‘To Prevent Migrant Deaths, Labour Must Stop Courting Nationalism and Trying to Outdo the Conservatives on Immigration’

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 prevent Kenyan Asians with British passports from entering the UK and the Blair Government’s vast expansion of immigration detention.

It’s an approach that aims to attract right-wing voters by portraying the party as more responsive to the “legitimate concerns” of “ordinary working people” and more competent at enforcing immigration controls. 

This isn’t simply a misguided electoral strategy – something reflected in Labour’s lower overall vote count in this year’s general election (around 560,000 fewer votes than in the 2019 election, which was a catastrophic defeat) and in radical independent candidates winning numerous seats from Labour. This repeated capitulation to reactionary politics is symptomatic of just how extensively a deeply exclusionary nationalism permeates our society.

From a progressive perspective, courting nationalism (even under a polite facade of “patriotism”) is misguided because it fundamentally doesn’t work.

Not only is nationalism by its nature an exclusionary and homogenising process, but – as social scientists Marc Helbling, Tim Reeskens, and Matthew Wright demonstrate in their extensive comparative study – the mobilisation of “nice” nationalistic symbols or discourses consistently provides a platform for concurrent exclusionary, ethnicist, and violent manifestations of nationalism. 

It’s no coincidence that street-level racist and xenophobic violence from the far-right ramps up at the same time as the state’s own anti-migrant violence: something we saw this summer when the rioters chanted “Stop the boats!” while attacking asylum seeker accommodation.

More widely, accentuating nationalist rhetoric activates latent far-right tendencies in voters, empowering parties like Reform UK. This effect is amplified as more political parties adopt exclusionary outlooks.

Courting nationalism is also cowardly because it betrays the Labour leadership’s incapacitating fear of the Conservative press. Unless the escalation of anti-migrant bureaucracy is born from genuine bigotry (which can hardly be ruled out), the most viable explanation for the Government’s approach is that they’re attempting to curry favour with a media that wages war on migrants.

This is in line with their other policies, such as removing trans youth healthcare and freezing pensioners instead of taxing the rich.

That approach is doomed to fail.

The Conservative press didn’t endorse Labour in 2015 under Ed Miliband when the party brought out the infamous “Controls on Immigration” mugs, and The Telegraph responded to Cooper’s latest deportation announcements by calling the Government weak on immigration.

They and other right-wing newspapers like the Daily Mail will simply use Labour to further the persecution of migrants and reification of structural racism, then endorse the Conservatives at the next election anyway.

A sheep dressed as a wolf is still dinner. Our path forward as progressives should be to rediscover and affirm our history of working-class internationalism.

Labour members should organise within Constituency Labour Parties and trade union branches to pass motions in support of migrants and bring these into effect by mobilising for solidarity actions on our streets and in our workplaces.

The Labour Campaign for Free Movement is organising a demonstration outside Labour conference in Liverpool at 1pm on 22 September. This provides an opportunity to hold the party leadership to account and build a fightback.