ASA Globalog

A few thoughts on the immigration industry and the politics of scholarship

Dr Imogen Tyler, Sociology Department, Lancaster University, UK.

British Borders

“My name is Fatmata and I come from Sierra Leone. I left my country because of the problems I had with my family. I claimed asylum when I arrived at the airport [...] I was taken to Tinsley [Immigration removal centre] and then to Yarl’s Wood [immigration removal centre]. The Home Office said they would provide me a solicitor but he only came once. My case was still pending when I was taken to the airport for removal, so I was brought back to Yarl’s Wood. But then it was refused at the High Court, so they scheduled my removal [...]. When that day came I was seriously sick. I was 26 weeks pregnant [...] Then they came to take me, but I was not well, I couldn’t even walk. A different officer came, he told me to get up, but I was so sick I couldn’t. Then he told my room-mate to get out, but she protested and refused to leave. The manager called seven officers to come to my room. They took my room-mate to a cell. One officer lifted my feet onto the floor; one hit me; one held my head down and I was dragged out of the room. [...] After that I was released from detention, and I gave birth on 2nd January. And now I have to report once a week in Old Street. I can’t afford to go and sign, I can’t afford the travel costs, because I’m destitute and I get no benefits, nothing. [...] If I go back to Sierra Leone I’m sure my parents will kill me, so I have nowhere to go.[...] My father raped me. He beat me mercilessly. And when people tried to come to my aid he told them “I’ve just caught her with men outside”. I had to leave again. I had a distant relative in England. I contacted this uncle and asked him to send me an invitation to come. He accepted and sent me this. We arranged that he would contact me when I arrived but we have never communicated. I have nowhere to go. Now I don’t have any support here. At times I just feel like killing myself. I’m tired. It’s so difficult. I’m really suffering”.

(Fatmata, 23 years old, was detained for six months in 2007 in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, she is likely to be taken back into detention with her baby and deported.) Interview by Helen Raynsford.

Since 1989 the Institute for Race Relations, an independent educational charity based in Britain, has been documenting the deaths of asylum seekers and undocumented ‘illegal immigrants’ who have died in Britain or attempting to reach here. A report, entitled ‘Driven to Desperate Measures’ lists the names (if known) of 221 migrants and details the ways in which these individuals died; many are recorded as suicides.

In July 2007, British Immigration Minster Liam Byrne presented an extraordinary paper entitled ‘Border Security and Immigration: Our Deal for Delivery in 2008’ in which he announced that one `failed asylum seeker’ is deported every eight minutes. He promises to improve vastly on this `performance target’ with further massive expansion of Britain’s detention estate. In January 2008 the same minister reversed previous government policy in a statement which suggests that the government will begin to deport the two thousand unaccompanied ‘failed’ child asylum-seekers who arrive in the UK each year. These policies, Byrne argued, are necessary to keep `Britain safe in an era of global movement’.

The detention of people subject to migration control in Britain was first codified under the 1920 Aliens Act and elaborated in the 1971 Immigration Act. Britain now has more wide-ranging powers than any other European nation to imprison asylum seekers. The detention of asylum seekers is ‘a phenomenon that may seem to some to be almost a contradiction in terms’ as ‘social convention in many societies has frequently dictated that a stranger with no hostile intent, or in a condition of distress, should be met with hospitality rather than with the prospect of incarceration’ (Robin Cohen, 1994: 99). In contemporary Britain the very act of seeking asylum has effectively been criminalised. This shift in the meaning of ‘asylum’ is not unique to Britain, of course. As Derek Gregory and Allan Pred note “affluent states now routinely fortify their borders against the threat of unwanted peoples, often the surplus residue of their own neo-liberal and military adventures and the physical architectures that are involved—walls, fence, detention centers and the like—depend on a spatio-legal strategies” (2007 4).

