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In July 2013, the UK government arranged for a van to drive through parts of
London carrying the message ‘In the UK illegally? GO HOME or face arrest.’ The
vans were short-lived, but they were part of an ongoing trend in
government-sponsored communication designed to demonstrate control and toughness
around immigration. This book explores the effects of such performances of
toughness: on policy, on public debate, on pro-migrant and anti-racist activism,
and on the everyday lives of people in Britain. This book both presents research
findings, and provides insights into the practice of conducting research on such
a charged and sensitive topic.
Blending original research, theoretical
analysis, and methodological reflections, the book addresses questions such
as:
- Who gets to decide who ‘belongs’?
- How do anti-migrant sentiments relate to changing forms of racism?
- Are new divisions, and new solidarities, emerging in the light of current immigration politics?
Written in a clear and engaging style, the book sets an agenda for a model of collaborative research between researchers, activists, and people on the ground.
. Imagine that her husband beats her and kicks her out. She tries to ask her family for help but they will not let her come back: ‘Where will she live? Where will she go?’ Figure 1: Go Home van Lucee, a refugee from Sierra Leone, worried that the van would create ‘racial tension’. All foreigners could be stigmatised. In
experienced and interpreted. Here local issues, such as histories of migration and resistance, and national contexts, such as debates about devolution and the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum, impact on reactions to anti-immigration campaigns. Whereas in Ealing and Hounslow (West London), for example, the Go Home van's appearance played into divisive discourses of respectability among established migrants and British citizens (discussed in
how to stay ahead of a tightening net, navigating the uncertainty of finding out that you no longer qualify for the immigration category you're in. It felt like a finish line of sorts. Finally, I was home. When I took up citizenship in 2013, the Go Home vans were already on London streets, ostensibly to encourage those who might be in the country illegally to return home. In reality, it felt like they were talking to all migrants, but especially ethnic
, fees to the community organisations, the costs of commissioning the survey, travel costs and other incidentals involved with carrying out the project). The rest of the article focused on the controversy surrounding Operation Vaken and the Go Home van pilot and the fact that the pilot had not been successful. The implication was that our project was problematic because it was using taxpayers’ money to criticise government policy – specifically
2013 (see Chapter 1 ) all of the authors of this book were angered by the seeming overt and unapologetic racism of the Go Home van slogan, apparent racial profiling in immigration checks in public places and the Home Office's publication of images of raids through Twitter using the #immigrationoffenders hashtag (see Figure 3 ). We expressed this over email, on social media and in conversation. Several weeks earlier, some of us, with others
Immigration, Mark Harper MP, makes a defence of the Go Home vans in a column in the Daily Mail newspaper (see also Introduction ). He argues that it is not ‘rational’ to view the poster as threatening to anyone other than people who are in contravention of immigration law. By extension it seems that Harper would class the experience of terror described by Rita as ‘silly’ too. Why should Rita feel ‘blocked’ if she is carrying a valid visa and being
Windrush generation … which are consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism’. 3 The notorious ‘Go Home’ vans, meanwhile, deployed by ‘Operation Vaken’ in 2013 to the most ethnically diverse areas of London, echo the repatriation campaigns of earlier decades. To be sure, race is not the only criterion for national belonging, now or in the past, in the United Kingdom, as the Brexit referendum campaign and opposition to the immigration of largely, although not entirely, white migrants from the
? Southall Black Sisters : The research was timely. For us, it was part of a process that had already started at SBS. The London borough of Ealing was one of the areas where the Go Home vans were piloted. Alongside that, women using the [Southall Black Sisters] centre were telling us about the stops and checks taking place at the local train station. We were hearing from them that there had been an increase in the
are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. For Satwinder there are those ‘that are working’ (good) and there are those that ‘get caught up in drink and drugs and should not be here … women drinking and smoking’ (bad). A similar sentiment was echoed in a Bradford focus group by Nadia, an Iranian woman who had been settled in the UK for decades and now volunteers at a refugee and asylum seeker group. She said that perhaps it was good that the Go Home van scared some