Hostile Homes: Violence, Harm and the Marketisation of UK Asylum Housing (Critical Criminological Perspectives) 3030792129, 9783030792121

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CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

Hostile Homes Violence, Harm and the Marketisation of UK Asylum Housing

Steven A. Hirschler

Critical Criminological Perspectives

Series Editors Reece Walters Faculty of Law Deakin University Burwood, VIC, Australia Deborah H. Drake Department of Social Policy & Criminology The Open University Milton Keynes, UK

The Palgrave Critical Criminological Perspectives book series aims to showcase the importance of critical criminological thinking when examining problems of crime, social harm and criminal and social justice. Critical perspectives have been instrumental in creating new research agendas and areas of criminological interest. By challenging state defined concepts of crime and rejecting positive analyses of criminality, critical criminological approaches continually push the boundaries and scope of criminology, creating new areas of focus and developing new ways of thinking about, and responding to, issues of social concern at local, national and global levels. Recent years have witnessed a flourishing of critical criminological narratives and this series seeks to capture the original and innovative ways that these discourses are engaging with contemporary issues of crime and justice. For further information on the series and to submit a proposal for consideration, please get in touch with the Editor: Josephine Taylor, [email protected]. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14932

Steven A. Hirschler

Hostile Homes Violence, Harm and the Marketisation of UK Asylum Housing

Steven A. Hirschler Department of Social Sciences York St John University York, UK

ISSN 2731-0604     ISSN 2731-0612 (electronic) Critical Criminological Perspectives ISBN 978-3-030-79212-1    ISBN 978-3-030-79213-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79213-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the residents who shared their dispersed accommodation experiences as well as the workers and volunteers within the refugee and asylum seeker support sector who offer aid and enrichment to those seeking sanctuary in the United Kingdom. He dedicates this book to all displaced persons and to the memory of his father, William, whose capacity for empathy and kindness is profoundly missed. The author thanks his spouse, Lydia, her family, his mother, Patricia, and brother, Michael, for their ceaseless support. He is humbled by Esme Madill’s dedication to humanitarianism, and he is grateful to Professor Simon Parker for his many years of friendship and guidance. He thanks Dr Alana Barton, Dr Howard Davis and Associate Professor Oliver Smith for their encouragement and good humour, and he extends his gratitude to the editors at Palgrave Macmillan, including Josephine Taylor and Liam Inscoe-Jones, for their supportive attitudes and generous accommodations during a period of personal and universal uncertainty associated with a global pandemic.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Britain’s Legacy of Inhospitality and Violence Towards Immigrants 17 3 From ‘Crimmigration’ to Governmentality: Theoretical Perspectives on the Management and Marketisation of Immigration Control 51 4 The Asylum ‘Market’: Deportation, Detention and the Privatisation of Dispersed Accommodation 95 5 Hostile Environments: Life Within Privatised Dispersed Housing137 6 The Role of Third Sector Organisations and Concluding Remarks171 Index187

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In January 2021, recently arrived refugees seeking asylum in the United Kingdom were moved from their existing accommodation in former army barracks to regional hotels after they were exposed to an outbreak of the COVID-19 virus that spread throughout the repurposed military facility, which had not been used to accommodate military personnel for over a decade and had previously been deemed unsuitable for long-term accommodation (Grierson, 2021a, c). Nevertheless, correspondence between the Home Office and one of its contractors, Clearsprings Ready Homes, revealed that the agency intended to continue using the barracks for accommodating asylum seekers, leading the Scottish National Party MP, Stuart McDonald, to state that ‘[t]he whole Home Office machine is hell-bent on ensuring life for people seeking refuge is as miserable as possible in the hope it will put off others from applying for refugee status’ (quoted in Grierson, 2021b). Asylum seekers were accommodated within hotels and other facilities around the country during the coronavirus pandemic due to the inability of the Home Office to source adequate accommodation, and because it had determined that those whose applications for asylum had been rejected and whose appeals had been unsuccessful should be denied accommodation support under its dispersal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. A. Hirschler, Hostile Homes, Critical Criminological Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79213-8_1

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scheme for destitute asylum seekers (Home Office, 2020). A case launched in the High Court accused the Home Office of subjecting asylum seekers accommodated within hotels to a 23-hour ‘unlawful’ curfew, which resulted in the isolation and re-traumatisation of vulnerable people and those seeking refuge from persecution, abuse and state harm in their countries of origin (Bulman, 2021; Taylor, 2021). Under the extraordinary circumstances of a global pandemic, these examples of the state’s treatment of asylum seekers might otherwise be viewed as an exceptional and unfortunate outcome of the unforeseen strains impacting virtually every institution, business and individual throughout society. However, there is nothing particularly unprecedented about the state’s approach to the management of asylum seekers’ accommodation during the coronavirus pandemic or its willingness to expose asylum seekers to harm as a means of dissuading future arrivals and to encourage the return of those already present within the country. Britain’s legacy of inhospitality towards populations seeking refuge in the country stretches back centuries. From the isolation and ultimate expulsion of England’s Jewish population in 1290 and the criminalisation of French refugees in the eighteenth century to the subjection of twenty-first century asylum claimants to the isolating and unhygienic conditions of dispersed asylum housing, the UK has demonstrated its capacity to directly and indirectly contribute to the injury, distress, trauma and diminished life chances of those it is bound to protect under the European Convention on Human Rights and, by extension, the Human Rights Act 1998. This book explores the role of the state and private organisations in contributing to the harm of asylum seekers through the implementation of deliberate policies and practices of destitution, exclusion and neglect. Through a synthesis of historic and contemporary public policy, experiential accounts of asylum seekers living in dispersed asylum accommodation, and criminological, sociological and political theory, this text exposes the complex and co-dependent relationship between the state’s social control aims and neoliberal imperatives of market expansion into the immigration control regime. As Home Secretary, Theresa May proposed an immigration bill that would foster a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants (Travis, 2013). That bill, which was later passed as the Immigration Act 2014, limited immigrants’ appeal decisions and

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streamlined the removal of migrants the Home Office deemed to be illegally present within the United Kingdom (Gower, 2015). While the Home Office has attempted to reframe its ‘hostile environment’ as a ‘compliant environment’ (Walsh, 2020, p. 6), its aggressive approach to the management of immigrant and asylum-seeking populations reveals that its policies have in effect extended to those legally residing within the United Kingdom (Webber, 2019). The decision to deport the descendants of the so-called Windrush generation, a population of immigrants that arrived in Britain from the Commonwealth following the Second World War to fulfil the country’s aim of strengthening its industries and economy, evidenced the state’s willingness to disregard reasonable claims of residency to pursue its punitive and unrelenting border control practices (Taylor, 2020). Alongside this policy approach, the UK government has become increasingly reliant on its contracts with private security firms like G4S and Serco to carry out its immigration control functions, such as operating immigration removal centres, accompanying migrants on deportation flights and managing dispersed accommodation for destitute asylum seekers provided under Sections 4 and 95 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 (Tyler et  al., 2014; Athwal, 2015; Darling, 2016b). Through an examination of the expanded marketisation of dispersed asylum housing, this book explores the lived realities of ‘hostile environments’ as asylum seekers’ accounts reveal the impacts of the privatisation of asylum accommodation. While the contractual failings of firms outsourced to provide accommodation to dispersed asylum seekers have been addressed within official investigations, such as those conducted by the National Audit Office (2014, 2020) and the Home Affairs Select Committee (House of Commons, 2017), as well as a range of academic literature (Darling, 2016a, b; Alonso & Andrews, 2021; Hill et al., 2021), inclusion of asylum seekers’ own accounts of their accommodation experiences has largely been isolated to investigative reporting on the conditions within dispersed housing (Grayson, 2012, 2018; Robertson, 2013; Bulman, 2020). In its 2014 report on the status of dispersed asylum housing, the National Audit Office (2014, para. 3.17) explains that neither the Home Office nor its contracted providers, including G4S and Serco, had conducted ‘any surveys or focus groups with service users to look at their

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experiences under the new contracts’. Bosworth and Guild (2008, p. 706) note that scholarship directly incorporating asylum seekers’ views is relatively sparse, stating: ‘Impeded by the rapid pace with which most foreigners are processed, […] few scholars have gathered the subjective experiences of the most vulnerable migrants’. Drawing on research findings from the author’s doctoral thesis, this book fills an evidentiary gap by incorporating anonymised qualitative interview data from 26 asylum seekers with experience living within privatised dispersed accommodation in one of three dispersal areas, including the North East of England, West Yorkshire and Glasgow. It also includes the perspectives of anonymised third sector volunteers and workers supporting asylum seekers and refugees in each of these regions. Interviews were conducted in 2013 following the transition from the ‘National Asylum Support Service’ (NASS), a series of contracts agreed between the Home Office and various consortia of local authorities, housing associations and private landlords, to the fully privatised ‘Commercial and Operational Managers Procuring Asylum Support Services’ (COMPASS) programme, which included private security firms like G4S and Serco as primary contractors with smaller accommodation firms operating as subcontractors. Asylum seekers’ narratives reveal the extent to which dispersed accommodation provided through G4S and Serco represented a novel and expanding site of hostility within which value is derived from residents’ continued destitution and institutionally enforced exclusion. This text explores the experiential effects of outsourcing the accommodation and care of asylum seekers to security firms that have been scrutinised for their questionable treatment of asylum seekers and deportees in their care (Lusher, 2014; Busby, 2019), instances of major fraud (Chapman, 2019; Davies, 2020) and their inability to meet other contractual obligations, including G4S’s failure to provide adequate security at the 2012 Olympics (Gledhill, 2012). While the COMPASS contracts were subsequently replaced by the Asylum Accommodation and Support Services Contracts (AASC) and G4S was abandoned as an accommodation provider in 2019, similar problems exist under the new regime, as asylum seekers continue to be housed within substandard accommodation exposing them to physical and mental health ailments, and as they continue to be dispersed to the

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periphery of asylum dispersal regions, isolated from essential services and important social and support networks (National Audit Office, 2020). Criminology is a multidisciplinary subject and critical approaches require the incorporation of a wide range of related academic perspectives ranging from sociology and political science to biology and psychology. Criminology’s historic preoccupation with interpersonal violence and ‘crime’ as defined by states seemingly limits the scope of the discipline’s ability to address asylum seekers’ exposure to harm within the United Kingdom’s border control regime. However, critical criminological perspectives help reframe the violence of the state within the context of structural and institutional harm, bypassing the need for a reliance on the state’s definition of what constitutes a crime. This work is embedded within a zemiological perspective, as the violence of the state and its asylum housing contractors can be understood as a demonstration of harm despite not necessarily being classified as criminal. As Boukli and Kotzé (2018, p. 4) writing in this series note, zemiology allows for the analysis of ‘various structurally induced harms and the harms endured and perpetrated by those victimised by the capitalist system and its hegemonic vicissitudes’. The application of ‘harm’ to the study of the United Kingdom’s marketised asylum accommodation programme therefore seems appropriate, as it facilitates a meaningful analysis of the impacts of the state’s profit-driven asylum accommodation model, which prioritises neoliberal imperatives over concerted attention to residents’ welfare. Canning (2018) suggests that zemiology can help fill in the gaps of a strictly criminological approach to border studies, as it allows for a more nuanced reflection on the distinctions between prisons and immigration detention, while allowing researchers to overcome criminology’s inability to ‘escape the dictatorial definitions of crime and criminality set by the State’ (Hillyard, 2013 quoted in Canning, 2018, p. 190). New directions in victimology also facilitate a more meaningful examination of the treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers within the apparatuses of the immigration control regime. For instance, Kauzlarich et al. (2001) argue that the study of victims should extend beyond those defined as victims’ interpersonal harm and state-defined crime. Drawing on the work of critical criminologists like Quinney and Frieddrichs, the authors suggest that the state facilitates structural inequality leading to

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differential experiences and outcomes for marginalised groups. They state that ‘the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, and women are explicitly or tacitly victimized by the state partly because of its support of larger structural and cultural definitions of work, status, power, authority, and prestige’ (ibid., p.  176). The authors remain wedded to a more traditional view of crime that is associated with a violation of domestic or international law as evidenced in their proposed definition of a victim of state crime, which includes ‘individuals or groups of individuals who have experienced economic, cultural, or physical harm, pain, exclusion, or exploitation because of tacit or explicit state actions or policies which violate law or generally defined human rights’ (Kauzlarich, 1995 quoted in ibid., p. 176). Still, in conjunction with zemiology, an expanded conceptualisation of victimisation is helpful in illustrating the state’s role in exacerbating asylum seekers’ pre-existing trauma by subjecting them to heightened levels of surveillance, threatening them with deportation, exposing them to the extreme conditions of immigration detention and isolating them from communities, amenities and support networks via the state’s no-choice dispersal policy. Alongside the adoption of more systemic conceptualisations of harm and victimisation, the examination of the state’s treatment of asylum seekers and the conditions of their dispersed housing are grounded within a broader conceptualisation of violence than is typically adopted within traditional criminal justice narratives or in popular imaginings and representations of interpersonal harm. Galtung (1969) proposes that some of the most harmful forms of violence in terms of the scope and severity of victimisation are seldom instances of interpersonal or ‘direct’ violence occurring between individuals. Instead, structural violence pervades societies, institutions and individual subjectivities and is identifiable as widespread inequality, discrimination and diminished opportunities. Galtung explains that violence occurs when resources are unevenly distributed, incomes are unequal, access to education is imbalanced and medical care is not accessible to all evenly (Galtung, 1969, p. 171). The key difference between direct violence and structural violence is that the former involves ‘a clear subject-object relation [and] is manifest because it is visible as action’ whereas the latter may be difficult to perceive, as victims and perpetrators may not be easily identifiable (ibid., p. 171). Structural violence

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can therefore be imagined as a series of outcomes arising from an unequal ‘distribution of wealth and power’ (Galtung & Höivik, 1971, p.  73). Galtung suggests that the societal preoccupation with direct interpersonal violence is understandable, as it is clearly visible, but that direct violence is so ingrained within social, political and economic norms that it is almost imperceptible most of the time. Galtung (original emphasis, 1969, p. 173) states: Personal violence shows. […] Personal violence represents change and dynamism—not only ripples on waves, but waves on otherwise tranquil waters. Structural violence is silent, it does not show—it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters. In a static society, personal violence will be registered, whereas structural violence may be seen as about as natural as the air around us.

Given the broad range of harm addressed by structural violence, the concept has been employed in research ranging from the indirect violence committed by states during wartime (Le Billon, 2001) to analyses of women’s exposure to online harassment and misogyny (Barker & Jurasz, 2019). Within the context of border studies, Canning (2017) incorporates structural violence into her analysis of the gendered harm within Britain’s asylum system, and Campbell (2020) argues that the structural violence endured by asylum-seeking children represents a form of state harm, as their development and freedoms are inhibited by the bureaucratised immigration control environment. In this book, the concept of structural violence is the foundation of the investigation of asylum seekers’ experiences in the United Kingdom and specifically within dispersed accommodation. It is reflected in the diminished educational opportunities for children who are moved from established schools due to contactors’ prioritisation of sourcing cheap, available accommodation. Violence occurs when asylum seekers’ complaints about unhygienic conditions or disrepair go unanswered or dismissed by accommodation staff, and it is evidenced in the despair and depression expressed by dispersed residents who feel isolated and abandoned within the state’s dispersal programme. This book begins with an exploration of the United Kingdom’s legacy of inhospitality and violence—both direct and structural—towards

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immigrants to situate the modern treatment of asylum seekers within the context of historical antipathy towards migrant groups, including those seeking refuge within Britain’s borders. Within accounts of the development of the United Kingdom’s immigration control regime over time, it is typical to begin with the Aliens Act 1905, which introduced restrictions on the entry of foreigners, particularly Jewish immigrants entering from Eastern Europe and Russia (Pellew, 1989; Wray, 2006; Bashford & McAdam, 2014; Bhui, 2016). The influence of earlier legislation, such as the Aliens Act 1793, is less common in descriptions of advancements in the United Kingdom’s social control objectives, but the circumstances surrounding its debate and enactment are highlighted here, as it established early precedents still in use today, such as requirements that immigrants register with the police, the imposition of fines on carriers transporting immigrants without proper identification and an expansion of the country’s use of deportation to remove migrants deemed to be ‘illegal’. It is more atypical still to extend the analysis of immigration control histories back to medieval England and Edward I’s expulsion of the English Jewish population following a century of discrimination, marginalisation, isolation and enforced deprivation. However, notable parallels between the treatment of England’s medieval Jewish community and modern Britain’s structural violence towards asylum seekers, including their isolation in designated areas of the country, limitations on employment and forced deportation, demonstrate the continued relevance of examining this period. These explorations of early legislative developments in the country’s more distant past are followed by an examination of more recent legislation, including the precedent set by the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919, which extended the exceptional containment and restrictions placed on immigrants during the First World War into peacetime. Its provisions were made permanent in the Immigration Act 1971. This chapter concludes with an examination of the embedded racism, discrimination and violence underpinning the immigration legislation of the 1960s, which culminated in the 1971 Act, and it also addresses the role of racialised conceptions of British identity in the establishment of the British Nationality Act 1981. The third chapter begins with a review of modern legislation used to manage the asylum-seeking population and control its movements both

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within and outside the UK borders. This progresses into an analysis of some of the key theoretical positions employed in the examination of asylum seekers’ exceptional treatment by the state. It begins with the ‘crimmigration’ narrative first advanced by Stumpf (2006) and then expanded and adapted by others (Aas, 2013; Kaufman, 2013; Canning, 2018) as a way of highlighting the convergence of crime control tactics, institutions and attitudes with immigration control practices. The extension of criminal law into the management of persons subject to immigration control is one example of ‘crimmigration’ in practice, but it is also evident in the conflation of ‘immigrant’ and ‘criminal’ within popular media accounts of asylum seekers and within the political discourse underpinning the development of immigration legislation and policy. This serves to legitimise extreme immigration control measures, such as indefinite detention, violent deportations and asylum seekers’ exposure to harm within dispersed housing. The second half of this chapter examines the appropriateness of adopting Agamben’s (1998, 2005) interpretations of concepts like ‘bare life’ and ‘homo sacer’ in the study of the state’s role in victimising asylum seekers and other migrants through sovereign mechanisms of control and in using the law as a way of circumventing humanitarian responsibilities. Returning to Foucault’s (1998, 2004, 2007) concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘governmentality’, this chapter ends with the contention that Agamben’s misrepresentations of Foucault’s ideas limit the utility of Agamben’s arguments, whereas Foucault’s articulation of power as diffuse and the state’s aim to ‘protect’ society—often at the expense of others allowed to wither and die—offer a much more promising theoretical approach, as they allow for the possibility of agency and resistance within highly controlled environments. Chapter 4 examines the triangulation of control exerted on asylum seekers through state mechanisms of deportation, detention and dispersed accommodation (Schuster, 2005), and it specifically addresses the impacts of the privatisation of each of these services. It explores the involvement of private security firms, like G4S and Serco, in the management of immigration removal centres and accompanying prisoners during deportation. Asylum seekers’ experiences of re-traumatisation, self-harm, suicide, racist discrimination and physical and emotional abuse within detention and deportation reflect systemic neglect and

