to the creation of a ‘really hostile environment’ have been disabled. Third, the pursuit of the criminalized immigrant—a globally recognized ‘folk devil’—provides a vital link between domestic and global systems of policing, punishment and exclusion. The UK crimmigration control system is an example of wider processes that are taking place in institutions concerned with the control of suspect populations across the globe.
Migrants are too easily portrayed in very negative terms. Politicians from certain ideologies nowadays seem content to link migration to a number of issues, including security. Although much research has covered the securitization of migration, this dissertation will attempt what few researchers have tried: a concise analysis of a particular nation at a particular time: this dissertation examines the extent to which migration was securitized in the United Kingdom between 2001 and 2005. In turn, this thesis approaches the question from the Copenhagen School’s understanding of security. It then applies this understanding to the case study of migration in the United Kingdom, highlighting relevant elements to this thesis such as migration levels, legislation and British attitudes. Ultimately, this thesis reaches the conclusion that migration was securitized in the United Kingdom between 2001 and 2005, along with its benefits and potential problems. Throughout the analysis, this dissertation identifies gaps in the research that will make future examinations of this question easier for scholars, hopefully serving as a road sign for avoidable issues and a calling for further literature on this subject.
This article explores how British immigration control policy was carried out during the nineteen-seventies to filter immigration, while addressing the perceived problem of ‘non-white’ colonial migration. Recently released government documents suggest that the immigration control system should be viewed as a series of inter-connected institutions and actors that operated under the influence of a number of different, and often contradictory, factors. The result of these competing factors was an immigration control system that, relying on the paradoxical whims of the government and other sections of civil society, was restrictive and suspicious towards potential migrants, but at the same time constrained in its behaviour.