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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.
hostile environment for certain migrants in ways that we have explored throughout the book. Within this hostile environment there remains recognition that immigration touches all of our lives, as world populations are increasingly on the move, and where this movement is full of historical and geo-social layerings and legacies of transit and encounter. Politicians’ calls to ‘ordinary people’ who are affected by immigration control are often
Chapter 6 Family and friends: witnessing deportation and hierarchies of (non-)citizenship The previous four chapters examined how and why Jason, Ricardo, Chris and Denico were deported. By describing processes of criminalisation, illegalisation and expulsion, I developed a critical account of immigration controls in contemporary Britain. In Jason’s chapter, I argued that deportation begins long before anyone gets on a plane, which means that immigration controls both produce and shape various forms of inequality within Britain. When discussing Ricardo
Deporting Black Britons provides an ethnographic account of deportation from the UK to Jamaica. It traces the painful stories of four men who were deported after receiving criminal convictions in the UK. For each of the men, all of whom had moved to the UK as children, deportation was lived as exile – from parents, partners, children and friends – and the book offers portraits of survival and hardship in both the UK and Jamaica. Based on over four years of research, Deporting Black Britons describes the human consequences of deportation, while situating deportation stories within the broader context of policy, ideology, law and violence. It examines the relationship between racism, criminalisation and immigration control in contemporary Britain, suggesting new ways of thinking about race, borders and citizenship in these anti-immigrant times. Ultimately, the book argues that these stories of exile and banishment should orient us in the struggle against violent immigration controls, in the UK and elsewhere.
experiences precipitated Ricardo’s deportation points to the connection between racist policing and immigration control. In this chapter, then, I build on the accounts of Ricardo and his friends to reflect on the dynamics of police racism in multi-status Britain. The chapter begins, however, in Mobay, where Ricardo and I got to know one another. Remembering Smethwick from Mobay The heart of Montego Bay (Mobay) is its bustling town centre: it is white hot, dirty and dusty, busy with people moving in every direction, with never enough pavement to accommodate the traffic. The
did we get to the point where deporting people from everything they know became both routine and unremarkable, and how can we best to situate deportation within a broader social and historical canvas? In short, why are ‘Black Britons’ being deported? Or, put differently, what is the preface to this book’s opening scene? This chapter is organised around some tentative answers to this deceptively simple question: how did we get here? Deportation nation11 For almost all of the twentieth century, deportation was seen as an exceptional form of immigration control in
-circuits’ between the themes of race and immigration control, while evoking the images of the nation, the British people and the destruction of ‘our culture, our way of life’.15 Tracing the genealogy of these memories allows us to analyse the continuities, fissures and contradictions of racism as an ideology which has coalesced around the symbolism of Powell. The rest of the chapter examines the survival processes of Powell’s memory and his partial rehabilitation from the wilderness. Death Powell often discussed his own death. Although in his later years Powell was pushed away
the unwanted and sick are warehoused in a country with no functioning welfare state – it is also a site of ‘humanitarian bordering’, and one which actively facilitates UK deportations.6 Importantly, Open Arms has been funded through the UK’s aid budget, as Official Development Assistance, and this reminds us that immigration controls are increasingly implemented through development and aid policy.7 This means that to situate deportation in wider political context, we need to think about contemporary meanings of development. As I demonstrate in what follows
immigration control in a more impressive light than the one that transpired. ‘Performance politics’, as discussed in the previous chapter, requires the state to put on convincing public displays that the ‘audience’ finds compelling. The performance of the border as a space of fear and potential violence has to infiltrate the public sphere, in this case with the help of the local media. While the performance politics of raids work to spread fear, this
strengthening of the State’s main immigration control agency, the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB), to a degree that had not been envisaged previously. The bureau was established in May 2000 amid what certain government figures described as a ‘flood’ of immigrants into Ireland. The new entity was placed under the authority of the assistant commissioner for national support services but directed by a