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violence within the institutional cultures of private security firms and the Home Office. Drawing on Esposito’s (2008, 2013) concept of ‘immunisation’, this chapter explores the extent to which private security’s involvement in the management of immigration removal centres embodies a logic of inoculating citizens from the perceived threat of the outsider. Countering Hollifield’s ‘liberal paradox’ (Hollifield, 2004; Hollifield et  al., 2008), which suggests an inherent incompatibility between the liberal state’s duelling aims of promoting the free market while restricting immigration, it is proposed that the inclusion of private security firms within immigration control markets in fact represents a synergy of these two seemingly divergent aims. The second half of this chapter explores the entry of firms like G4S and Serco in the management of the United Kingdom’s dispersed accommodation for asylum seekers, a policy introduced within the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 to ostensibly ‘ease the burden’ on local authorities in the South East and London that had taken on the brunt of support provision for asylum-seeking residents. Through an examination of conditions prior to the privatised COMPASS dispersal regime and the mismanagement of the dispersal contracts by G4S and Serco, this section identifies the extensive harm and victimisation asylum seekers were exposed to in dispersal areas under the management of private security firms. Chapter 5 features dispersed residents’ accounts of their experiences within COMPASS accommodation. It begins with an examination of the physical deterioration of dispersal properties and asylum seekers’ stories of the physical and mental impacts of living in damp, unsanitary, insect-­ infested properties as private contractors prioritised the procurement of inexpensive, undesirable accommodation to expedite the transition from NASS and to pursue profit at the expense of residents’ wellbeing. Residents’ previous exposure to extreme trauma in countries of origin, throughout the asylum journey, and previous detention experiences illustrate that the poor conditions of dispersed housing and contractors’ lack of attention to the needs of vulnerable residents fuel the re-victimisation of asylum seekers already enduring the relived experiences of past suffering. The chapter also acknowledges the practical effects of being moved to the periphery of dispersal areas with little access to necessary resources including culturally specific markets and essential social and support

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networks. The chapter then ends with a brief examination of residents’ coping strategies and expressions of agency and resistance within adverse environments. The final chapter illustrates the important role of small charitable and voluntary third sector agencies in filling service gaps left by the Home Office and its dispersed asylum housing contractors. Through the application of Geiger and Wolch’s (1986) concept of the ‘shadow state’, the first section cautions that such third sector services are in danger of being unwittingly co-opted into the state’s immigration control regime in their fulfilment of basic provision and social care functions. The chapter concludes with  a review of current challenges and future trajectories in challenging the continued abuse of asylum seekers within dispersed accommodation.

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Grayson, J. (2018, May 29). Rodents, Bedbugs, Mould: UK Asylum Housing Still a Hostile Environment. openDemocracy. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/shine-­a-­light/rodents-­bedbugs-­mould-­ uk-­asylum-­housing-­hostile-­environment/ Grierson, J. (2021a, January 26). Asylum Seekers Sent to Hotels After Covid Outbreak at Former UK Army Barracks. The Guardian. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/26/asylum-­seekers­sent-­to-­hotels-­after-­covid-­outbreak-­at-­former-­uk-­army-­barracks Grierson, J. (2021b, April 7). Home Office to Send More Asylum Seekers to ‘Unsuitable’ Napier Barracks. The Guardian. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/07/home-­office-­to-­send-­more-­ asylum-­seekers-­to-­unsuitable-­napier-­barracks Grierson, J. (2021c, February 15). Napier Barracks Not Suitable for Accommodation, Experts Found. The Guardian. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/15/napier-­barracks­not-­suitable-­for-­accommodation-­experts-­found Hill, E., Meer, N., & Peace, T. (2021). The Role of Asylum in Processes of Urban Gentrification. The Sociological Review, 69(2), 259–276. Hollifield, J., Hunt, V., & Tichenor, D. (2008). The Liberal Paradox: Immigrants, Markets and Rights in the United States. SMU Law Review, 61(1), 67–98. Hollifield, J. F. (2004). The Emerging Migration State. International Migration Review, 38(3), 885–912. Home Office. (2020, August 8). The Use of Temporary Hotels to House Asylum Seekers During Covid-19. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from https://homeofficem e d i a . b l o g . g ov. u k / 2 0 2 0 / 0 8 / 0 8 / t h e -­u s e -­o f -­t e m p o r a r y -­h o t e l s ­to-­house-­asylum-­seekers-­during-­covid-­19/ House of Commons. (2017). Home Affairs Committee, Asylum Accommodation, Twelfth Report of Session 2016–17 (HC 637). House of Commons. Retrieved April 10, 2021, from https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/ cmselect/cmhaff/637/637.pdf Human Rights Act 1998. c. 42. Retrieved August 14, 2021, from https://www. legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/contents Immigration Act 1971. c. 77. Retrieved May 20, 2020, from https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1971/77/contents/enacted Immigration Act 2014. c. 22. Retrieved August 14, 2021, from https://www. legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2014/22/contents/enacted Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. c. 33. Retrieved August 14, 2021, from https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1999/33/contents

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Kaufman, E. (2013). Hubs and Spokes: The Transformation of the British Prison. In K. F. Aas & M. Bosworth (Eds.), The Borders of Punishment. Oxford University Press. Kauzlarich, D., Matthews, R. A., & Miller, W. J. (2001). Toward a Victimology of State Crime. Critical Criminology, 10(3), 173–194. Le Billon, P. (2001). The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts. Political Geography, 20(s5), 561–584. Lusher, A. (2014, November 4). Jimmy Mubenga Death: G4S Guards ‘Ignored Deportee’s Cries’ Before He Died on Airliner. Independent. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/jimmy-­ mubenga-­death-­g4s-­guards-­ignored-­deportee-­s-­cries-­before-­he-­died-­on-­ airliner-­9839480.html National Audit Office. (2014). COMPASS Contracts for the Provision of Accommodation for Asylum Seekers. The Stationery Office. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from http://www.nao.org.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2014/01/10287­001-­accommodation-­for-­asylum-­seekers-­Book.pdf National Audit Office. (2020). Asylum Accommodation and Support (HC 375). National Audit Office. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from https://www.nao.org. uk/wp-­content/uploads/2020/07/Asylum-­accommodation-­and-­support.pdf Pellew, J. (1989). The Home Office and the Aliens Act, 1905. The Historical Journal, 32(2), 369–385. Robertson, G. (2013, January 11). Taking Over the Asylum. Inside Housing. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/ insight/taking-­over-­the-­asylum1-­34251 Schuster, L. (2005). A Sledgehammer to Crack a Nut: Deportation, Detention and Dispersal in Europe. Social Policy and Administration, 39(6), 606–621. Stumpf, J.  P. (2006). The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power. American University Law Review, 56(2), 367–419. Taylor, C. (2020). Representing the Windrush Generation: Metaphor in Discourses Then and Now. Critical Discourse Studies, 17(1), 1–21. Taylor, D. (2021, February 19). Asylum Seeker Brings Case Against Covid ‘Curfew’ at London Hotel. The Guardian. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from http://www.theguardian.com/uk-­news/2021/feb/19/asylum-­seeker-­brings-­case­against-­covid-­curfew-­at-­london-­hotel Travis, A. (2013, October 10). Immigration bill: Theresa May defends plans to create ‘hostile environment’. The Guardian. Retrieved August 13, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/10/immigrationbill-theresa-may-hostile-environment

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Tyler, I., Gill, N., Conlon, D., & Oeppen, C. (2014). The Business of Child Detention: Charitable Co-option, Migrant Advocacy and Activist Outrage. Race & Class, 56(1), 3–21. Walsh, P. W. (2020). Deportation and Voluntary Departure from the UK [Briefing]. Migration Observatory, COMPAS, University of Oxford. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2019/ 07/Briefing-­Deportation-­and-­Voluntary-­Departure-­from-­the-­UK.pdf Webber, F. (2019). On the Creation of the UK’s ‘Hostile Environment’. Race & Class, 60(4), 76–87. Wray, H. (2006). The Aliens Act 1905 and the Immigration Dilemma. Journal of Law and Society, 33(2), 302–323. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­ 6478.2006.00359.x

2 Britain’s Legacy of Inhospitality and Violence Towards Immigrants

In April 1968, Enoch Powell infamously railed against the proposed Race Relations Act citing the deterioration of British culture and the threat of unrest that would follow the passage of antidiscrimination legislation. Beyond his provocative rhetoric and his evocation of a portentous sanguine river, Powell’s entreaty to halt Commonwealth immigration and pursue repatriation schemes relied upon a firm, but misguided attachment to Britain’s mythologised past. In his attempt to accentuate the scale of the impending conflagratory conflict between races, Powell declared that areas of Britain were besieged and ‘undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history’ (Powell, 2007). Powell may have been a student of the classics, but his grasp on history was selective and tenuous. His assertions that Englishness was threatened by the presence of outsiders simply echoed those voiced by fearmongers for centuries. The last one thousand years of English and British history reveal a rather persistent adversarial approach to population management and migration control strategies. Opportunism and feigned anxiety fuelled some of the most pernicious responses to foreigners’ presence, and immigrants have been the targets of considerable harm and exploitation through sovereign endeavours to establish © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. A. Hirschler, Hostile Homes, Critical Criminological Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79213-8_2

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economic dominance and assert national identity. As we will explore in the next chapter, the extent to which this exercise of control rests solely with the sovereign is debatable, as nuanced understandings of power challenge strictly hierarchical imaginings. Nevertheless, the state has played a significant role in establishing the boundaries of belonging, sometimes through very violent means. An early example of this is evident in the efforts of successive English monarchs to first contain and then expel England’s Jewish population in the one hundred years between 1190 and 1290. Many of the tactics employed in the control of Jewish communities during this period, such as restricting people’s movements and limiting their ability to work, are currently in use in the Home Office’s management of specific categories of migrants, including destitute asylum seekers. Like today, a strategic use of the law allowed for the subjugation and eventual removal of an unwanted minority population. Like the Commonwealth immigrants arriving in England in the post-war period, such as those who disembarked the Empire Windrush in 1948, the Jewish communities of medieval England were exploited for the financial contribution they could bring to the country and were subsequently abandoned when their usefulness to the sovereign was expended. The expulsion of England’s Jewish population in 1290 therefore represents both the culmination of an evolving restrictive approach towards a community deemed to be ‘foreign’ and a significant episode in the development of the United Kingdom’s legacy of exclusion.

2.1 1  190–1290: The Expulsion of Medieval England’s Jewish Population Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Jewish moneylenders occupied an important role in the maintenance of the medieval English economy. As the growth of towns and markets expanded, the concentration of wealth shifted from rural feudal estates to more densely populated commerce centres. This transition placed significant pressure on the fortunes of knights, lords and the monarchy, as longstanding revenue streams from the feudal agrarian economy began to diminish. At a time when

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military endeavours were becoming increasingly costly, English kings became dependent upon new sources of income (Koyama, 2010). The early Jewish immigrants that arrived alongside the Normans in the latter half of the eleventh century brought with them considerable amounts of money, which they began lending in England’s burgeoning market centres (Abrahams, 1894; Mundill, 1998). Jewish creditors provided a significant source of revenue for English monarchs, as they paid heavy taxes and contributed 10 percent of their loan transactions to the royal treasury. In return, they were allowed to move freely within the realm and enjoyed special protections from the king (Abrahams, 1894, pp. 85–87). However, as Stacey (2013, p. 110) suggests, the financial pressures placed upon Jewish moneylenders and, by extension, their debtors contributed to animosity towards Jewish communities that led to the massacres of Shabbat ha Gadol in 1189 and 1190. The 1190 massacre of Jewish people at Clifford’s Tower in York was at least partially motivated by barons’ desires to destroy evidence of their debts to Jewish moneylenders (Mundill, 2010, p. 81; Koyama, 2010, p. 382). Richard I’s response to the violence committed against Jewish communities was to exact greater control over their finances, a trend that would continue under his successors until Edward I’s ultimate ejection of England’s Jewish population in 1290. In the final decade of the twelfth century, the Exchequer of the Jewry extended its reach into the management of Jewish finances. From 1194, Jewish moneylenders were restricted to conducting business in specific towns, and documentary evidence of loan agreements was kept both by Jewish creditors and in chests, or archae, located in each town that could be inspected by the king’s officers at any time (Stacey, 2013, pp. 116–117; Abrahams, 1895b, p. 250). The establishment of new financial policies applying to the debt collection practices of Jewish creditors reflected an intensification of sovereign oversight and scrutiny. Rather than protect Jewish moneylenders from future attacks, such strategies were, as Huscroft (2006 quoted in Koyama, 2010, p. 382) explains, ‘primarily intended to make their financial exploitation more systematic and methodical’. Within thirty years of the massacre at York, Jewish communities around Britain were subject to strict controls on their movements, and their financial transactions were meticulously managed by the monarchy.

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In 1219, Henry III decreed that newly arrived Jewish immigrants were required to register their names with the Justices of the Jews. He also stipulated that these migrants would not be allowed to leave England without a licence allowing them to do so (Tovey, 1738, pp. 80–81). A year earlier, Jewish males were ordered to wear a badge, or tabula, to make them more instantly identifiable; this later applied to Jewish women as well (Dobson, 2000, p. 16; Mundill, 2010, p. 133). Restrictions on the movements of Jewish people were extended further in 1245 when they were limited to settling in specific towns unless they were licenced to reside elsewhere (Abrahams, 1894, p. 90), and in 1253, their ability to remain in England was contingent upon their continued ability to serve the crown. Henry’s Mandate to the Justices of the Jews declared that ‘from the hour of birth every Jew, whether male or female, shall serve us in some way’ (in Routledge, 1982, p.  99). If Jewish residents did not perform ‘service for the king’, they could not remain in England (Dobson, 1974, p. 38). While these controls were largely intended to strengthen the monarch’s command of Jewish finances, they were also driven by anti-­ Jewish sentiment. The stigmatising effects of Henry III’s 1253 mandate served to both limit Jewish moneylenders’ ability to continue practicing their trade and to legitimate and promote anti-Jewish attitudes within the wider populace. As Stacey (2003, p. 52) writes, Henry III’s measures were designed to ‘segregate and isolate Jews’ and ‘rested on the fundamental presumption that Jews were a polluting and a dangerous presence in Christian society’. From their arrival alongside the Normans in the eleventh century, Jewish residents were constructed as ‘peculiar’ (Abrahams, 1895a, p. 455). Like the Normans, Jewish communities spoke French, but they were differentiated from other groups on the basis of their ‘religion and scriptural language’ (Clanchy, 1979 quoted in Mundill, 1998, p.  29). While the later containment and ultimate expulsion of the Jewish population were predicated largely on financial grounds, communities were also subjected to social stigmatisation. For instance, Stacey (2003, p. 52) describes instances in which Jewish people were associated with the defilement of Christian women and child killing, and Tachtenberg (1943 in Mundill, 2010, p. 71) cites a ‘common belief ’ that the children of Jewish meat vendors were directed to urinate upon Christians’ food to

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‘induce sickness and death’. Henry’s 1253 mandate criminalised sexual intercourse between Jews and Christians; offences were ‘likely to carry a charge of bestiality’ (Mundill, 2010, p. 151). The systematic demonisation of England’s Jewish populations was advanced by powerful figures in religious and political life, including Edward I’s mother, Eleanor of Provence and Pope Gregory IX. In 1229, Gregory wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury citing his concerns about intermarriage between Christians and Jews and his fears that female Christian servants would be defiled by their Jewish masters. He appealed for stricter enforcement of the policy requiring Jewish people to wear badges, and further ecclesiastical pressure eventually resulted in the more rigorous impositions of the badge policy under Henry III and Edward I (Vincent, 1994, p.  219). Eleanor of Provence was instrumental in the gradual isolation and ultimate expulsion of England’s Jewish population in the latter half of the thirteenth century. Leonard (1891, p.  127) explains that Edward’s antagonistic attitude towards Jewish communities was likely influenced by his mother, whom Leonard describes as the Jewish population’s ‘steady enemy’. Prior to their complete expulsion from England in 1290, Jewish residents were excluded from market centres throughout England. In the decade between 1234 and 1244, Jews were expelled from Newcastle and Southampton as well as other towns (Singer, 1964, p. 129). In 1275, Eleanor called for the removal of Jewish people living in her dower towns of Gloucester, Worcester and Cambridge (Mundill, 2003, p. 57). This ejection was significant, because it marked a major symbolic expansion of the monarch’s punitive approach towards England’s Jewish population that was further evidenced in Edward’s highly impactful Statute of Jewry the same year. Following decades of heavy taxation and increasing restrictions on the movements of England’s Jewish communities, Edward’s 1275 statute prohibited Jewish moneylenders from entering into loan agreements in which any interest was taken (Brand, 2000, p.  1140). This effectively ended their ability to practice their trade, which had been the ‘economic backbone of English Jewish life’ (Stacey, 2003, p. 41). Additionally, Jews were restricted to living only in towns designated by the King, specifically those containing archae, which further entrenched the sovereign’s oversight of Jewish transactions and movements (Brand, 2000, p. 1143). The

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measure also facilitated the Crown’s collection of alternative forms of income, as Edward’s ability to introduce a tax on wool was contingent on his ability to appease knights and barons who demanded an end to Jewish moneylending and the dissolution of the Exchequer of the Jewry (Koyama, 2010, p.  394). Political pressures, financial incentives and widespread enmity towards the dwindling Jewish population prompted Edward to demand the total banishment of England’s Jews. In July 1290, Edward ordered the expulsion of England’s Jewish population by the following November. Though sheriffs were instructed to protect departing Jews from violence committed against them, contemporary records and depictions of the expulsion suggest Jews were subjected to aggression and harm during their exodus. Mundill (2010, p.  158) describes an incident in which a ship’s captain contracted to transport Jews from London directed his passengers to disembark onto a sandbar under the false pretence that the ship had run aground. The Jews ultimately drowned with the return of the tide and the captain set sail with their belongings. Beyond isolated examples of physical violence committed against the Jews during their departure, the expulsion itself can be interpreted as an act of sovereign aggression following years of economic exploitation and sanctioned discrimination against England’s Jewish population. Though the kings of the thirteenth century guaranteed the Jews’ protection while Jewish moneylenders provided essential tax revenue, these efforts were largely undertaken to protect the sovereign’s financial interests. If harms committed against Jewish creditors had prevented their ability to extract interest from their debtors, the king would have been unable to draw on the income received through heavy tallages placed on Jewish moneylenders. By the time of their expulsion, though, the Jews of England were forbidden from working as moneylenders and their overall financial contribution to the Crown was minimal (Elman, 1937, p.  150). The primary financial incentive for the removal of the Jews was not in the value of property and assets they left behind, but in the promise of increased tax revenue. Stacey (2003, p. 54) suggests that in appeasing his Christian subjects by ordering the removal of the Jews, Edward was then able to secure ‘the largest single grant of taxation in the history of medieval England’.