Current capacity of detention spaces across the estate:

Campsfield, Oxford: 215

Dover: 316

Dungavel, Prestwick: 188 (male, female & family)

Harmondsworth, Heathrow: 259

Haslar, Portsmouth: 160

Lindholme, S Yorkshire: 112

Oakington, Cambridge: 352

Tinsley House, Gatwick: 146 (male, female & family)

Yarl’s Wood, Bedford: 405 (female & family)

Colnbrook, Heathrow: 313 (plus 40 STHF)

TOTAL: 2,506

http://nds.coi.gov.uk/Content/Detail.asp?ReleaseID=302003&NewsAreaID=2

Seven of these immigrant prisons are run by private companies for profit under contract to the Home Office. A new detention centre is currently being built under a private finance agreement- the massive Brook House near Gatwick, which will open in 2008. Britain is the only EU state which has no legal limit on detention- there are documented cases of people held for over three years. Amnesty International estimated the number of people detained in immigration centres in the UK during 2003 to be 27,000, at least two thousand of whom were children. (see also Tyler, 2006)

The immigration detention industry is a global billion-dollar business, one profitable part of a massive ‘industrial corrections complex’. In Australia, Europe and the United States the same multinational corporations compete for lucrative government contracts to build detention centres and lock up immigrants with global banks, investment funds and airlines lining up for a slice of the action. Indeed, detention policies and practice in the UK are driven by corporate interests. Indeed, the expansion of the detention estate is not based solely on ever-restrictive state-based asylum laws and policies, but must also be understood as a global business in which corporations compete to win and maintain contracts. Profit margins improve year on year through an increase in `turn-over’: keeping detainees on the move, keeping facilities full to capacity and increasing the number of deportations.

European Borders

Since 2002, the European ‘wing’ of the international activist network, noborders, has been collating news reports of incidents when dead would-be migrants have been found – mainly bodies found at sea, or washed up on European beaches. This list of the dead is composed of links to news stories which report 2,909 deaths to date. These news reports are short, often vague and reveal few details about the deceased:

06.Jun.08: In the last few days 8 dead bodies of migrants were found in the sea around Lampedusa as well as on beaches in Lampedusa and Sicily. It is believed that they drowned when one or more boats sank during the passage from the North African coast. (source: AGI news)

As the deaths of individual or small groups of immigrants are not considered `newsworthy`, noborders concede that their list represents only a tiny percentage of the large numbers of migrants who die on sea-crossings to Europe.

Figure 1. The body of an unidentified would-be immigrant lies covered on the beach of Solana Matorral, the Canary Islands. (BBC News)

A longer list of dead immigrants exists on a website produced by `UNITED for Intercultural Action` a pan-European anti-racist network which has been documenting deaths since 1993. In an project it describes as ‘the Fatal Realities of Fortress Europe’ it produces a database of the dead, which, at the time of writing contains details 11,105 immigrant deaths.-within and between European borders.

These lists offer only a glimpse of the scale of the horror. For example, it has been suggested that up to 6,000 people are killed each year attempting the perilous 2,000-kilometre sea crossing from North Africa to the Canary Islands alone. Most are never found, dead or alive, and those that survive can remain in detention for years. According to human rights watch the hundreds of unaccompanied children in detention camps in the Canaries are living in ’squalid, overcrowded conditions` and are at high `risk of abuse from their custodians and other children’. (The Canary Islands is one of the most popular holiday destinations for wealthy Europeans, with an estimated 10 million visitors per year).

Figure 2. Tenerife Tourists Tourists help migrants

In order to deter unwanted travellers to the Canaries, Spain has acquired European funding to step up sea patrols (mainly through Frontex, the EU border security agency ). It has also built a series of extraordinary electrified walls around the Spanish ports of Ceuta and Melilla on the North African mainland. One consequence of this is that African migrants now take much longer and more dangerous routes across the sea . As one newspaper report recently put in, the bodies of African immigrants are piling up around sunbathers.

Figure 3: Tenerife Tourists help Migrants

Of course the number of immigration detention centres within the EU and in bordering states has been rapidly increasing . Outside of Europe, activists and humanitarian networks around the globe are involved in the kinds of documentation, data collection and memorialisation described above. To take just one example, the US based organisation, ‘No More Deaths No Más Muertes’ compiles lists of migrant deaths on the US/Mexican border where several hundred immigrants die each year. [video] Meanwhile, since 2001 the US has incrementally increased its immigration detention estate: the number of people detained in immigration cases has more than tripled since 2001 with at least 33,000 immigrants in custody at any one time.

