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In the early hours of 15 September, eight more people drowned attempting to cross the Channel. But instead of looking to open safe and legal routes for asylum seekers, Keir Starmer has been in Rome for bilateral talks with Italy’s hard-right PM Georgia Meloni, hoping to learn from her country’s reduction of migrant arrivals.
Starmer has said the UK will contribute around €4.75 million to Meloni’s scheme to move asylum claim processing to third countries like Albania.
Meanwhile, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has pledged to carry out the highest rate of deportations since Theresa May was Prime Minister, aiming to remove over 14,500 irregular migrants in the next six months.
Cooper also plans to expand immigration detention capacity by reopening the controversial Haslar and Campsfield detention centres. Ironically, current Minister for Women and Equalities Anneliese Dodds celebrated Campsfield’s closure in 2018, noting at the time that it was “a bittersweet victory” given the “hostile environment seems to be getting even more hostile”.
This follows Cooper’s July announcement (written for The Sun) that 1,000 civil servants would be deployed to fast-track deportations of undocumented migrants. In that same piece, she announced a wave of immigration raids on businesses, including nail bars and car washes, believed to be exploiting irregular migrant labour and fuelling the trade of human trafficking gangs.
The Government’s plan is a violent assault on migrants, many of whom are refugees. As we’ve seen with forced returns to Afghanistan, Syria, Russia, and many other countries, sending back people who’ve fled for their lives is often a death sentence.
Even the most “humane” immigration controls require considerable state violence against migrants and marginalised communities.
However comforting it is to believe that immigration controls can be implemented with a light touch, they entail officers breaking down doors, tearing families apart, pushing people into vans, and depriving them of basic liberties until they’re forcibly sent to another country.
This is why the Government’s framing of its policies as saving vulnerable migrants by stopping smuggling gangs rings hollow.
As Amélie Moyart of the French charity Utopia 56 observes, increased police enforcement on the Northern French coast hasn’t reduced people’s demand for boats to cross the Channel: it’s simply meant fewer boats and more people in each, with the average number loaded on by smugglers rising from about 40 to “60 at least”. This increases the chances of lethal accidents at sea.
More broadly, numerous researchers, including Neil Howard and Garrett Nagaishi, have strongly criticised the “raid and rescue” approach to combatting human trafficking.
From Brazil to Vietnam to the US, this body of research finds that raid and rescue missions fail to address the real sources of exploitation, misleadingly promote clear-cut victim/criminal dichotomies, and often leave forced rescuees in a prolonged state of detention against their will – something they frequently experience as a kind of “secondary trafficking”.
So, far from safeguarding vulnerable migrants from exploitation, the kind of law-and-order approach that the Starmer Government has adopted catches migrants in the line of fire.
An undocumented migrant working for poverty wages won’t feel “rescued” or “protected” by police or immigration enforcement officers entering their workplace, discovering their immigration status, and (often literally) dragging them into the Kafkaesque nightmare of the detention and deportation system.
Further, just the possibility of deportation leaves migrants open to greater exploitation, unable to come forward through fear of state violence.
The Government’s latest turn is far from an isolated incident. It fits a much longer pattern of Labour trying to outdo the Conservatives on immigration. This pattern includes the Wilson Government’s passing of the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1968 to