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The events surrounding the 1290 expulsion remain resonant, because many of the tactics employed in the management and exclusion of England’s minority Jewish community seem strikingly contemporary. The design and implementation of more recent immigration legislation echo the royal dicta of Henry III and Edward I, and the cycle of a population first welcomed, then demonised and finally ejected continues in the modern era. Like the Jews of the eleventh century, twentieth century Commonwealth citizens were initially invited to Britain because of the financial boost their labour could provide to the post-war economy. However, popular resentment prompted political and legislative action limiting immigrants’ prospects for success, and by the 2010s, resulted in the controversial deportation of individuals of the Windrush generation (Agerholm, 2018). Like the 1275 Statute of Jewry, which prohibited Jews from moneylending and therefore contributed to the rapid decline in their fortunes, modern immigration controls have similarly limited immigrants’ employment prospects. Following the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, Commonwealth migrants seeking work in the United Kingdom had to apply for employment vouchers. In the early 2000s, the Labour government was accused of contributing to the deliberate destitution of asylum seekers, as Section 9 of the Immigration and Asylum (Treatment of Claimants Act) 2004 granted the Home Office the power to withdraw welfare support for failed asylum seekers (Cunningham and Tomlinson, 2005, p. 253). The practice of ordering Jews to wear identifying badges was adopted by other regimes throughout history, perhaps most notably the Third Reich, but the stigmatising effects of that form of labelling are also evident in other schemes, such as the issuing of ‘Azure’ cards to asylum seekers in the United Kingdom as a form of cashless support. Given that this method of currency is only used by asylum seekers, during transactions, the Azure card holder is immediately identified as ‘other’, an outcome Coddington (2019, p. 529) argues amounts to ‘slow violence’ committed against asylum seekers. The degree of oversight and management of medieval Jewish populations is also reflected in other ways within modern immigration controls, including the policies of police registration and the dispersal of asylum seekers. In the early thirteenth century, newly arrived Jewish immigrants were compelled to register with the Justices of the Jewish Exchequer and

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needed the permission of the king if they wished to leave England (Stacey, 2003, p.  44). Seven centuries later, foreign nationals were required to register with the police under the Aliens Restriction Act 1914 (Reinecke, 2009, p.  47), and under existing immigration rules, immigrants from over forty countries entering the United Kingdom for longer than six months must register with the police (Home Office, 2016). The restriction placed upon medieval Jews to living in specific towns designated by the king resembles the dispersal policy introduced in the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, which limited asylum seekers to living in designated areas across the United Kingdom. Deportees’ exposure to violence during their removal resonates across eras as well. Mundill’s account of the medieval ship’s captain causing the death of his Jewish passengers is mirrored in recent events, such as the 2010 death of an Angolan asylum seeker, Jimmy Mubenga, while being restrained by G4S guards during his deportation flight (Lewis & Taylor, 2012). The legacy of population management strategies of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, therefore, is the establishment of a precedent of demarcation, marginalisation and exclusion. While England and later the United Kingdom oscillated between extensions of humanitarianism and exclusionary tactics, the expulsion of England’s Jewish population in 1290 remains a notable progenitor to the United Kingdom’s legislative approach to immigration control in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

2.2 1  793: The Birth of Modern Immigration Control The examination of the United Kingdom’s border control history reveals a reactionary approach to the enactment of primary legislation limiting migrants’ entry into the country. Following the perceived influx of foreigners, mediated narratives dominate political and popular discourse, and the need for statutory limits is advanced as necessary for the preservation of the security of the nation. Heightened surveillance, limitations on the freedom of migrants’ movements and deportation schemes become the tools operationalised in the protection of society. Another trend

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evident in the development of modern British immigration legislation was the normalisation and extension of wartime restrictions into peacetime, a phenomenon Giorgio Agamben (2005) advances as a permanent state of exception in which law established during exceptional periods endures long after formal hostilities between states have ended. While one of the earliest examples of modern immigration legislation in the United Kingdom, the Aliens Act 1793, did not lead to a permanent state of exception with regard to immigration controls—though the legislation was renewed regularly until 1826—it nevertheless established enduring precedents in terms of the state’s response to unwanted migrants, including early iterations of modern tactics like police registers, deportations and fines for carriers transporting immigrants lacking proper identification. The restrictions and penalties introduced in the Aliens Act 1793 were comprehensive, and as Roscoe (1930, p. 66) writes, the 1793 Act ‘materially curtailed the freedom hitherto enjoyed by the friendly alien and was a new departure in legislation’. It also proved to be a rudimentary blueprint for later immigration law, as a number of features were subsequently adopted in more recent legislation. Section 3 required every alien to declare their name, rank and occupation in writing immediately upon arrival. Anyone failing to do so could be deported from the country. Within modern immigration legislation, specifically Section 4(3) of the Immigration Act 1971, the Home Secretary is empowered to require immigrants to register with police upon arrival in the United Kingdom. Existing immigration rules require entrants from a specific list of countries to register their details with the police (Home Office, 2020); failure to comply is punishable with a fine or up to a six-month prison sentence (Immigration Act 1971, s26(f )). The Aliens Act 1793 placed restrictions on the movements of aliens and required the use of passports when travelling within the country (Dinwiddy, 1968, p. 194), reflecting early surveillance practices now pursued through the issuing of visas and biometric residence permits. Additionally, masters and commanders of ships and vessels arriving in the United Kingdom were obliged to declare whether any foreign passengers were aboard (s1), and failure to do so as a result of negligence or refusal carried a ten-pound fine for every offence (s2). Today, a variety of similar offences exist for carriers failing to check

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foreign passengers’ travel documents. Under Section 40 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, owners of ships and aircrafts can be fined up to 2000 pounds per individual arriving in the United Kingdom without proper documentation. The introduction of the Aliens Act in January 1793 coincided with increasing hostilities between Britain and France that ultimately resulted in war between the two countries within a month of the bill becoming law. The legislation was intended to not only limit the entry of enemy combatants, but to control the arrival of refugees fleeing the upheaval of revolution-era France. Dinwiddy (1968, p. 193) writes that the number of immigrants arriving in Britain peaked during the autumn of 1792, during which ‘nearly 4,000 refugees landed in Britain’ in a single month. The dominant parliamentary discourse surrounding the entry of French refugees was that they threatened to infect the British public with violent, revolutionary tendencies. This was particularly evident in the rhetoric of the Whig MP, Edmund Burke, a vocal opponent of the revolution in France. In a theatrical performance within the House of Commons during a second reading of the Aliens Bill in December 1792, Burke threw a dagger to the floor, claiming that thousands of knives were being made in Birmingham and that the only way ‘to keep the French infection from’ Britain’s shores was to introduce meaningful legislation to limit their arrival (Cobbett, 1806–1820 cited in Russell, 1997, p. 2). Burke’s allusion to French migrants’ ‘insidious purposes’ and the ‘blood trickling down their faces’ (ibid., p. 2) is strikingly similar to the tone and intent of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech nearly two centuries later, but unlike Powell, Burke’s primary target for exclusion was the revolutionary, not the foreigner. Whereas Powell aimed to incite fear of societal deterioration due to the incursion of cultural difference, Burke’s appeals in both his theatrical scenes in parliament and his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France centred on the threat revolutionaries posed to the political and monarchical status quo. Burke capitalised on popular fears that the admission of French refugees into Britain represented an acceptance of destabilising, revolutionary elements, and as Walters (2002, p.  278) notes, the successful passage of the Aliens Bill was ‘a direct response to fears of revolution’. However, the 1793 Act served additional purposes, in that it enabled the government to deport not only

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revolutionaries but those deemed undesirable, and it allowed the state to further police dissident voices amongst the British public. Superficially, the 1793 Act was intended to protect the British public from the dangers of violent outsiders. This is evident in the preamble: ‘[U]nder the present circumstances, much danger may arise to the public tranquillity from the resort and residence of aliens, unless due provision be made in respect thereof ’ (Aliens Act 1793). Sibley (1909, p. 437) generally accepts this justification for the enactment of immigration controls, writing that that 1793 Act was ‘aimed at both the exclusion and expulsion of persons who constituted a danger to public tranquillity because they were propagandists of the ideas of the French Revolution’ and suggests that not everyone who entered may have been an anarchist, but nevertheless may have been ‘dangerous to public tranquillity’. Meyers (2004, p.  63) suggests that the comprehensive restrictions placed on French immigrants evidenced pervasive ‘Francophobia’ and ‘fears that Jacobin agents had infiltrated the ranks of the refugees’. However, alternative perspectives highlight the explicitly coercive and xenophobic motivations underpinning the legislation. Roscoe (1930, pp.  66–67) explains that the scope of the legislation represented a fully restrictive stance on the entry of foreigners: ‘Though there was some fear of Republican agents, the Act was chiefly intended to enable the Executive to control the émigrés who had taken refuge in England and who were not very welcome’. For Roscoe, the Aliens Act was novel in that it represented the first notable example of blanket restrictions being placed on a specific population of immigrants. The rejection of French refugees was not simply a side-effect of curtailing the entry of foreign criminals and disruptors to the established public order; refugees were as much a target of the restrictions as were the presumed revolutionaries. The legislation also served a population management function indirectly targeting segments of the British public. While the Aliens Bill was being debated within parliament in late 1792, the Pitt government was combatting growing disaffection amongst societies of artisans and tradespeople seeking parliamentary reform. The spectre of French revolutionaries fomenting insurrection amongst domestic radicals was a useful device in the government’s punitive response to dissenting voices. Emsley (1978, p.  66) details the deployment of the

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military and county militias in the patrolling of London in November 1792, a practice he describes was ‘illegal, except in cases of invasion or insurrection’. Emsley also notes that, during the third reading of the proposed Aliens Bill in January 1793, William Pitt associated domestic unrest with the entry of French revolutionaries (ibid., p. 85). Additional circumstances surrounding the development of the Aliens Act seem to provide further evidence of its implicit domestic social control function. Sparrow (1998, pp. 281–282) writes that while the ‘overt object [of the Aliens Act 1793] was control of the immigration problem, the act went further and embodied an extraordinary extension of police powers’. This is evidenced, Sparrow argues, by the fact that the Aliens Act was secretly drafted by Claude Antoine Rey, a ‘former lieutenant-general of police at Lyon’ (ibid., p.  282) and gave rise to the expansion of a French-style secret service in Britain. According to Sparrow, the advocacy for a domestic police force in Britain was firmly linked to the intensification of entry controls for foreign immigrants, as Pitt affirmed the need for the establishment of a police force consisting of magistrates that were responsible for monitoring foreign nationals and British subjects (ibid., p. 283). In the year prior to the introduction of the Aliens Act, the Middlesex Justices Act 1792 established an embryonic police force in the form of paid magistrates that represented ‘the primary instruments of public order in Victorian London’ (Davis, 1984, p. 309). The notion that such magistrates should be responsible for policing the entry of immigrants reveals the presumed confluence between the control of domestic and foreign populations. While it seems somewhat incongruous that a French police official would be responsible for authoring British legislation specifically limiting the entry of French immigrants on the eve of war between France and the United Kingdom, Rey’s royalist stance and the Pitt government’s antipathy towards parliamentary reformers reveal a perverse logic to the arrangement. The Aliens Act occupied an exceptional position at the intersection between immigration control and domestic surveillance and represented a significant development in the securitisation of borders, as the logic of policing both underpinned the drafting of the legislation and was informed by it. Alongside fears of foreign-fuelled rebellion, anxiety about crime rates and incivility in London during the late eighteenth century

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contributed to demands for a new system of organised crime control (Taylor, 1997, pp. 14–15). A growing obsession with the protection of private property at the London docks and the formal criminalisation of hitherto informally accepted practices, such as dockworkers’ appropriation of materials from worksites (D’Sena, 1989), coincided with the restrictive stance on immigration. The Aliens Act was introduced amidst a legislative environment that was increasingly centred on crime control. The Gordon Riots of 1780 represented the culmination of popular dissatisfaction with relief measures offered to Catholics in 1778 (Rudé, 1956, pp.  94–95). As Jones (2013, p. 79) writes, the protestors perceived that ‘the relief acts threatened to undermine a widely shared Protestant British patriotism that defined itself against Catholicism and France’. Following a week of unrest that resulted in over 450 arrests (Rudé, 1956, p. 99), calls for an organised public police force intensified, as did attempts to associate domestic unrest with the presence of outsiders. In 1785, the Pitt government proposed the London and Westminster Police Bill, which aimed to establish a centralised London police force, comprised nine divisions (Emsley, 2014, p. 20). Had the bill passed, it would have preceded the Metropolitan Police Act 1829 by over forty years. The same year, Samuel Bentham, the Inspector General of Naval Works, conceived of 24-hour shift work on the London docks with the intended effect of introducing permanent surveillance of dockworkers and diminished opportunities for the appropriation of wood from shipyards (Linebaugh, 2006, p. 399). His concept of the panopticon, a prison in which inmates were under constant observation, was later immortalised in a series of letters written by his brother, Jeremy, in 1787 (Hume, 1973; Steadman, 2012). The previous year, the first edition of Patrick Colquhoun’s Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis advanced an image of London that was morally corrupt and overrun with delinquency. Evoking the fall of Rome well in advance of Enoch Powell, Colquhoun declared that, ‘like the Roman government, when enveloped in riches and luxury, the National prosperity will be of short duration, hazarding the same calamities wherever public morals are neglected, and no effectual measure adopted for the purpose […] of checking the alarming growth of depravity and crimes’ (Colquhoun, 1796 quoted in Dodsworth, 2008, p. 596). It is also worth noting that while the Aliens

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Act was not renewed after 1826, the replacement Aliens Registration Bill was introduced by Home Secretary Robert Peel, the man credited with establishing the Metropolitan Police in 1829. Given his preoccupation with crime control, Peel expressed ‘no hesitation in calling upon parliament for a renewal of the [Aliens Act]’ if, in ‘return for British generosity’, refugees were ‘to make this land […] the scene of cabals or conspiracies against their own governments, while Great Britain was in alliance with them’ (Hansard, 20 April 1826 col 500). The political and legislative context within which the Aliens Act arose was dominated by perceptions of imminent societal decline amongst those antagonistic to calls for change both within Britain and abroad. The French emigrants seeking refuge in the United Kingdom became proxies for domestic dissenters whose vision of Britain’s future challenged traditional views on the nature of power. For a man like Edmund Burke, who believed that civil society was dependent upon the unwavering precedent of hereditary rule, the French Revolution represented an existential threat to the fabric of national order (Burke, 2013). Formal legislation restricting the entry of French immigrants served the dual purpose of quelling fears that a revolutionary spirit would fully take hold in Britain and enhancing the state’s coercive response to undesirable populations within its borders. The Aliens Act 1793 retains a prominent position in the pantheon of British immigration legislation, because it serves as an early example of the legal conflation of the immigrant and criminal. Its establishment alongside increased calls for a centralised police force reveals that the Aliens Act was situated plainly within the immigration and crime control continuum, and it established the lasting precedent of using immigration legislation as a tactic of power not simply directed at migrants, but the whole of the population.