So what can be made of this kind of data? These incomplete and fragmentary accounts of the missing, the imprisoned, the dying and the dead offer us only a glimpse of the abject underside of global immigration debates. This incoherent archive of ‘facts’, snatched photographs, blogs, lists, news reports, maps and humanitarian reports from a few of the world’s borders haunt the reader with the knowledge that many more immigrant lives and deaths remain undocumented, and this is perhaps what grants this archival material its particular affective power. At the very least it reminds “us” that immigration is about people, and, as Kathryn Cronin suggests in her blog, is about journeys once told but now unheard in the context of nationalistic (and increasingly regionalistic) governmental rhetoric and corporate news media (See Bennett 2008).

The Politics of Immigration Scholarship

Some questions then: What role should or could academic scholarship have in effecting and shaping public debates about immigration? How can scholarship produce alternative (and resistant) accounts and knowledges of immigration? What is the relationship between scholarship and political practice, particularly the kinds of local and trans-national activist practices which characterise movements such as noborders? What is the place/space for immigrant protest and politics within these debates?

In her blog ‘Who belongs where? A Global Power Perspective on Migration’ Professor Nina Glick Schiller focuses on the inadequacies of contemporary `migration scholarship`. She criticises the ways in which ‘methodological nationalism’ underpins this area of enquiry. As she states:

“There has been little conceptual room in this scholarship for tracing and theorizing networks that extend into, are shaped by, and shape particular localities. Nor has there been sufficient conceptualization of the relationship between transnational social fields that extend between localities, the neoliberal restructuring of specific places, and the current restructuring of migration policy and rhetoric”.

Glick Schiller’s central point is that a focus on `the state` limits the ability of scholars to fully comprehend the global structures and local complexities of immigration. She argues that we will only be able to open up the immigration debate and fully interrogate and explore migration in all its contradictory global permutations, if there is a change in methods of enquiry. Scholars need to move away from ‘national frames’ and place much more of an emphasis on the shifting relationship between the local and the global. She suggests that it is only the emergence of more thoroughly trans-national methodologies or ‘g-local’ ways of thinking that will be able produce effective scholarship in this area. As she writes:

By paying more attention to locality in migration studies we can also understand the seeming contradictory national anti-immigrant discourses, the celebration of migrant remittances by global financial institutions, the policies that divide global talent from the apparently unwashed and unwanted and the significant role played by immigrants in specific cities”.

In short, Glick Schiller calls for what she terms `a global power perspective on migration’ in which we can account for the ways in which migrant and native experiences are `simultaneously transnational, globally reconfigured, and place-based`. But how does this translate in terms of research methods, design and practice, in terms of making an intervention?

I agree that the local specificities of immigrant experience need to be understood in dialogue with wider trans-national perspectives. However, we also need to reflect carefully on what is meant by `the global` and `the trans-national`, both highly over-determined categories. Many humanitarian organisations networks already operate within a ‘g-local’ logic and yet they remain complicit with neo-liberal agendas at both national, regional and global levels. Moving `beyond the state` is, perhaps, not enough and can in some instances be a way of veiling local operations of state violence. The state can also be an important site of resistance. There is an urgent need for multiple perspectives to map and make sense of contradictions of anti and pro-immigration rhetoric, but scholars also need to explore in much more depth the economics which fuels this rhetoric: the desire for cheap and skilled labour and the interests of global corporations in escalating immigration detention and border security technologies. Here a consideration of the role of global corporations needs to take account of the intimate relationships between states and corporations and the ‘intricacies’ of public-private financial arrangements. The same companies who are building and running detention centres, are operating our state prisons, schools, hospitals and even parts of our universities.