2.3 1905–1920: The Age of Exception For most of the nineteenth century, formal immigration controls were largely absent. Deportations under the Aliens Act significantly reduced following the end of hostilities between Britain and France, though the fact that it continued to be renewed every two years into peacetime was a

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source of controversy. Sir James Mackintosh, the MP for Cromartyshire and Nairnshire, declared that the Aliens Act ‘was a bill to subject twenty thousand residents of Great Britain to banishment at an hour’s warning, on secret information, without knowledge of their offence, without the possibility of proving the clearest innocence’ (HC Deb 10 May 1816 quoted in Dinwiddy, 1968, p. 207). Subsequently, many of the restrictions introduced in the Aliens Act were eased when it was replaced by the Registration of Aliens Act 1826. This legislation required aliens to register their details with the Alien Office within fourteen days of their arrival (s1) and provide the government with information relating to their place of residence twice a year (s7), a practice not dissimilar to modern requirements that persons subject to immigration control update the Home Office if they move home. Under the 1826 Act and its replacement, the Registration of Aliens Act 1836, the government was no longer empowered to deport aliens, and, despite a brief return of deportation powers with the short-lived 1848 Aliens Act, the remainder of the nineteenth century was relatively free of restrictions (Stevens, 2004  in Orchard, 2014, pp.  83–84). However, by the end of the nineteenth century, attitudes towards immigrants were beginning to shift, particularly in response to the entry of Jewish refugees and migrants from Eastern Europe and Russia. Debates about stricter immigration legislation pivoted between romanticised views of Britain’s historical hospitality towards refugees and the desire to prevent the entry of ‘undesirable’ and criminal ‘aliens’. When the Aliens Act 1905 was finally introduced, its wording and implementation reflected the political tensions of those grasping at Britain’s imaginary past and restrictionists’ belief that contemporary social ills could be cured through the rejection and banishment of a subset of foreigners. While the legislation was largely ineffectual in both design and execution, it established two significant precedents: the bureaucratisation of immigration management and the centrality of the Home Office in matters of border control. The final decades of the nineteenth century were marked by the sizeable emigration of Eastern European Jews fleeing persecution and revolutionary upheaval. Following the 1881 assassination of the Russian emperor, Alexander II, Jews became the target of the ‘May Laws’, a series of highly restrictive policies aimed at limiting Jews’ ability to trade and

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acquire property (Gainer, 1972, p. 1; Bloom, 1992, p. 187). These developments contributed to the vast exodus of millions of Jews from the region (Gartner, 1960 cited in Jones, 1977, p. 68). While many of the Jewish migrants arriving in Britain at the turn of the century continued on to the United States, a sizeable number—around 150,000 between 1881 and 1914—remained in Britain (Winder, 2004 cited in Wray, 2006, p. 308). Those who settled in Britain were often drawn to areas with existing Jewish populations, such as the east end of London, and gained employment as tailors, shoemakers, joiners and cigarmakers (Pellew, 1989, p. 370). The concentration of Jews in urban localities like Stepney and Whitechapel in London and the Leylands in Leeds contributed to the perception that foreigners were dominating certain areas of the country (Bloom, 1992, p.  197). According to the 1901 census, foreign-­born residents made up nearly 20 per cent of the population of Stepney (Jones, 1977, p. 70). One of the many arguments against the further admission of Jewish refugees and migrants was that in coalescing in poorer areas of the metropolis and accepting lower wages, Jewish workers were undercutting British tradespeople; unions feared that progressive steps towards raising working conditions would falter (Winder, 2004 in Wray, 2006, p. 309). Anti-immigrant sentiment was evident in representations of Jewish migrants as lacking good hygiene, carrying illness, spreading criminality and being economically dependent upon the state (Dummett and Nicol, 1990  in Orchard, 2014, p.  91). One of the most prominent anti-­ immigrant voices was that of Arnold White, an anti-Semitic journalist who advocated eugenics and suggested that Jewish immigrants were a threat to the medical, social and economic health of Britain (Bashford & Gilchrist, 2012, p.  417). White’s claims that Jewish immigrants were contributing to the expansion of London’s slums were challenged by contemporary writers, such as Stephen Fox, who pointed to statistics to suggest that Jewish immigrants were generally law-abiding and did not threaten British jobs or represent a drain on the economy (Fox, 1888 in Haggard, 2001, p.  150). Nevertheless, White’s views were mirrored in other accounts problematising Jewish immigration, such as W.H. Wilkins’s 1892 text, The Alien Invasion, in which Wilkins suggested that impoverished Jewish women were engaging in prostitution and that discontented

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British workers would be moved to violence if the government failed to introduce measures to restrict migrants’ entry (Bloom, 1992, p.  194). Wilkins also argued for formal legislation designed to disincentivise future migrants from making the journey to Britain; he even suggested that steamship companies should be involved in returning passengers deemed undesirable (Wilkins, 1892  in Bashford & Gilchrist, 2012, p. 420). Alongside written appeals for the expansion of immigration controls, anti-immigrant organisations began surfacing as well. For instance, Arnold White established the Society for the Suppression of the Immigration of Destitute Aliens, a pressure group aimed at promoting legislative action in restricting immigration (Pellew, 1989, p. 370). Bloom (1992, p. 202) describes the establishment of the British Brothers’ League in 1901 by the MP for Stepney, William Evans-Gordon, as the founding of ‘the first quasi-Fascist organization in Britain’. The League’s 1903 campaign slogan was ‘England for the English’, and its explicit positioning against the presence of an ethnic minority in Britain situates it as a progenitor of modern movements, such as Britain First and the English Defence League (Bashford & Gilchrist, 2012, p. 417). At least one of its meetings was attended by thousands of people who celebrated parliamentary members’ reference to immigrants as ‘“scum” and “rubbish”’ (Jewish Chronicle, 17 Jan 1902 in Bloom, 1992, p. 203). The casting of refugees and immigrants as inherently criminal and disease-ridden was certainly precedented, as examined in the earlier sections of this chapter, but the relative profusion of anti-immigrant literature and organisations arising at the end of the 1800s illuminates the significance of this period in establishing trends towards demonising and criminalising migrants that have persisted to the present day. The political debates surrounding the introduction of the Aliens Act 1905 reveal that while many popular accounts of Jewish immigrants framed them as threats to the health and security of the British public, counter-narratives drawing on an imagined heritage of British hospitality towards refugees were also prevalent. The Aliens Act 1905 was the last in a series of previously unsuccessful attempts to pass legislation restricting the entry of Jewish refugees and migrants, which included successive efforts by Conservative Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, the MP for Sheffield, Sir Howard Vincent, and

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the Earl of Hardwicke in 1894, 1897 and 1898 (Bloom, 1992, pp. 201, 203). Such was the pressure to address the immigration question that the Conservative government appointed a Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1902. The Commission was weighted in favour of restrictionists, and it included Evans-Gordon of the British Brothers’ League. On the basis of its investigation, which relied heavily on the witness statements of those favouring legislation, such as politicians and trade union members, the Commission determined that overcrowding was a problem and recommended that immigration control was needed. It also advocated the use of deportation to remove criminals and ‘undesirables’ who were seen as a burden on the economy (Pellew, 1989, p.  371; Bloom, 1992, p. 206). The majority opinion of the Commission was that freedom of movement should be curtailed to respond to overcrowding in certain areas (Bloom, 1992, p. 206), a recommendation that predated the UK government’s adoption of a dispersal policy applying to the accommodation of asylum seekers nearly a century later with the introduction of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. Additionally, the Commission recommended that shipping companies should bear the responsibility of financing the return journeys of migrants deemed to be of ‘bad character’ (Gainer, 1972, p. 160), a policy mirrored in more recent legislation fining airline firms for transporting inadequately documented immigrants and asylum seekers. Though the Commission’s recommendations were broadly in step with anti-alien arguments, the desire for immigration controls was not universally shared within government or across all sectors of society. Restrictions to freedom of movement were viewed by some—particularly Liberals— to be out of step with the perceived precedence of welcoming people seeking asylum from hardship, and threatened traditional liberal values, such as the promotion of free trade (Garrard, 1971  in Wray, 2006, p.  310). Winston Churchill challenged calls for immigration controls, citing Britain’s ‘old tolerant and generous practice of free entry and asylum’ (quoted in Winder, 2004 in Wray, 2006, p. 304). The Liberal MP, Herbert Samuel, emphasised the fact that restricted entry would interfere with free trade (Gainer, 1972, pp. 144, 149). During a second reading of the Aliens Bill, Llewellyn Atherley-Jones, another Liberal MP, countered narratives of disease-ridden foreigners by citing the Medical Officer of

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Health for London, stating that ‘the standard of health among the foreign labourers is higher than amongst our own working classes. […] The evidence is that the Jew is a healthier subject—for the foreigner is a Jew for the most part—than the English’ (Hansard, 02 May 1905 col 792). While the Aliens Act 1905 was nevertheless passed, some of these dissenting voices were likely instrumental in tempering the intensity of the restrictions. As Orchard (2014, p. 91) notes, the final form of the Aliens Act reflected a series of concessions the Conservative government was compelled to make in order to pass the legislation, which included a recognition of the right of asylum. For Bashford and McAdam (2014, p. 313), the explicit inclusion of a right of asylum in Section 1(3) of the Act was unique, as it briefly ‘codified an individual right to asylum in British law’ and ‘effectively established a refugee category as part of immigration law, a practice that became standard in the later twentieth century and remains so today’. The Aliens Act 1905 introduced a number of measures to address the perceived problems associated with the arrival of unwanted immigrants. Section 8 defined an immigrant as an ‘alien steerage passenger’ who could not adequately demonstrate their intention to carry on to a destination beyond the United Kingdom. For the purposes of immigration control, an ‘immigrant ship’ was any ‘ship which brings to the United Kingdom more than twenty alien steerage passengers’ (s8(2)).1 Section 1 (3a–b) defined an ‘undesirable immigrant’ as someone incapable of ‘decently supporting himself and his dependents’, a ‘lunatic or an idiot’, or anyone posing a health risk to the public or a charge on state finances. Additionally, an extraditable person convicted of a non-political crime in a foreign country was classed as undesirable (s1(3c–d)). The distinction between political and non-political offences is significant, as it is here that the Aliens Act briefly enshrined political asylum within British legislation. While the burden of proof rested with the immigrant to demonstrate that they were ‘seeking admission to [Britain] solely to avoid prosecution or punishment on religious or political grounds’, in practice, many  The exclusion of ships carrying fewer than twenty foreign steerage passengers represented a significant loophole, which allowed a significant proportion of alien arrivals—nearly half by 1910—to avoid inspection (Pellew, 1989, p. 384). 1

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immigrants claiming on these grounds were admitted.2 The Act widened the scope of the Home Secretary’s involvement in establishing rules applying to immigration boards (s2(2)) and empowered the Home Secretary to expel undesirable aliens, including certain foreigners convicted of felonies and misdemeanours as well as those convicted of prostitution (s3(1a)). The Aliens Act represented a significant advancement in the centralisation of border control. In addition to making the Home Office responsible for immigration matters, it empowered the Home Secretary to deport unwanted migrants on the basis of immigration officers’ decisions. Immigration officers were granted a significant degree of discretion in determining migrants’ suitability for entry, particularly in cases in which immigrants did not meet the informal threshold of being able to produce five pounds as evidence of their capacity to sustain themselves upon arrival in Britain (Pellew, 1989, p.  377). Concerns about the arbitrary nature of immigration officers’ decision making continue to dominate critical reflections on the management of modern UK border control policy. For instance, Weber (2003) problematises the use of discretion in the decision making of border officials when detaining asylum seekers, suggesting that the administrative nature of Home Office determinations notionally exempts border officials from the level of scrutiny applied within other criminal justice contexts. Given the trends established in the Aliens Act and its focus on restricting the entry of a specific target population, it is regularly identified as the United Kingdom’s first example of modern immigration control. Pellew (1989, p. 369) refers to the Aliens Act as the ‘first modern act to regulate alien immigration into Britain’, and Cohen (2002, pp. 519–520) states that it set the baseline for ‘[t]he dominant ideological position prevailing today in respect to controls’. However, unlike subsequent legislation, the Aliens Act was restrained due to the residual tension between restrictionist stances and the perspectives of those clinging to Britain’s imagined past of welcoming refugees. This is evidenced in the concessions made for those claiming religious or  Shortly after the Liberal Party’s election win in early 1905, the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, directed immigration officials to give migrants claiming entry on the grounds of religious or political persecution of the ‘benefit of the doubt’ when determining their suitability for entry (Bashford & McAdam, 2014, pp. 318–319). 2

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political asylum, and in the establishment of an appeals process involving immigration boards (Bashford & McAdam, 2014). With the outbreak of war across Europe in 1914, the qualified approach to immigration control was abandoned in favour of highly punitive legislation that was extended perpetually and forms the basis of the immigration law operating in Britain today. Following Britain’s entry into the hostilities of the First World War, heightened panic about the possible infiltration of German spies prompted political debate about the effectiveness of existing immigration legislation. For many within the Liberal Government at the time, the Aliens Act 1905 was incapable of addressing the presumed threat of foreign enemies. When a proposed bill to extend the immigration control powers of the Home Secretary was debated in parliament, it met little resistance and was passed in August 1914 (Saunders, 2003). The emergency provisions of the Aliens Restriction Act 1914 were extensive, despite the fact that it was relatively succinct. The legislation placed strict limits on the movements of foreign nationals within the United Kingdom and prohibited them from settling in specific areas, including near military establishments and the coastline (Hansard, 1914: c589; French, 1978, p. 366). It established designated entry points and empowered the state and its administrators to subject foreigners to ‘arrest, detention’ and ‘search of premises or persons’ (Aliens Restriction Act 1914, s1(1a–k)). The powers introduced were broad in scope and allowed for significant discretionary action on the part of the Home Office and the police. Coupled with the Official Secrets Act 1911, which permitted the apprehension and detention of anyone found to be ‘prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State’, the 1914 legislation was used as a means of detaining thousands of foreign nationals. By November 1915, over 30,000 people identified as enemy aliens were interned in Britain (Panayi, 1991 in Saunders, 2003, p. 27). The Aliens Restriction Act 1914 and the emergency powers it introduced represent some of the clearest examples of a state of emergency being used to justify the formation and implementation of exceptional rules. Schmitt (2005, p.  13) writes that ‘[a]ll law is “situational law”’, which the 1914 Act seemingly reflects. It represents a key example of early British immigration policy in which an ‘emergency’—war— served as the justification for the state to abandon precedented

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commitments to human freedom and dignity through legal means. In this way, the exceptional circumstances of the First World War resulted in the ‘law suspend[ing] itself ’ (Schmitt, 2005, p. 14). However, the Aliens Restriction Act 1914 was limited to wartime. It only empowered the state to ‘impose restriction[s] on aliens’ during ‘a state of war’ or such a time ‘when it appears that an occasion of imminent national danger or great emergency has arisen’ (s1(1)). Subsequent legislation in 1919 and 1920 empowered the state to extend emergency provisions into peacetime, establishing a significant precedent in British legislative history—permanent restrictions on the entry of foreigners subject to immigration controls. As the First World War came to an end, the British government aimed to extend many of the restrictions placed on foreign nationals in 1914 into peacetime. The passage of the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919 secured this ambition, as it allowed the provisions of the 1914 legislation to be implemented not only during a state of war or imminent emergency, but ‘at any time’ (s1). The 1919 legislation enabled the state to determine a foreigner’s nationality ‘in doubtful circumstances’ (s2), and it empowered the state to imprison those believed ‘likely to cause sedition or disaffection’ (s3), and it prohibited the entry of those formerly identified as ‘enemy aliens’ from entering the United Kingdom for a period of three years (s10). An amendment to the 1919 Act, the Aliens Order 1920, introduced further stipulations requiring foreign workers to register with the police and foreign arrivals to complete landing cards and undergo physical inspections (Coleman, 1987; Saunders, 2003). While the extension of emergency powers into peacetime established within the 1919 Act was notionally limited to one year, the legislation was dutifully renewed every year until it was essentially replaced by the Immigration Act 1971 (Coleman, 1987; Bloch & Schuster, 2005, p. 494). The influence of the 1914 and 1919 Acts on future immigration control cannot be understated. They can be viewed as ‘particularly important stepping stones’ towards a modern legislation environment that is restrictive, punitive and exclusionary (Grahl-Madsen, 1966 quoted in Bashford & McAdam, 2014, p. 312). An early realisation of the significance of the Aliens Acts of 1914 and 1919 is captured here in Roscoe’s (1930, p. 69) early reflections on the potential seismic impact of the legislation:

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It will be an interesting subject for discussion in the future by the historian who is impartially reviewing the condition of Great Britain in the years succeeding the War why, when it came to an end and the country had passed out of a state of national peril, England should not only have continued restrictions on the freedom of foreigners which were introduced in wartime, but have in effect reverted to conditions which had not existed for nearly a century.

2.4 1  948–1981: Immigration, Race and the Boundaries of Nationality Following the Second World War, parliament aimed to rearticulate the conditions of British citizenship, particularly regarding the status of citizens of the Commonwealth. Prior to 1948, British nationality extended to all dominions of the United Kingdom, including Commonwealth nations. However, as individual Commonwealth countries, such as Canada, began reshaping the definition of citizenship to include distinctions between citizens of a given Commonwealth country and British subjects, the parliament began debating the possibility of introducing legislation that would establish similar distinctions. As Jones (1948, p. 161) writes, the intended effect of proposed legislation was to establish ‘three classes of persons’ under nationality law, which included: (1) citizens of the United Kingdom; (2) citizens of other Commonwealth countries, as well as Ireland; and (3) aliens. The resultant British Nationality Act 1948 introduced the status of ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’, which was acquirable through birth, descent, registration, naturalisation or if a territory became incorporated into the United Kingdom. The registration pathway allowed a citizen of a Commonwealth country to apply for British citizenship as long as they had been resident in the United Kingdom for a year or more (ibid., pp. 168–169). The bill was not universally supported as it made its way through parliament, and opposing Conservative members lamented the fact that British citizenship would be diluted if any Commonwealth citizen could claim British nationality relatively easily. The racism underpinning these objections was clearly evident in members’ comments associating foreignness with

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‘malcontent’ and lacking an appropriate ‘standard of civilisation’ (Deakin, 1969, p. 79). Nevertheless, the bill passed, and it effectively permitted citizens of Commonwealth states to work and reside in Britain to fill employment gaps left in the aftermath of the Second World War. Throughout the 1950s, a portion of the white British population became restive and reacted prejudicially and, at times, violently towards an increasingly conspicuous non-white minority as Commonwealth citizens from the Caribbean and West Indies continued to take advantage of employment opportunities in the United Kingdom. Animosity towards Commonwealth citizens spilled over into direct violence during the 1958 ‘riots’ in London and Nottingham. While the popular press presented this unrest as an example of ‘race riots’ to foment a sense of societal decline amongst its readership (Small & Solomos, 2006), most of the violence was committed against non-white residents and perpetrated by white citizens. Reflecting on the disorder in 1961, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Maydon, the MP for Wells, asked rhetorically of the riots: ‘What else were those but a manifestation of racial discrimination?’ (Hansard, 22 March 1961, c512). While the collective desire for immigration controls amongst parliamentarians during the 1950s was tepid, reactionary attitudes in the wake of the 1958 riots as well as public disquiet regarding the increasing arrivals of non-white Commonwealth citizens during the early 1960s incentivised parliamentary members to begin advocating for stricter controls on the entry of Commonwealth citizens (Spencer, 1997). A proposed bill that would later become the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 began making its way through parliamentary debates. The key feature of proposed legislation designed to limit the entry of Commonwealth citizens into Britain was the introduction of a work voucher scheme. To be eligible to take up employment in the United Kingdom, a Commonwealth citizen would need to apply for a work voucher, of which there would be a limited number. Notably, this scheme was not to apply to people from every Commonwealth country. Instead, it would be applied predominantly to those arriving from the so-called New Commonwealth, citizens of which were almost universally non-­ white. The racist foundations of this legislation are revealed in comments made by R.A. Butler, the Home Secretary, while the bill was still being debated:

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The great merit of this scheme is that it can be presented as making no distinction on grounds of race or colour. […] We must recognise that, although the scheme purports to relate solely to employment and to be non discriminatory, its aim is primarily social and its restrictive effect is intended to, and would in fact, operate on coloured people almost exclusively. This will be […] laboured by some of our critics but there is no escape from it and at least such critics will not be able to sustain any suggestion that the scheme is inherently discriminatory. (CAB 129/107, 1961, s4)

The successful passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 resulted in the imposition of significant restrictions on the entry of Commonwealth citizens—a population that had previously enjoyed the same movement and residency rights as British citizens. The 1962 Act effectively undermined the universality of the category of ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ established with the British Nationality Act 1948. Section 1 of the 1962 Act established a distinction between two categories of Commonwealth citizen. The restrictions introduced within the legislation, including the work voucher scheme, did not apply to anyone who was born in the United Kingdom or any Commonwealth citizen who held a British passport. Any category of entrant not represented within these two categories, which was effectively much of the population of the ‘New Commonwealth’, was subject to the newly introduced immigration controls, controls which were designed to be racially discriminatory. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 extended these exclusions further, as those free from immigration controls only included British passport holders who could evidence that a parent or grandparent was born in the United Kingdom or those who were naturalised or adopted. The 1968 Act therefore ‘effectively excluded people without close ancestral links to Britain and who, for the most part, would be Black or Asian’ (Miles and Clearly, 1993 in Bloch, 2000, p. 32). Throughout the 1960s, it was evident that there was a certain degree of political capital in adopting an anti-immigrant stance. Peter Griffiths, the MP for Smethwick, ran a successful campaign against his Labour opponent by adopting an extreme position on immigration, going as far as to include a racially charged epithet within his campaign slogan

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(Hartley-Brewer, 1965  in Layton-Henry, 1992, p.  79). MPs Cyril Osborne and Norman Pannell challenged fellow members with statements including: ‘Does the unrestricted immigration of coloured people into this country cause my right hon. Friend no anxieties at all?’ (Osborne in Hansard, 03 May 1961, c1392) and ‘Commonwealth immigrants are responsible for practically the whole of the drug traffic in this country’ (Pannell in Hansard, 17 February 1961, c1967). Enoch Powell famously and opportunistically embraced racialised rhetoric in his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech at a Conservative Association meeting on 20 April 1968, in which he constructed immigrants as inherently criminal, relying on unsourced and lurid accounts of Commonwealth immigrants posting faeces through a pensioner’s letterbox. Powell proposed that fellow Conservatives reject the proposed Race Relations bill that was currently undergoing parliamentary readings, and he implored them to immediately cease immigration from the New Commonwealth while also offering Commonwealth citizens with the offer of a stipend to return to their countries of origin. The price of not proceeding with these measures was nothing less than the degradation of British culture and the implosion of the British state, as Powell portentously exclaimed that he saw ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’ (Powell, 1992, pp. 162–169). While Powell’s contemporaries within the Conservative Party, including Edward Heath, attempted to distance themselves from his inflammatory rhetoric (Spencer, 1997, p. 143), Powell’s position was favoured by an increasing proportion of the British public, and it became clear to Conservatives that adopting an uncompromising stance on immigration that promised further restrictions on non-white immigrants might be politically fruitful (Studlar, 1974, 1978). Following Conservatives’ success in the 1970 election, Heath’s government introduced a new immigration bill that further demarcated the boundaries of belonging and entrenched the racialised construction of Britishness within primary legislation. The Immigration Act 1971, which remains a central pillar of modern Britain’s border control regime, advanced the distinction between ‘patrials’ and ‘non-patrials’. Patrials included Commonwealth immigrants that could evidence their direct descendance from a parent or grandparent born in the United Kingdom, and this meant that the vast majority of ‘patrials’ were white (Hassan, 2000, p. 187). The 1971 Act enhanced

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the power of the Home Secretary and made permanent many of the features of earlier legislation. It also broadened the powers of detention, which became the foundation for the rapid expansion of the use of immigration removal centres from the 1990s onward. The final exclusionary measure to effectively end the free entry of non-White citizens from the Commonwealth and elsewhere was the introduction of the British Nationality Act 1981. This legislation fully redefined the parameters of British citizenship and not only supplanted but completely reversed the relative inclusivity of the British Nationality Act 1948. As Bloch (2000, p.  32) notes, under the 1981 legislation, ‘citizenship through place of birth […] was abolished and replaced by citizenship through descent […]. The effect was to exclude children born in Britain, to Commonwealth migrants, from immediate entitlement to citizenship’, a reality painfully realised by children of the Windrush generation wrongfully detained and deported from the United Kingdom, some of which subsequently died (Rawlinson, 2018; May, 2020). Given that the British Nationality Act 1981 effectively restricted the entry of non-white immigrants, there remained one final route with which subsequent UK governments would turn their legislative attentions: the right of asylum.

References Abrahams, B. L. (1894). The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. The Jewish Quarterly Review, 7(1), 75–100. Abrahams, B.  L. (1895a). The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 (Concluded). The Jewish Quarterly Review, 7(3), 428–458. Abrahams, B.  L. (1895b). The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 (Continued). The Jewish Quarterly Review, 7(2), 236–258. Agamben, G. (2005). State of Exception (K.  Attell, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Agerholm, H. (2018, August 21). Windrush: Government Admits 83 British Citizens May Have Been Wrongfully Deported Due to Scandal but Will Only Apologise to 18. The Independent. Retrieved December 11, 2019, from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-­n ews/windrush-­ government-­deportations-­british-­citizens-­uk-­caribbean-­home-­office-­rudd-­ javid-­a8501076.html

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Aliens Act 1793. 33 Geo 3 c. 4. Retrieved May 20, 2020, from https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.movinghere.org.uk//search/catalogue.asp?RecordID=77088&ResourceTypeID=2&sequence=1 Aliens Act 1905. 5 Edw 7 c. 13. Retrieved June 11, 2020, from https://www. legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Edw7/5/13/contents/enacted Aliens Restriction Act 1914. Stationery Office: London. Retrieved June 11, 2020, from https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/4-­5/12/contents/enacted Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919. Stationery Office: London. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/9-­10/92/ contents Bashford, A., & Gilchrist, C. (2012). The Colonial History of the 1905 Aliens Act. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40(3), 409–437. Bashford, A., & McAdam, J. (2014). The Right to Asylum: Britain’s 1905 Aliens Act and the Evolution of Refugee Law. Law and History Review, 32(2), 309–350. Bloch, A. (2000). A New Era or More of the Same? Asylum Policy in the UK. Journal of Refugee Studies, 13(1), 29–42. Bloch, A., & Schuster, L. (2005). At the Extremes of Exclusion: Deportation, Detention and Dispersal. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28(3), 37–41. Bloom, C. (1992). The Politics of Immigration, 1881–1905. Jewish Historical Studies, 33, 187–214. Brand, P. (2000). Jews and the Law in England, 1275–90. English Historical Review, 115(464), 1138–1158. British Nationality Act 1948. Chapter 56. Retrieved June 11, 2020, from https:// www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/11-­12/56/enacted British Nationality Act 1981. Chapter 61. Retrieved June 11, 2020, from https:// www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1981/61/contents Burke, E. (2013). Select Works of Edmund Burke, Volume 2: Reflections on the Revolution in France (F. Canavan, Ed.). Liberty Fund: Indianapolis. https:// www.amazon.co.uk/Select-­Works-­Edmund-­Burke-­Reflections-­ebook/dp/ B00E0GNMVE (Original work published 1790). CAB 129/107. (1961). Commonwealth Migrants—Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Home Department. Cabinet Papers. 06 October. National Archives. Coddington, K. (2019). The Slow Violence of Life Without Cash: Borders, State Restrictions, and Exclusion in the U.K. and Australia. Geographical Review, 109(4), 527–543. Cohen, S. (2002). The Local State of Immigration Controls. Critical Social Policy, 22(3), 518–543.

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Coleman, D.  A. (1987). U.K.  Statistics on Immigration: Development and Limitations. International Migration Review, 21(4), 1138–1169. Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962. Chapter 21. National Archives. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http:// www.movinghere.org.uk/deliveryfiles/pro/Commonwealth_Immigration_ Act_1962/0/8.pdf Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968. Chapter 9. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/9/pdfs/ukpga_19680009_en.pdf Cunningham, S., & Tomlinson, J. (2005). ‘Starve them out’: Does Every Child Really Matter? A Commentary on Section 9 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act, 2004. Critical Social Policy, 25(2), 253–275. D’Sena, P. (1989). Perquisites and Casual Labour on the London Wharfside in the Eighteenth Century. The London Journal, 14(2), 130–147. Davis, J. (1984). A Poor Man’s System of Justice: The London Police Courts in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century. The Historical Journal, 27(2), 309–335. Deakin, N. (1969). The British Nationality Act of 1948: A Brief Study in the Political Mythology of Race Relations. Race, 11(1), 77–83. Dinwiddy, J. R. (1968). The Use of the Crown’s Power of Deportation Under the Aliens Act, 1793–1826. Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 41(104), 193–211. Dobson, B. (2000). The Medieval York Jewry Reconsidered. Jewish Culture and History, 3(2), 7–20. Dobson, R. B. (1974). The Decline and Expulsion of the Medieval Jews of York. Jewish Historical Society of England, 26, 34–52. Dodsworth, F. M. (2008). The Idea of Police in Eighteenth-Century England: Discipline, Reformation, Superintendence, c. 1780–1800. Journal of the History of Ideas, 69(4), 583–604. Elman, P. (1937). The Economic Causes of the Expulsion of the Jews in 1290. The Economic History Review, 7(2), 145–154. Emsley, C. (1978). The London ‘Insurrection’ of December 1792: Fact, Fiction, or Fantasy? Journal of British Studies, 17(2), 66–86. Emsley, C. (2014). The English Police: A Political and Social History (2nd ed.). Routledge. French, D. (1978). Spy Fever in Britain, 1900–1915. The Historical Journal, 21(2), 355–370. Gainer, B. (1972). The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905. Heinemann Educational Books.

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Haggard, R.  F. (2001). The Persistence of Victorian Liberalism: The Politics of Social Reform in Britain, 1870–1900. Greenwood Press. Hansard HC Deb vol 15 col 500 (20 April 1826) [Electronic version]. Hansard HC Deb vol 145 col 768 (02 May 1905) [Electronic version]. Hansard HC Deb vol 634 cols 1929–2024 (17 February 1961) [Electronic version]. Hansard HC Deb vol 637 cols 441–532 (22 March 1961) [Electronic version]. Hansard HC Deb vol 639 cols 1391–1394 (03 May 1961) [Electronic version]. Hansard HL Deb vol 17 cols 589–602 (10 September 1914) [Electronic version]. Hassan, L. (2000). Deterrence Measures and the Preservation of Asylum in the United Kingdom and United States. Journal of Refugee Studies., 13(2), 184–204. Home Office. (2016). Immigration Rules. Retrieved December 11, 2019, from https://www.gov.uk/guidance/immigration-­rules Home Office. (2020). UK Visas and Registering with the Police. Retrieved May 20, 2020, from https://www.gov.uk/register-­with-­the-­police Hume, L.  J. (1973). Bentham’s Panopticon: An Administrative History—I. Historical Studies, 15(61), 703–721. Immigration Act 1971, c.77. Retrieved May 20, 2020, from https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1971/77/contents/enacted Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. c.33. Retrieved May 20, 2020, from https:// www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1999/33/contents/enacted Jones, B. A. (2013). “In Favour of Popery”: Patriotism, Protestantism, and the Gordon Riots in the Revolutionary British Atlantic. Journal of British Studies, 52(1), 79–102. Jones, C. (1977). Immigration and Social Policy in Britain. Routledge. Jones, J.  M. (1948). British Nationality Act, 1948. British Year Book of International Law, 25, 158–179. Koyama, M. (2010). The Political Economy of Expulsion: The Regulation of Jewish Moneylending in Medieval England. Constitutional Political Economy, 21(4), 374–406. Layton-Henry, Z. (1992). The Politics of Immigration: Immigration, ‘race’ and ‘race’ Relations in Post-war Britain. Blackwell Publishers. Leonard, G. H. (1891). The Expulsion of the Jews by Edward I: an Essay in Explanation of the Exodus, A.D. 1290. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5, 103–146. Lewis, P., & Taylor, M. (2012, July 17). Jimmy Mubenga Death: G4S Guards Will Not Face Charges. The Guardian. Retrieved August 28, 2012, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jul/17/jimmy-­m ubenga-­g uards­no-­charges

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Linebaugh, P. (2006). The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. Verso Books. Metropolitan Police Act 1829. 10 Geo 4 c. 44. Retrieved August 14, 2021, from https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo4/10/44 Meyers, E. (2004). International Immigration Policy: A Theoretical and Comparative Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan. Mundill, R. (1998). England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290. Cambridge University Press. Mundill, R. (2003). Edward I and the Final Phase of Anglo-Jewry. In P. Skinner (Ed.), The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives. The Boydell Press. Mundill, R. (2010). The King’s Jews: Money, Massacre and Exodus in Medieval England. Continuum. Official Secrets Act 1911. Geo 5 1–2. Chapter 28. Stationery Office: London. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ Geo5/1-­2/28/contents Orchard, P. (2014). A Right to Flee: Refugees, States, and the Construction of International Cooperation. Cambridge University Press. Pellew, J. (1989). The Home Office and the Aliens Act, 1905. The Historical Journal, 32(2), 369–385. Powell, J. E. (1992). To the Annual General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre (Birmingham, April 20, 1968). In Reflections: Selected Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell. Bellew. Powell, J. E. (2007, November 6). Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech. The Telegraph. Retrieved November 05, 2019, from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ comment/3643823/Enoch-­Powells-­Rivers-­of-­Blood-­speech.html Rawlinson, K. (2018, November 12). Windrush: 11 People Wrongly Deported from UK Have Died—Sajid Javid. The Guardian. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from http://www.theguardian.com/uk-­news/2018/nov/12/windrush-­11­people-­wrongly-­deported-­from-­uk-­have-­died-­sajid-­javid Registration of Aliens Act 1826. 7 Geo 4 c. 54. Retrieved June 14, 2020, from https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.movinghere.org. uk/deliveryfiles/PRO/Registration_of_Aliens_Act_1826/0/1.pdf Registration of Aliens Act 1836. 6 & 7 Will 4 c. 11. Retrieved June 14, 2020, from https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120603111455/http:// www.movinghere.org.uk//deliveryfiles/pro/Registration_of_Aliens_ Act_1836/0/2.pdf

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Reinecke, C. (2009). Governing Aliens in Times of Upheaval: Immigration Control and Modern State Practice in Early Twentieth-Century Britain, Compared with Prussia. International Review of Social History, 54(01), 39–65. Roscoe, E. S. (1930). Aliens in Great Britain. Transactions of the Grotius Society, 16, 65–72. Routledge, R. A. (1982). The Legal Status of the Jews in England 1190–1790. Journal of Legal History, 2, 91–124. Rudé, G.  F. E. (1956). The Gordon Riots: A Study of the Rioters and their Victims. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6, 93–114. Russell, G. (1997). Burke’s Dagger: Theatricality, Politics and Print Culture in the 1790s. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 20(1), 1–16. Saunders, K. (2003). ‘The stranger in our gates’: Internment Policies in the United Kingdom and Australia During the Two World Wars, 1914–39. Immigrants & Minorities, 22(1), 22–43. Schmitt, C. (2005). Political Theology, Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (G. Schwab, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Sibley, N. W. (1909). International Law and the Aliens Act. Law Magazine and Review: A Quarterly Review of Jurisprudence, 34(4), 432–442. Singer, S.  A. (1964). The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. The Jewish Quarterly Review, 55(2), 117–136. Small, S., & Solomos, J. (2006). Race, Immigration and Politics in Britain: Changing Policy Agendas and Conceptual Paradigms 1940s–2000s. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 47(3–4), 235–257. Sparrow, E. (1998). Secret Service under Pitt’s Administrations, 1792–1806. History, 83(270), 280–294. Spencer, I. (1997). British Immigration Policy since 1939: The Making of Multi-­ racial Britain. Routledge. Stacey, R. (2003). The English Jews Under Henry III. In P. Skinner (Ed.), The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives. The Boydell Press. Stacey, R. (2013). The massacres of 1189–90 and the origins of the Jewish Exchequer, 1186–1226. In S. Rees Jones & S. Watson (Eds.), Christians and Jews in Angevin England. York Medieval Press. Steadman, P. (2012). Samuel Bentham’s Panopticon. Journal of Bentham Studies, 14(1), 1–30. Studlar, D. T. (1974). British Public Opinion, Colour Issues, and Enoch Powell: A Longitudinal Analysis. British Journal of Political Science, 4(3), 371–381.

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Studlar, D. T. (1978). Policy Voting in Britain: The Colored Immigration Issue in the 1964, 1966, and 1970 General Elections. The American Political Science Review, 72(1), 46–64. Taylor, D. (1997). The New Police in Nineteenth-century England: Crime, Conflict and Control. Manchester University Press. Tovey, D. (1738). Anglia Judaica. James Fletcher. Vincent, N. (1994). Two Papal Letters on the Wearing of the Jewish Badge, 1221 and 1229. Jewish Historical Studies, 34, 209–224. Walters, W. (2002). Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens. Citizenship Studies, 6(3), 265–292. Weber, L. (2003). Down that Wrong Road: Discretion in Decisions to Detain Asylum Seekers Arriving at UK Ports. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 42(3), 248–262. Wray, H. (2006). The Aliens Act 1905 and the Immigration Dilemma. Journal of Law and Society, 33(2), 302–323.