What is also needed is more reflection on broader epistemological and political questions. What is immigration or migration studies? Whom is it for? What do those of us enagaged in this work hope or imagine it might do in terms, for example, of producing alternative forms of knowledge about the world or intervening into wider public debates? Research as pedagogy. What too often remains implicit is the relationship between the politics of research (desire for political change) and research design, practice and methods. If one wanted to really want to get more `radical’ here, why not look outside of academia for methods which might produce the kind of transformations in perspective required to produce alternative ways of thinking about immigration.

A suggestion: To begin with, there could be much more engagement with the radical anti-state activism of the political networks and groups who often gather under the umbrella of the international noborders network. The methods which characterize noborders activism and anti-deportation activism, offer immigration scholars resources for rethinking research design and practices, particularly in terms of how immigrants can play a central role in the research process. In order to effectively critique immigration rhetoric, there needs to be more collaborative forms of knowledge production. Direct forms of collaboration between migrants, activists and scholars are already underway. The first noborders camp in the UK in 2007, hosted a ‘migrating university’ in which academics and activists collaborated to exchange ideas. These are small sites of change which perhaps shouldn’t be over invested with political hope. Nevertheless, immigrant/activist/scholar collaborations within local communities and at protest camps and conferences around the world are shaping new debates. Moreover, these collaborations are increasingly impacting on university curricula; with new postgraduate courses in political activism (see the new Leeds, UK-based MA in activism and social change ).

Who speaks? Who listens? Immigrant Subjectivities

So what about the role of immigrants in the research process? Are they only to figure as abject others? As lists of the dead, or silent invisible populations moving among us, but unable to speak out? In her blog, Cronin points to the ways in which ‘the law’ as a field of knowledge and discipline silences immigrant voices- they simply cannot be heard. As she notes, `we have little evidence concerning our understanding of how the immigrant’s experience [their] journeys and we have no real accounts of how immigrants cope with their reception in places of arrival’. One of the risks of scholarly work is that it becomes another site in which the migrant is produced as an other, as an object to be researched, `uncovered`, and exchanged. (As here in this blog, with its lists of the dead, with accounts of people who have no chance here to speak for themselves). If analogy, generalization and abstraction take the place of listening and translation in research about immigration then what is ultimately foreclosed is the subjectivity of immigrants themselves, abjected once more.

On a more positive note, whilst the interim findings of the British Independent Asylum Commission are extremely bleak, the methods by which they have distributed their findings are inspiring. For example, collaboration with human rights TV has enabled the testimonies of asylum-seekers and other citizens and non-citizens to be watched or listened to online. This commission, however ineffective it may prove to be in generating political pressure for change, has created a unique space for recent immigrants to Britain to tell their stories and to protest. We might also look to Glasgow and the community activism and anti-deportation movements on estates like the Kingsway Estate, or to the students in Leeds and Manchester having ‘sleep-outs’ on the street to protest at the enforced destitution of refused asylum-seekers, and to theatres and art galleries across Britain, in which actors, artists, immigrants and activists are collaborating in plays and monologues about their journeys and lives, and the emergence of online blogs and video diaries made by immigrants. Of course, visibility of any kind comes with risks (as many of the failed asylum seekers who have become involved in local activism and then been targeted by immigration officials have found out), but I want to end hopefully by suggesting that collaboration can not only begin to expose the abject underside of mainstream immigration debate but, as Peter Nyers (2006) suggests, challenges preconceived notions of who can speak with a political voice.

Figure 4: Stop The War

References

Robin Cohen (1994)Frontiers of identity: the British and the others, Longman

Derek Gregory and Allan Pred eds. (2007) Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence New York and. London: Routledge.

Peter Nyers (2006) Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency, New York and London, Routledge.

Bruce Bennett and Imogen Tyler (2008) `Screening Unliveable Lives: The Cinema of Borders’ in Anikó Imre, Katarzyna Marciniak, Áine O’Healy (eds.) Transnational Feminist Encounters in Film and Media. Palgrave Macmillan, New York: 21-36.

Imogen Tyler (2006)`”Welcome to Britain”: The Cultural Politics of Asylum’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 9: 185-202.