3 From ‘Crimmigration’ to Governmentality: Theoretical Perspectives on the Management and Marketisation of Immigration Control

Following the effective restriction of nearly all non-EU immigrant categories by the early 1980s, asylum seekers became one of the only groups of migrants in the United Kingdom whose entry was not strictly controlled via legislation (Bosworth & Guild, 2008, p. 707), though a political shift towards ‘the question of asylum’ resulted in enhanced legal scrutiny of asylum seekers by the end of the twentieth century (Huysmans, 2000, p. 755). Developments in the 1990s increasingly focused the managerial and punitive lens of immigration law on asylum seekers as an inherently suspect community. Section 2 of the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996 empowered the Home Secretary to deport asylum claimants to ‘safe third countries’ provided that their ‘life and liberty would not be threatened’ and that doing so would not contravene the rules of 1951 Refugee Convention (UNHCR, 2011), such as the non-refoulment provision of Article 33. Section 4 amended the Immigration Act 1971 to include the offence of seeking leave to remain through deception, effectively embedding the popularised image of the ‘bogus’ asylum seeker into law. The large increase in asylum applications in the early 1990s (Bloch, 2000, pp. 29–30) and the widely disseminated view that asylum seekers © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. A. Hirschler, Hostile Homes, Critical Criminological Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79213-8_3

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were seeking to exploit the generous welfare offerings of Western European states contributed to a perception that the entry of asylum seekers needed to be curtailed. Moore (2013, p.  349) writes that ‘the hegemonic discourse on asylum regularly articulated asylum seekers as an accumulating mass of undeserving and duplicitous “intruders”, and as a group who were somehow allowed to defy the rules’ and were engaged in the concerted ‘“abuse” of [Britain’s] immigration system’. The political reaction to these constructions resulted in asylum seekers being specifically targeted in ‘the area of entry and in the area of welfare entitlements’, as evidenced in successive legislation from the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993 to the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 (Bloch, 2000, p. 32). The expansion of offences including arriving without proper documentation and making false representations further entrenched asylum seekers as a criminal population and facilitated the British government’s abrogation of the spirit of the Refugee Convention. As Bosworth (2008, p. 205) argues, the representation of asylum seekers ‘as a threat and as “bogus” claimants’ has resulted in their loss of ‘affective and legal “entitlements” to British hospitality. Detention and expulsion are, for these people, appropriate’. The intensification of restrictions placed on asylum seekers, and the increased opportunity for falling afoul of immigration laws, has effectively made the process of seeking asylum in the United Kingdom an illegal activity (Gibney, 2004 in Bosworth & Guild, 2008, p. 707). This chapter explores some of the conceptual and theoretical approaches that have informed research into asylum seekers’ exposure to harm by the state and other institutions, firms and individuals incorporated into the United Kingdom’s immigration control regime. Beginning with Stumpf ’s (2006) reflections on the embedded legal and societal constructions of asylum seekers and other immigrants as inherently ‘criminal’, it then addresses the synergies between criminal justice system and border control functions including indefinite detention and the perceived surveillance functions of the dispersed asylum accommodation programme. The second half of this chapter introduces common theoretical positions used to investigate the development of immigration legislation and consider asylum seekers’ relationship to the state in an environment in which their movements and freedoms are highly curtailed and in which they are

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subjected to excessive surveillance. The section begins with an examination of Giorgio Agamben’s use of concepts like Schmitt’s ‘state of exception’, Arendt’s ‘camp’ and Foucault’s ‘biopower’ to describe an immigration control environment in which asylum seekers and other migrants are uniquely subjected to the rule of law but unprotected by it. While these concepts have been adopted elsewhere in related research investigating the experiences of asylum seekers, they remain somewhat limited by their determinism and the degree to which they fail to acknowledge potential agency and resistance on the part of asylum seekers and their advocates within the refugee and asylum support sector. This chapter closes on a return to Foucault’s reflections on the diffuse nature of power and his concepts of ‘governmentality’ and ‘biopower’ as a means of reasserting the emergent nature of power as it arises from human interactions and within institutional environments.

3.1 ‘Crimmigration’ and Constructing the Deviant ‘Other’ Following the expansion of asylum-related offences throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, criminologists, sociologists and others working within the fields of refugee and border studies (see: Aas, 2011; Bhatia, 2020; Pakes & Holt, 2017; Stanley, 2018; van der Woude et al., 2017; Welch, 2012) have adopted Juliet Stumpf ’s (2006) portmanteau, ‘crimmigration’, to examine the convergence of immigration and criminal law. Writing within the context of US immigration law, Stumpf (2006, pp. 383–384) argues that the merging of immigration and criminal law is evidenced in the expansion of offences for which deportation is a possible outcome for non-citizens, including drug trafficking, claiming false citizenship and ‘marrying to evade immigration laws’. For Stumpf, high rates of immigration prosecutions (ibid., p. 388) and the procedural similarities between crime control and immigration control, such as immigration officials’ power to ‘execute warrants, make arrests, and detain suspected violators’ (ibid., p. 390), provide further confirmation that the state employs exclusionary and punitive methods to further establish the

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boundaries of belonging. ‘By imposing the sanction of deportation for crimes and by criminalizing immigration violations’, Stumpf (ibid., p.  412) writes, ‘the state expresses moral condemnation both for the crime through criminal punishment and for the individual’s status as a noncitizen offender’. Stumpf ’s work has been adapted and expanded to examine ‘crimmigration’ in wider national and international contexts, including the further merging of criminal and immigration law, the synergies between mechanisms of criminal justice and border control and the rhetorical conflation of migrants and criminals within political discourse and media representations. In the United Kingdom, nearly all breaches of immigration rules are linked to a related criminal offence (Home Office, 2010, p. 26). Aliverti (2016, p. 2) notes that 89 immigration offences were established between 1999 and 2016 compared to ‘only 70 that were introduced between 1905 and 1998’. Incarceration and fines are possible penalties for entering the United Kingdom without leave to remain, overstaying following the expiry of leave to remain, failing to provide documents and information on arrival and making false statements to immigration officers (Home Office, 2010, p. 29). Section 2 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 established the offence of not providing valid immigration documents at leave to remain and asylum interviews. Some vulnerable asylum seekers are particularly susceptible to being caught up in the criminalisation of immigration violations, such as failing to produce documentation or providing false documentation, as the circumstances of their departure from a country of origin may have resulted in an inability to retrieve birth certificates and other records or may have necessitated the securing of fraudulent documentation to secure passage away from threatening conditions (Day & White, 2002, p. 19; Collyer, 2005, pp. 707–708). The punitive logic of modern immigration policy is further evidenced in more recent legislation penalising carriers, private landlords and employers for any accessorial role in assisting illegal migrants (Bowling & Westenra, 2018, p. 168). Under Section 35 of the Immigration Act 2016, employers are criminally liable—and face a maximum custodial sentence of five years—for employing anyone disallowed from working due to immigration status or anyone that the employer has ‘reasonable cause to believe […] is disqualified from employment’ as a

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result of their immigration status. The basis of ‘reasonable cause’ is sufficiently vague to raise concerns about the basis of employers’ suspicions, including possible reliance on an employee’s physical appearance, in determining the employee’s likelihood of working illegally. Section 44 makes it an offence for a person to drive a motor vehicle if not lawfully resident in the United Kingdom; third parties also commit an offence if they know or have ‘reasonable cause to believe’ that a driver is not lawfully resident. For proponents of the ‘crimmigration’ perspective, such extensions of the criminal law in the management of persons subject to immigration control represent an advancement of retributive responses to the mere presence of non-citizens. This is further reflected, Aas (2013, p.  24) argues, in the creation of ‘novel configurations of the penal’ in which immigrants are increasingly exposed to targeted policing strategies, marked for incarceration and subjected to additional periods of detention and, ultimately, deportation. Kaufman (2013) cites the creation of the ‘hubs and spokes’ model of imprisoning foreign nationals under New Labour as evidence of the integration of criminal justice approaches into the management of immigrant populations. Under this scheme, the then UK Border Agency and the Prison Service collaborated in consolidating foreign national detainees into prisons designated specifically for foreign offenders, and immigration officials were embedded on-site. The intention, Kaufman notes, was to ultimately streamline the removals process, so that upon the completion of foreign nationals’ sentences, they could continue to be held before entering an immigration removal centre in advance of their deportation (Kaufman, 2013, p. 169). This is confirmed in an instruction issued by the National Offender Management Service (NOMS, 2015, p. 2), in which the use of select prisons for the sole purpose of detaining ‘Foreign National Offenders’ (FNOs) was presented as vital to achieving the ultimate goal of deporting foreign offenders and enabling the Home Office to ‘make best use of their resources’. Many of the people incarcerated in immigration removal centres are not, as popularly represented, dangerous criminal offenders, but migrants who have been detained for immigration-related offences (Fekete & Webber, 2010, p.  2) or asylum seekers whose initial claim has been rejected and are awaiting the outcome of an appeal (Schuster, 2005, p.  612; Hudson,

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2018, p. 20). Over half of those entering detention in 2019 were asylum seekers (Home Office, 2020 in Silverman et al., 2020, p. 8). The practice of detaining foreign offenders following the completion of a custodial sentence to facilitate their removal is particularly controversial, as detainees face an indeterminate period of detention despite having served time for an offence. It is a process that, along with deportation, has been deemed a form of ‘double punishment’ in which prisoners are detained for months or even years following the end of their custodial sentence (Barker, 2013; Fekete & Webber, 2010; Todd-Kvam, 2019). While detention serves an administrative function in facilitating the removal of asylum seekers and other immigrants, it is functionally prison-­ like, as detainees are enclosed in secure environments featuring ‘bars on windows, high fences topped with razor wire, and ubiquitous CCTV cameras’ (Bosworth & Turnbull, 2015 quoted in Bowling & Westenra, 2018, p. 174). For many detainees, the experience of detention is indistinguishable from prison and, at times, worse (see: Taylor, 2018). A female detainee in Yarl’s Wood detailed her experience, stating: ‘You don’t have your freedom, you are powerless. […] When I was put on suicide watch they would put male officers to watch me, they would watch all night, right by my bed’ (quoted in Hudson, 2018, p. 20). In their reflections on detention experiences, former prisoners have also highlighted the unique challenges faced in immigration removal centres that are distinct from those within prison, including the added emotional strain of being incarcerated for an indeterminate amount of time and lacking intellectual stimulation and a sense of agency (Turnbull & Hasselberg, 2017, pp.  143, 145). In an environment in which the mechanisms of criminal law and immigration administration overlap, as in the incarceration of ‘foreign offenders’, the feeling and intent of imprisonment and detention are virtually the same. As Bosworth et al. (2018, p. 37) write, ‘[w]hether or not they have ever been imprisoned before, detainees commonly refer to their administrative incarceration in punitive terms’. Despite any attempts to differentiate the detention regime from the prison system, detained asylum seekers and other migrants interpret their experiences within a criminal justice context (Bosworth & Guild, 2008, p. 706). This is evident, too, in the past detention experiences of asylum seekers living within dispersed housing in the United Kingdom. Saira

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(interview, 19 July 2013), an asylum seeker living in dispersed accommodation in Glasgow, described the challenges of her previous detention experience in Yarl’s Wood, stating: The detention centre—it’s like prison, I would say. You get certain time, and certain food, and you’re not allowed to go out at this time and that. It’s similar…it’s more horrible than prison. Women doesn’t have any rights. […] No respect for a woman in there, no.

Saira recalled incidents in which male Serco employees would open the door to her shared room without notice; she described their attitudes as ‘rude’ and ‘strict’. Marion, a dispersed asylum seeker living in West Yorkshire, explained that she was detained almost immediately upon arrival into the United Kingdom and spent nearly two years in a detention facility. Marion described the experience as being ‘behind bars for 22 months’ (interview, 9 June 2013). These accounts are not unique, and they are reflected in multiple investigations into the extreme conditions asylum seekers and other migrants face within detention environments, including a 2017 Panaroma documentary highlighting racism, abuse and violence within Brook House IRC (BBC, 2017; see also: Bosworth, 2012 and Athwal, 2015). Further examples of the ‘crimmigration’ regime are evidenced in other ways, including the use of police in immigration control strategies (Parmar, 2020), the collection of biometric data and surveillance tactics (Aas, 2011) and the expansion of private security firms into the management of immigration removal centres, transportation services and dispersed housing for destitute asylum seekers (Weber & Bowling, 2004: Bosworth, 2012; Guild, 2016; Gill et al., 2014). It is also reinforced in media representations and political messaging conflating immigration and asylum with criminality and deviance; constructions of the ‘illegal’ and ‘bogus’ asylum seeker often dominate media reports (Innes, 2010; Moore, 2013). In their study of participant interpretations of media representations of asylum seekers, Pearce and Stockdale (2009, p. 152) note that just under half of their respondents associated asylum seekers with criminality, and suggest that the acceptance of ‘poorly formed and somewhat contradictory representations of asylum seekers’ is likely ‘anchored

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in negative media images’ (ibid., p. 154). The criminalisation of immigration is extensive, apparent in the logic and apparatuses of social control as well as within popular discourse and imagination. Deportation and prolonged periods of detention are validated and made justifiable, because immigrants and asylum seekers are ‘criminal’, and the law and apparatuses of control have been designed to ensure that this is increasingly the case. This construction of the inherently criminal asylum seeker is achievable, in part, because of a significant caveat in Article 33(2) of the 1951 Refugee Convention (UNHCR, 2011)  that allows states to expel those convicted of a ‘particularly serious crime’. Additionally, Article 1F excludes those ‘to whom there are serious reasons for considering’ whether a person has committed war crimes, ‘serious non-political crime outside the country of refuge’ or acts contrary to the values of the United Nations. In principle, these sorts of exclusions mean that a person’s refugee status can be denied or revoked on the grounds of criminality, and the threshold for exclusion is arguably lower than it is within a criminal law context. As Dauvergne (2013, p. 81) notes, ‘“serious reasons for considering” […] is still a long way from the criminal burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt’, which ‘means that individuals suspected of criminal activity may be excluded in circumstances that could not possibly lead to a criminal conviction’. Under immigration and refugee law, therefore, asylum seekers lack the protective insulation from arbitrariness that would otherwise be afforded to a suspect within criminal law. A related consequence of the rhetorical proximity between refugees and criminality within the Refugee Convention is that it reinforces the perception of asylum seekers as inherently criminal leading to an environment in which ‘punitive action against the entire group appears justifiable’ (ibid., p. 81). Those advancing the ‘crimmigration’ perspective suggest that the merging of immigration and criminal law is a deliberate process that operationalises the vilification of immigrants and asylum seekers as a means of reinforcing national identity through deterrence strategies and symbolic demonstrations of the state’s competence in marginalising and ejecting unwanted foreign populations. The criminalisation of migration and normalisation of administrative punishments like detention and deportation are designed to dissuade people from making the journey to

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the United Kingdom and to encourage those already present to return to their country of origin (Bosworth & Guild, 2008; Schuster, 2005; Walker, 2019; Weber, 2002; Welch & Schuster, 2005). The effectiveness of deterrence in criminal justice approaches, including imprisonment and zero tolerance policing, is questionable (Braithwaite, 2018; Nagin, 2013), and there is little evidence to support the notion that deterrence strategies employed in border control processes lead to significant reductions in asylum claims. Since Theresa May’s statement of intent to create a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants (Kirkup & Winnett, 2012), the number of annual asylum claims increased from 23,584 in 2013 to 35,566  in 2019 (Home Office, 2020a). Still, deterrence-inspired approaches to the management of asylum seekers and other migrants persist in both border control strategies and the Home Office’s dispersal programmes under the former NASS and COMPASS regimes and the current Asylum Accommodation and Support Services Contracts. Following the introduction of the dispersal programme in the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, Mynott (2000, p.  318) notes that asylum seekers’ placement in areas without a robust system of specialist support can be interpreted as a ‘deliberate ploy to make it harder for asylum seekers to make their claim’. The no-choice dispersal model alongside the stigmatising effects of cashless support are just two features of the United Kingdom’s deterrence model. Isolation, destitution, overcrowding and substandard living conditions all contribute to an environment designed to incentivise asylum seekers to return to their countries of origin and dissuade others from making initial claims (Darling, 2011; Fekete, 2001; Hynes, 2011; Stewart, 2012). Successive UK governments’ decisions to outsource the management of dispersed housing to the same firms responsible for operating detention facilities and transportation services reflect an advancement of punitive and carceral logics aimed at making life sufficiently miserable for asylum seekers that they opt to withdraw their applications and return home. As Darling (2011, p. 368) writes, ‘[t]he mobility and insecurity associated with asylum housing is […] one which creates discomfort and disorientation’. However, despite exposure to the extreme conditions of the UK immigration system, deterrence policies are ineffective in spurring voluntary returns or reducing asylum applications (Weber & Bowling, 2004, p.  201). Only a small

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percentage of asylum seekers opt to return to their countries of origin despite facing hostile treatment and severe privations within the United Kingdom (Quinn, 2014, p. 68). Crawley et al. (2011, p. 61) note that less than 2 per cent of refused asylum seekers living in the United Kingdom in 2009 opted for voluntary return, suggesting that ‘[t]he low level of voluntary return is indicative of the clear decision of refused asylum seekers to choose a life of destitution rather than accept state support on the condition of returning to their country of origin’. While the criminalisation of immigration may be unsuccessful in diminishing the number of asylum applications, it may serve a symbolic function, as it demonstrates to the population that the government is taking immigration control seriously. Fudge (2018, p. 559) explains that political rhetoric and legislative constructions of migrant illegality serve to remind British workers that their livelihoods are not being undermined by exploitative foreigners. Aliverti (2012) reveals that the proportion of foreigners convicted of immigration crimes is relatively small and that the introduction of a range of immigration offences allows the state to justify administrative sanctions, such as detention and deportation; it also demonstrates that the state has ‘immigration flows under control’ (ibid., p.  418). Politicians draw on widespread fears that unfettered immigration will contribute to a diminishment in opportunities for citizens and a deterioration of British identity. Bigo (2002, p. 65) argues that the securitisation of immigration represents a ‘governmentality of unease’ in which politicians exploit the structural precarity of late modernity to fuel popular anxiety about immigrants in an effort to maintain a tenuous hold on ‘their symbolic control over the territorial boundaries’. The criminalisation of immigration can therefore be viewed as a method of reaffirming the tenuous foundations of ‘national identity’ while destabilising migrants’ sense of belonging through the relentless use of punitive criminal justice tactics in the policing of immigration. In introducing the concept of ‘crimmigration’, Stumpf (2006) draws on membership theory to illustrate that by criminalising migrants, the state is able to strengthen its social contract with those deemed eligible for belonging. Where criminal law demarcates the boundaries of belonging through the use of incarceration, immigration law achieves this through the use of deportation (ibid., p. 397). Arguably, the dividing line

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between acceptance and rejection is further demonstrated in the use of dispersal, which separates asylum seekers from support networks and segregates them into isolated, yet visible enclaves of difference based on contractors’ ability to source cheap clusters of accommodation. Their geographical location within dispersal zones becomes yet another way in which asylum seekers are stigmatised and their sense of belonging undermined. The visual spectacle of asylum seekers’ status as outsiders was blatantly evidenced in the ‘red door’ controversy in Middlesbrough. The subcontractor in the region, Jomast, was implicated in making asylum seekers targets of racism and harassment, as the firm had painted the front doors of its asylum dispersal accommodation red in an effort to more easily monitor its housing stock and the asylum seekers within (Bates, 2017; Darling, 2016). Darling (2016, p.  484) writes that ‘the exclusionary marking of red front doors is emblematic of a system built upon a drive for fiscal savings at the expense of human dignity’. Beyond the financial and efficiency gains, the marking of residents’ doors further differentiated them from others in the community. The labels of ‘criminal’ and ‘bogus’ are paired with visual cues reinforcing perceived distinctions between asylum seekers and those who ‘belong’. The dispersal of asylum seekers becomes as much a function of the construction and reassertion of a tenuous national identity as deportation serves as ‘a way in which citizenship may be affirmed and reaffirmed as a normatively meaningful and practically valuable status’ (Gibney, 2013, p.  220). Young (2003, p. 455) suggests that the demonisation of immigrants, and particularly their construction as ‘criminal’ and ‘deviant’ in contrast to a ‘law-abiding’ and ‘normal’ citizenry, is part of an essentialising process that buttresses an ephemeral national identity in the face of the increasing insecurity and uncertainty of late modernity. The establishment and reaffirmation of identity are only possible through the ‘essentializing and denigration of the other’ (ibid., p. 457). ‘Crimmigration’ can perhaps be best understood as a collective response to a crisis of national identity, in which the law, apparatuses of social control and media constructions coalesce around the idea that Britishness can only exist in contrast to the ‘other’. Deviance and criminality cannot be inherent features of a British population; they are imported from the outside. The construction of these sorts of binaries is particularly evident

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during and after periods of unrest. Following the 2011 riots in Britain, for instance, the former prime minister, David Cameron, used racialised rhetoric to create an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ distinction between rioters and a presumably lawful British public, stating: ‘Those thugs […] do not represent us’ (Cameron, 2011). Iain Duncan Smith, then the work and pensions secretary, likened rioters to ‘child soldiers of the third world’ whose only frame of reference is ‘the violent and the criminal’ (quoted in Mulholland, 2011). Within these constructions, criminality is simply not a feature of whiteness or Britishness, a point David Starkey made bluntly on Newsnight during the riots by stating that ‘whites have become black’ (Quinn, 2011). Theresa May’s mooting of the ‘hostile environment’ policy just a year after the riots reflects the extent to which criminality and immigration are so closely wedded within the collective political imagination. The merging of criminal and immigration law becomes the only feasible solution to the perceived multi-fronted threat to British security and identity. The exposure of asylum seekers and immigrants to extreme treatment within dispersal, detention and deportation contexts is therefore permissible in service of the protection of the (white) British population. While the ‘crimmigration’ narrative is helpful in illustrating the coalescence of crime and immigration control strategies, it nevertheless may benefit from deeper embedding within a historical and sociological framework that more specifically addresses the associations between race, nationality and social control. Garner (2015, p. 199) argues that existing explorations of the ‘crimmigration’ thesis tend to neglect clear connections between ‘racialized immigration policy’ and ‘racialized penal policy’, as ‘scholars have primarily worked in their own disciplinary silos’. For Garner, the ‘crimmigration’ thesis must focus more explicitly on the role and function of race in crime and immigration control (ibid., p. 202). In many respects, the development of racialised immigration legislation in Britain has occurred contemporaneously with racialised crime control strategies. The excessive targeting of black communities in Operation Swamp prior to the 1981 Brixton riots occurred alongside the UK government’s redefinition of British citizenship in the British Nationality Act 1981 along racial lines, effectively ending the citizenship rights of non-­ white Commonwealth immigrants (Hirschler, 2012, pp. 79–80). As the

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Coalition and Conservative governments of the 2010s were pursuing a ‘hostile environment’ policy overwhelmingly impacting non-white migrants and lifelong residents, such as the so-called Windrush generation, the disproportionate use of police stop-and-search rates of black people continued to rise.1 While various strands of literature have managed to address the systemic racism embedded within criminal justice practices (Bowling & Phillips, 2007; Medina Ariza, 2014; Yesufu, 2013) and approaches to immigration control (Fekete, 2001; Maguire, 2012), these are not necessarily wedded within ‘crimmigration’ narratives. Garner views this as a missed opportunity especially given the clear historical roots of restricting the entry of non-white people while also subjecting minority ethnic populations to disproportionate levels of policing and imprisonment. Since Garner’s entreaty, ‘crimmigration’ scholars have made the connections between race, criminalisation and immigration control more explicit. Armenta (2017, p. 87) explores the ways in which law enforcement agencies in the United States are active in a racialisation process, which targets Latinos for low-level criminality and facilitates their deportation through a labelling process establishing Latinos as ‘criminal aliens’ deserving of harsh treatment, including longer periods of incarceration and classification as more serious criminals despite having been arrested for relatively minor offences. Armenta (ibid., p.  93) writes that ‘laws, policies, and practices […] undergird systemic and institutionalized racism, reproducing racial domination and reinforcing white supremacy’ and ‘stem from a long tradition of preserving the American racial hierarchy’. Bhatia (2020) extends the ‘crimmigration’ narrative to examine the criminalisation of asylum seekers in the United Kingdom following a qualitative study of asylum seekers’ experiences of detention and imprisonment for immigration-related offences. Respondents noted the use of racist stereotyping by prison officers and racist abuse perpetrated by white inmates (ibid., pp.  42, 46). For Bhatia, the racialised management of criminalised immigrants represents a ‘set of hostile practices’ designed to punish and exclude those perceived as outsiders (ibid., p.  38). Racist  In 2018/2019, black people in Britain were 9.5 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people compared to 6.6 times in 2010/2011 (Home Office, 2020b). 1

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violence is not only an outcome of asylum seekers’ exposure to criminal justice institutions, but a feature of the ‘crimmigration’ regime within which racialised harm is ‘systematically built into the legal and policy frameworks’ (ibid., p. 47). The work of Armenta and Bhatia represents a possible evolution of the ‘crimmigration’ thesis, which better reflects the imbalanced effects the criminalisation of immigration has on non-white people specifically. The acknowledgement of racialised logics of both social control and border management aids critical reflection on the interconnectedness between state responses to—and constructions of— criminality and deviance on the basis of race and nationality. ‘Crimmigration’ narratives tend to rely on a Hobbesian construction of a state that is organised and resolute in its subjugation of migrants, asylum seekers and foreign ‘criminals’. The power of the state is total as it unflinchingly directs the mechanisms of law and order towards the ultimate end of expelling migrants. The merging of criminal law and immigration law is designed to expedite this process, as asylum seekers and other migrants are made criminal. Their removal is therefore justifiable, as they threaten the welfare of the permitted population. Agamben’s (1998) concepts of ‘bare life’ and the sovereign ‘ban’ are used to illustrate the extremity of migrants’ experiences and the state’s absolute power over life (De Genova, 2010; Doty, 2011; Klein & Williams, 2012; Vaughan-­ Williams, 2010). For Agamben (1998), bare life, or zoē, is life that is denied political agency, but is nevertheless politically valued as it can be manipulated and abandoned in service of sovereign interests. His adaptation of ‘homo sacer’, the sacred man, as ‘life that may be killed but not sacrificed’ (ibid., p.  83) illustrates the liminal quality of bare life, as it exists insofar as it can be eliminated, but its killing would not hold the attendant moral and spiritual value of a sacrificial death. The sovereign can abandon or banish bare life, but this does not necessarily result in its physical expulsion from a territory, as the visual spectacle of bare life in ‘camps’ affirms the identity of that life which does have political agency, bios. These concepts will be explored in greater detail in the following section, but it is worth stating here that their application within ‘crimmigration’ narratives has on the one hand facilitated understanding of the state’s role in legitimating the exceptional treatment of asylum seekers and other migrants, while it has also limited critical reflection on the

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complex and contradictory qualities of the state and migrants’ capacity for agency and resistance. Aas (2011) situates Agamben’s ‘ban’ within the logic of border control, arguing that the apparatuses of crimmigration control throughout the European Union, including surveillance systems like Eurodac and Eurosur, operate as sovereign tools of exclusion aimed at both expelling foreigners and strengthening ‘internal community building’ (original emphasis, Aas, 2011, p. 334). Surveillance strategies and the use of biometrics, such as fingerprint scanning and facial recognition techniques, are used in the protection of one population and the criminalisation of another. ‘[T]hese practices’, Aas writes, ‘are predominantly directed at specific groups of “crimmigrant” others who form a class of subcitizens, where crime control objectives define the terms of their exclusion from the bios’ (ibid., p. 342). Bosworth et al. (2018, p. 43) posit that the pursuit of controlling populations beyond state boundaries and the objective of expelling unwanted foreigners represent a shift in the governmentality of population management. They suggest that the state has moved away from the logic of Foucault’s panopticon, in which populations are managed—and manage themselves—through techniques and apparatuses of securitisation, and is instead driven by the logic of Agamben’s ‘ban’, or the ‘Banopticon’. The internal exclusion of migrants and asylum seekers reflected in the expanded use of incarceration, detention and deportation is a key feature of the ‘crimmigration’ regime. Bosworth et  al. (2018, p. 43) write: In the movement from the Panopticon to the Banopticon we bear witness to a more complex interplay between territory, geopolitics and penalty as deportation and prison transfer agreements organize bodies geographically and according to state-defined markers of membership. Such practices expand the geographic reach of the contemporary penal state, revealing significant interconnections between internal and external dimensions of the penal field.

While these sorts of arguments help illustrate the extent to which exclusion is operationalised across multiple fronts, they also rely on a representation of the ‘contemporary penal state’ as a singular actor

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pursuing a unified objective. However, as Migdal (2001) argues, distinctions must be made between the outward image the state projects and the actual practices it engages in, which are marked by contradictions, inefficiencies and competing perspectives. Agamben’s ‘sovereign’ and formulations of the state as leviathan address only the exterior guise of the state, which is one of ‘a dominant, integrated, autonomous entity that controls, in a given territory, all rule making, either directly through its own agencies or indirectly by sanctioning other authorised organisations’ (Migdal, 2001, p. 16). In reality, the state lacks this level of continuity and is instead ‘constructed and reconstructed, invented and reinvented, through its interaction as a whole and of its parts with others. It is not a fixed entity’ (ibid., p. 23). The plurality of power operating within and outside the organisation of the state challenges the concept of the state as a unitary actor pursuing a singular goal with the full coercive force of its constituent parts operating in concert. Legal opposition to Home Office rulings, the advocacy and support work of third sector organisations and asylum seeker’s own resistance efforts challenge the state’s ability to exert absolute control over specific populations and therefore undermine Agamben’s diminishment of refugees to the level of ‘a sentimental trope’ (Tyler, 2006). This is also illustrated in the context of the relative success of appeals following initial asylum decisions. Between 2012 and 2016, over three quarters of initial decision rejections were appealed and of those appeals, 40 per cent resulted in the Home Office’s decision being overturned in favour of the asylum claimant (Walsh, 2019, p. 8). Given the persistence of Agambenian narratives within refugee and asylum studies, it is unsurprising that the ‘crimmigration’ perspective has largely relied upon similar constructions of the state. Johansen (2013, p. 259) writes that Agamben’s homo sacer has become a ‘shorthand reference to a politics of “abandonment”’ and his focus on the notion of the ‘camp’ is both evocative and persuasive given the prison-like conditions of immigration removal centres. However, even as crime control and immigration control merge into a seemingly homogenous series of tactics and policies, the study of the state’s treatment of asylum seekers, refugees, ‘illegal’ immigrants and economic migrants ‘requires more than a simple usage of metaphors and notions of abandonment’ (ibid., p. 260) if asylum seekers’ agency and capacity for resistance are to be adequately

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addressed. The next section considers the popularity of Agamben’s concepts in greater detail and their occasional utility in illuminating the exceptional treatment of asylum seekers before problematising approaches that are too dependent on the convenient spectacle of the asylum seeker as perpetually helpless and excluded.

3.2 Biopower, Governmentality and the Limits of Agambenian Approaches to Asylum Studies Agamben’s (1998) introduction of ‘bare life’ into the examination of the management of refugee populations gave rise to a steady trend within refugee and border studies, which uses the concepts of ‘bare life’, the ‘camp’ and the ‘state of exception’ to make sense of the dire conditions asylum seekers and refugees face when confronted with the indefatigable might of a state committed to dominating, isolating, expelling and, at times, killing highly vulnerable populations. The state, as sovereign, defines the parameters of inclusion and deploys its ‘arsenal of control’ (Bloch & Schuster, 2005, p. 508) in reducing refugee populations to the level of a ‘living dead man’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 131). The persuasiveness of this perspective is immediately clear when considering examples in which the state and its actors have been implicated in the direct and indirect threatening and killing of asylum seekers, such as the 2010 death of Jimmy Mubenga while being restrained by G4S guards on a deportation flight (Lusher, 2014), the numerous deaths and suicides within UK immigration removal centres (Athwal, 2015) and incidents in which boats carrying asylum seekers in the Mediterranean have been fired upon to encourage reversals (Squires et al., 2020). Given the adverse conditions asylum seekers face within initial and dispersal accommodation, including insect infestations (Grayson, 2012), lack of maternity care for pregnant women (Feldman, 2013) and placement at greater risk of exposure to coronavirus (Brooks, 2020), it would appear that asylum seekers are indeed mere objects of state power. Additionally, Agamben’s concepts have been used to analyse the state’s use of biometric technology in

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managing asylum-seeking populations (Ajana, 2013), the detention of asylum seekers and ‘illegal’ immigrants (Diken, 2004; Evans, 2003; Klein & Williams, 2012; Schinkel, 2009) and the logic informing refugee and asylum policy (Edkins & Pin-Fat, 2005). While these applications of ‘bare life’ and sovereignty help illustrate asylum seekers’ ostracisation from the full rights and protections of citizens and expose their abject treatment within immigration control regimes, they fail to adequately acknowledge the nuance of power expressed in asylum seekers’ resistance efforts and assertions of agency. Worse, adopting Agamben’s construction of asylum seekers as ‘bare life’, included within the juridical order only to be excluded, diminishes imagined paths of defiance. For instance, Owens (2009, p. 573) rejects the proposition that the reclamation of ‘bare life’ by asylum seekers, including desperate acts like lip-sewing, should be promoted as an effective response to sovereign power (see: Edkins & Pin-Fat, 2005). Instead of simply rejecting the law as an apparatus of repression operationalised by sovereign states to subjugate asylum seekers and other vulnerable migrants, existing legal frameworks are indispensable routes in repudiating the very notion of ‘bare life’ and asserting asylum seekers’ right to humane treatment (Tyler, 2006). This section features an examination of Agamben’s concepts in relation to the dispersed housing of asylum seekers while considering limitations to this approach. Much of the criticism levelled against Agambenian narratives of asylum seekers’ experiences is based on Agamben’s distorted representation of Arendt’s ‘camp’ and Foucault’s concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘governmentality’. His reliance on Carl Schmitt’s definition of ‘sovereignty’ and his conflation of Foucault’s ‘disciplinary’ power with ‘biopower’ limit opportunities for considering the diffuse nature of power emergent within institutions and society, which can—and has—been used to challenge Home Office decisions and mobilise resistance efforts amongst asylum seekers and their advocates. In returning to Foucault’s emphasis on biopower as a life-affirming phenomenon rather than a power over life, the continued usefulness of Foucault’s concepts to the study of asylum seekers and refugees is situated in contrast to Agamben’s limited conceptualisation of sovereign power. This section also explores related perspectives on sovereignty, including Walters’s (2004)

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‘domopolitics’, which likens the state management of migrant populations to the organisation of the home, and Esposito’s (2008, 2013) ‘immunity’, which in some respects parallels Agamben’s positioning of zoē as an ‘included exclusion’, but adheres more closely to Foucault’s notion of biopower. The keystone to the Agambenian conceptualisation of refugee experiences is Agamben’s interpretation of the sovereign or, for all intents and purposes, the administration and apparatuses of the modern state. Agamben borrows heavily from Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as ‘he who decides on the exception’ (Schmitt, 2005 [1922], p. 5), adapting it slightly to read: ‘he who decides on the state of exception’ (Agamben, 2005, p. 1). For Schmitt, the barometer for true political power is the capacity of a political entity to identify and declare a state of emergency and decide on the distinction between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. The sovereign is a political entity that is decisive and capable of making decisions in response to a ‘critical situation’, such as war (Schmitt, 2007 [1932], p. 38). The sovereign ‘exception’ is a state of ‘unlimited authority’ achieved through ‘the suspension of the entire existing order’ during which ‘the state remains, whereas law recedes’ (Schmitt, 2005 [1922], p.  12). In Agamben’s interpretation of Schmitt’s sovereign exception, the state is not acting entirely outside the ‘juridical order’ or the boundaries of the law. Instead, the sovereign uses the law to establish the exception and therefore gives itself the capacity to operate outside the rule of law. As Schmitt writes, ‘[a]lthough [the sovereign] stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety’ (Schmitt, 2005 [1922], p. 7). Agamben (1998, p. 15) describes this as the sovereign paradox in which ‘the sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, legally places himself outside the law’. In short, the sovereign is capable of declaring a state of emergency and of permitting itself to operate outside the rule of law to respond to a perceived threat. For Agamben, this is evident in times of war when emergency powers are granted through legislation. He cites the introduction of the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 as an example in which the UK government granted itself ‘vast powers to regulate the economy’ and limit citizens’ rights by extending the jurisdiction of military tribunals to

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include citizens (Agamben, 2005, p. 19). Furthermore, the state of exception does not necessarily cease once hostilities have ended or the threat retreats. Agamben points to Britain’s enactment of the Emergency Powers Act 1920 as an example in which the state of exception was extended into peacetime (ibid., p. 19). He draws on the work of Walter Benjamin to conclude that the sovereign propensity to empower itself to operate outside the rule of law has led to an environment in which ‘the state of exception … has become the rule’ (Benjamin, 1942 quoted in Agamben, 2005, p. 6). Agamben’s analysis of the normalisation of the state of exception is superficially persuasive, as it is grounded within an examination of law. In an earlier chapter, the state of exception was briefly mentioned as a way of explaining how Britain’s enactment of immigration policy over time has transitioned from a largely reactionary tactic used in isolated instances and in response to a specific ‘threat’ to a default strategy in which the exceptional legal measures deployed in the control of immigrants and asylum seekers are simply commonplace. Article 1 of the Aliens Restriction Act 1914 granted the sovereign emergency powers to ‘impose restrictions on aliens’, but this was limited to a time of war or ‘great emergency’. The Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919 extended these emergency powers into peacetime, making them ‘exercisable, not only in those circumstances’ identified in the 1914 Act, ‘but at any time’ (Article 1). While the 1919 legislation limited these measures to a period of one year, it was renewed every year until many of its provisions were included within the Immigration Act 1971, which is still in force today (Money, 1997, p. 699). The expanded authority of the Home Secretary to detain ‘persons pending examination or pending removal from the United Kingdom’ (Immigration Act 1971, Sch. 2, s.4) and the introduction of dispersal policies within the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 are not responses to a ‘great emergency’; these restraints on the liberties of immigrants and asylum seekers are simply part of the normal operating procedures of the state. The exception would appear to have become the rule. The state’s obligations under international human rights agreements, such as the Refugee Convention, seemingly undermine the state’s capacity to wholly legislate itself out of its responsibility to ensure that refugees’ rights are upheld. Indeed, successive UK governments have maintained

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an antagonistic stance in relation to the European Convention on Human Rights and, by extension, the Human Rights Act 1998. Universal human rights protections have been positioned as an impediment to the state’s ability to control its borders, a function Mole and Meredith (2010, p. 10) define as a ‘key attribute of national sovereignty’. The right to family life enshrined in Article 8 and the protection from ‘inhuman or degrading treatment’ under Article 3 of the ECHR have thwarted government attempts to remove unwanted immigrants (Stevens, 2010; Turner, 2014). At a time when asylum seekers were being conflated with terrorists as potential security threats in the early 2000s, Tony Blair determined that if the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 was insufficient in protecting the British public, his Labour government would ‘have to consider further measures, including fundamentally looking at the obligations we have under the convention on human rights’ (quoted in Wintour, 2003). Theresa May repeatedly called for the abandonment of the Human Rights Act 1998 (Hope, 2017; Merrick, 2019; Watt, 2013), and insisted that the possibility of withdrawing from the ECHR should remain a viable option for the British government (Travis, 2013). For Agamben, the existence of human rights agreements is not necessarily evidence of the diminished capacity of the sovereign. In fact, the establishment of human rights is further evidence of the sovereign’s ability to demarcate the distinction between ‘bare life’ and ‘political life’. Agamben views the concept of universal human rights as another facet of the sovereign’s boundary-making and, rather than an impediment to sovereign action, a further legitimation of the state. He writes that ‘it is time to stop regarding declarations of rights as proclamations of eternal, metajuridical values binding the legislator […] to respect eternal ethical principles’; they are instead ‘the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 127). In other words, the dichotomy between political life and bare life is entrenched in the state’s adoption of a formalised definition of, for example, the refugee. As a signatory to international human rights law, the state remains sovereign and defines both the parameters of inclusion and exclusion. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) acknowledges a person’s ‘right to leave any country’, but this is not paired with a ‘corresponding right to immigrate’ (Billings,

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1998, p. 36). Article 14 recognises an individual’s ‘right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’, but this does not place a meaningful obligation on states to universally accept asylum seekers. As explored in the previous section, Article 33 of the Refugee Convention (UNHCR, 2011) allows a refugee to be returned if there are ‘reasonable grounds’ to perceive a person to be ‘a danger to the security of the country’. Article 8 of the ECHR (2013) ensures the right to private and family life, but also enables states to interfere in the exercise of this right ‘in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others’. From an Agambenian perspective, the state’s entry into human rights agreements does not represent a ceding of control, but a reassertion of sovereignty and a transition of sorts from ‘divinely authorized royal sovereignty to national sovereignty’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 128). Border control remains a key form of sovereign expression, as it is the state that decides the terms in which it enters—and potentially withdraws—from human rights agreements. As Morris (2010, p. 3) writes, ‘[s]uch instruments’ of universal human rights agreements ‘do not necessarily challenge the nation-state framework […] insofar as they require voluntary adherence or ratification by individual nations’. One of the dangers in dismissing human rights law as simply an extension of national sovereignty is the diminishment of the significance of human rights legislation in ensuring the welfare of asylum seekers and refugees. Agamben envisages a scenario in which bare life doubles down on its own condition and, through a spontaneous transformational event, somehow emerges as a newly realised political being (Agamben, 1998, p. 188). Mills (2004, p. 56) describes this as Agamben’s ‘messianic’ event in which the law is totally overturned and the distinctions between zoē and bios are disintegrated. As Darling (2009) argues, Agamben neglects the possibility that any challenge to sovereign hegemony might come from within the state and through its own apparatuses. Challenging ‘bare life’, if such a category truly exists, depends on a collective political and legal will. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Owens (2009, p. 576) contends that political recognition is necessarily achieved through political means, not simply by ‘fall[ing] back’ on the ‘status as zoē’.

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Indeed, international law has been indispensable in challenging and, at times, reversing Home Office decisions and the application of immigration legislation. For instance, Section 55 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 was successfully challenged in the Court of Appeals and the decision upheld within the House of Lords on the basis that the provision had the potential to deny asylum seekers’ rights under Article 3 of the ECHR. Section 55 denies housing and financial support to destitute asylum seekers if they do not make their asylum claim ‘as soon as reasonably practicable’ upon entry into the United Kingdom. Stevens (2004, pp.  620–621) suggests that border authorities interpreted ‘“as soon as reasonably practicable’ as meaning ‘immediately upon arrival’”, which contributed to the denial of support for many destitute individuals and families. Section 55 was defended on the grounds that it would diminish the abuse of the asylum system by false claimants. Peter Lilly, the MP for Hitchen and Harpenden, argued in 2003 that asylum seekers ‘prefer, and are advised, to make their claim for asylum once they have entered the country rather than at a port, as it then becomes more difficult to deport them’ (Hansard, 26 February 2003 col 75WH). He was challenged on this point by Karen Buck, MP for Regent’s Park and Kensington North, who indicated that existing research suggests that asylum seekers are largely unaware of the benefits system and asylum processes upon arrival (ibid., col 75WH; see also: Robinson & Segrott, 2002). Neil Gerrard, the MP for Walthamstow, signalled his objection to the justifications for Section 55, stating that ‘[i]t is assumed that genuine asylum applicants would apply at the port of entry the minute that they stepped off the boat or plane and would not apply in-country. No hard evidence has ever been produced that backs up those claims’ (Hansard, 26 February 2003 col 78WH). Despite these protestations, the implementation of Section 55 contributed to the effective homelessness and destitution of thousands of claimants (Dwyer & Brown, 2008, p. 205), resulting in the advancement of numerous judicial review cases at the High Court and beyond (Stevens, 2004, p. 620). Three such cases that advanced to the House of Lords formed the 2005 decision, R. (Adam, Limbuela and Tesema) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department. The House of Lords concluded that homelessness,

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rough sleeping and the loss of dignity associated with the denial of support under Section 55 amounted to a breach of Article 3 of the ECHR, which protects against ‘inhuman or degrading treatment’ (Morris, 2010, p. 65). In his summary, Lord Brown directly addressed the potential violence of the state, explaining that ‘[t]he real issue in all these cases is whether the state is properly to be regarded as responsible for the harm inflicted (or threatened) upon the victim’ (R. v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, UKHL 66 2005, para 92). Brown rejected government assertions that late claimants were likely to be fraudulent, stating that statistics do not support the notion that ‘late claimants make a disproportionate number of the unmeritorious claims’; he concluded that ‘street homelessness would cross the threshold into article 3 degrading treatment’ (ibid., para 101). This decision was significant, because it resulted in the adoption of new Home Office guidance requiring case workers to apply a destitution test to decisions made in relation to Section 55 to ensure Article 3 of the ECHR would not be breached (Donald & Mottershaw, 2009, p. 350). It also demonstrated the necessity of using legal means and the apparatuses of the state to challenge state decisions. It reinforced the indispensability of the courts and international human rights law in protecting vulnerable migrants from state violence, even if the mechanisms of this protection were products of the state itself and their effects limited. Like similar cases, including those decided at the European Court of Human Rights, the outcomes of Adam, Limbuela, and Tesema signal the limits of Agamben’s rejection of the existing legal order as a means of securing checks on the state’s implementation of domestic immigration law. Tyler (2006, p. 197) addresses this succinctly, stating: Agamben proposes that radical politics must oppose the very idea of ‘legality’. However, it is patently unclear how opposing legality per se can translate into material forms of opposition to the detention of asylum-seekers, or indeed be mobilized in ways that will grant asylum-seekers the possibility of the agency that they desperately require.

For Agamben, power is bound up within the figure of the sovereign, and the only way power can be released and redistributed is through a

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singular event in which the sovereign and the rule of law are upturned. This hegemonic vision of power is limiting, because it does not adequately acknowledge that power is often diffuse and emerges as an outcome of interactions between constituent elements, populations and institutions within society. In the discussion above, it is not simply that the courts stand in opposition to the power of the state, but the courts are operating on the basis of networks of power expressions emanating from the population, as courts rely upon civil society ‘in identifying cases, furnishing evidence, and shaping judgements’ (Morris, 2010, p. 67). While Agamben positions his construction of sovereignty as a correction or completion of Foucault’s reflections on biopower (Agamben, 1998, p. 9), his ideas deviate extensively from Foucault’s arguments. Foucault did not view power as something ‘held’ in the way that the sovereign might exert power over a population. Instead, Foucault (1998, p. 93) argues, ‘[p]ower is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere’. Rather than power being bound up within the figure of the sovereign, ‘power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society’ (ibid., p. 93). Nevertheless, the version of power Agamben advances has been particularly influential in shaping analyses of asylum seekers’ experiences within highly controlled environments, as his construction of ‘bare life’ as the first action of the sovereign remains a convenient shorthand for illustrating state violence towards asylum seekers. The Agambenian approach is immediately persuasive given the extremes asylum seekers are exposed to within the United Kingdom’s immigration control network. The Home Office’s decision to contract a private firm, Clearsprings, to accommodate asylum seekers in overcrowded camps and barracks during the height of the coronavirus pandemic (Grierson & Taylor, 2021) makes Agamben’s adoption of Arendt’s ‘camp’ seem like a wholly appropriate conceptual module for understanding the acuteness of asylum seekers’ plight. The relative pittance individual destitute asylum seekers are issued per week—which was raised by £0.03 to £39.63 in 2020—amounts to just 46 per cent of the monetary support an individual UK citizen is potentially eligible to receive in weekly Universal Credit payments (Grierson, 2020; UK Government,

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2021). Asylum seekers whose applications were initially rejected by the Home Office and who are waiting on an appeal or cannot be deported must live off cashless support that is even more limiting, as it cannot be used for certain products and must be used with companies partnered with the Home Office to accept it. Asylum seekers are immediately identifiable as the only customers using this type of payment, which can lead to increased stigmatisation, discrimination, and isolation (Bloch, 2014; Klein & Williams, 2012). This payment method, the ASPEN card (formerly called the Azure card), also tracks location and purchase data. As Coddington et  al. (2020) suggest, this offers the potential for further surveillance of asylum seekers’ activities. They state that ‘[a]sylum seeker support organizations have reported instances of the UK Home Office using transaction patterns and data to cut or curtail financial support’ (Carnet et  al., 2014 and Unity Centre Glasgow, 2017  in Coddington et al., 2020, p. 1437). This exposure to relative deprivation and the conditions of immigration detention and accommodation seem to represent archetypal examples of Agamben’s homo sacer. Indeed, Klein and Williams (2012, p. 750) draw on Agamben directly in illustrating the impact of detention and cashless support on vulnerable asylum seekers, stating: Visible physical distinction adds insult to the far more degrading denial of basic rights, beginning with freedom of movement. […] Not being able to work […] or to start saving surplus from [asylum seekers’] meagre income strictly earmarked for subsistence, gives substance to their categorisation as ‘illegals’ and reduces their existence in the eyes of the judicial powers to what Agamben defines as the ‘bare life’.

This reliance on Agamben’s concepts represents a potential limitation for refugee and asylum studies, however, as it leads to deterministic assessments of power relations and restrains efforts to approach issues of power, oppression and resistance in nuanced terms. The capacity for individual and collective agency on the part of asylum seekers and their advocates is marginalised in favour of a totalising construction of sovereign power that exerts absolute dominance over asylum seekers as bare life (Owens, 2009). A potential avenue for adequately addressing asylum seekers’ agency and their capacity for resistance is to return to Foucault’s

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‘governmentality’ and ‘biopower’, and to use these concepts as a means of addressing the disparate and contingent nature of power. Applying Foucault’s ideas to the contemporary study of asylum seekers and refugees in the United Kingdom requires a modicum of poetic licence, as Foucault did not necessarily intend for his concepts to be applied outside of the historical and political contexts he was referencing, including developments in Europe during the seventeenth century and beyond. His notion of biopower, for instance, is both ‘time-specific and place-specific’ and represents a ‘geographically and historically grounded investigation of state power’ (Coleman & Grove, 2009, pp. 489–491). Rabinow and Rose (2006, p. 199) go further, stating that ‘[t]he concept of biopower […] was not trans-historical or metaphoric, but precisely grounded in historical, or genealogical, analysis’. Still, Foucault was also aware that others might wish to apply his ideas within other contexts, and he told his lecture audience at the Collège de France in January 1976: ‘I think that you are completely free to do what you like with what I am saying. These are suggestions for research, ideas, schemata, outlines, instruments; do what you like with them’ (Foucault, 2004, p. 2). Foucault did, however, ask that people ensure that their use of his ideas was ‘connected, related to what I am doing’ (ibid., p. 2). It is with that spirit in mind that his concepts are applied within this book to the contemporary study of the experiences of asylum seekers in the United Kingdom. A key distinction between Foucault’s ideas and others’ adoption of them is that Foucault’s genealogy of power was an analysis of a transitionary phase from sovereign power to alternative expressions of power in disciplinary power and biopower. The issue with Agamben’s implementation of Foucault’s concepts is that he is preoccupied with sovereign power at the expense of engagement with the intricacies of more diffuse expressions of power. Gratton (2006, p. 446) explains that Agamben’s fixation with sovereign power represents a ‘naïve view of power’ that Foucault advanced beyond by the time of his 1976 lectures at the Collège de France. Sovereign power, as addressed previously, is best understood as the sovereign’s overt display of power over its subjects to assert its dominance. For Agamben, the sovereign expressed this power through its ability to place itself outside the juridical order—to use legal means to situate itself beyond the rule of law—to enable its exceptional use of power in

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the control and domination of populations, such as those detained within extrajudicial prisons like Guantanamo Bay (Agamben, 1998, 2005). For Foucault, however, sovereign power gave way to a new form of managerial and knowledge-acquiring power, biopower. He actively sought to eschew the Hobbesian ‘Leviathan’ model of state sovereignty and ‘rule-­ governed […] forms of power which have a single centre’ (Foucault, 2004, p. 27). He states: ‘We have to abandon the model of Leviathan, that model of […] a unitary man who contains all real individuals, whose body is made up of citizens but whose soul is sovereignty’ (ibid., p. 34). Instead, Foucault offers a version of power that is emergent, networked and contingent upon human interaction. Power is an outcome of relations, not something necessarily centralised and ceaselessly oppressive. Power is diffuse and comprised of ‘local tactics of domination’ (ibid., p. 46). In other words, power arises from and is exercised by not just the sovereign (e.g. the state), but also individuals, institutions and a vast multitude of nearly innumerable nodes. Technologies and apparatuses of power are, as Foucault explains, ‘a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted’ (ibid., p. 245). This distinction between sovereign power and a more emergent power immediately provides a useful tool set for understanding how asylum seekers may on the one hand be subjected to extremely repressive forms of state power, including direct violence at the hands of contracted private security guards, while at the same time engaged in resistance practices, such as demonstrations in their local communities or, in more dire circumstances, forms of protest like the lip-sewing mentioned earlier (Owens, 2009). Researchers have embraced Foucault’s reflections on power to describe the agency-enhancing and resistance activities asylum seekers and their advocates have pursued. For instance, Gill et al. (2014, pp. 375–377) examine the tactics employed by migrant and asylum support groups in assisting asylum seekers and others in defying repressive state actions within the context of immigration detention and the court system. Tactics identified in their research include bodily resistance, such as laying in front of transportation buses and sitting in on court proceedings to show solidarity and to impose social pressure on immigration judges. The authors also note that the technologies the state deploys in

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managing and suppressing migrant populations can sometimes become tools of resistance, such as using state-provided video links to help asylum seekers access legal support. Hughes (2016) has similarly employed Foucault’s ideas to argue that resistance within immigration removal centres can be conceived of in terms beyond intentionality. Hughes states that certain manifestations of resistance, such as engagement in improvised music, must be understood as power expressions that are not simply associated with opposition to sovereign power, but as examples of emergent assertions of power in their own right. In their study of accompanied child asylum seekers in Sweden, Ottosson et al. (2017, p. 428) observe that expressions of agency, such as those demonstrated in children’s personal projects, are grounded in a Foucauldian conception of power and agency that acknowledges the dynamism of power as an outcome of interaction. While the examples above reflect an adoption of Foucault’s ideas as a means of countering Agamben’s totalising power of the sovereign, Foucault did not disregard the role of the sovereign in utilising the apparatuses of power to gain knowledge of a population for the purpose of exerting control over it. Foucault recognised that the state manipulated the dispositifs of security—‘apparatuses, institutions, and rules’ (Foucault, 2004, p. 27)—in order to designate, classify and quantify society’s constituent elements. Stoler (1995, p. 28) states that Foucault fully acknowledged that ‘state institutions foster and draw on new independent disciplines of knowledge and in turn harness these micro-fields of power as they permeate the body politic at large’. Foucault’s proposition of a knowledge-amassing power, biopower, expressed through the tactics and latticework of governmentality allows for a re-examination of state coercion through an alternative lens to sovereign power. The state is no longer the Leviathan in this articulation of power, but it can employ its vast resources, institutions and tactics of identity-construction to gain knowledge of a population and exert control—not just over it—but through it. The state need not always directly wield the mechanisms of power for that power to nevertheless emerge, as institutions, technologies and even individuals adopt and enact the logic of security and internalised surveillance. When Jimmy Mubenga, an Angolan asylum seeker, suffocated and died on a deportation flight while being restrained by G4S guards

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(Athwal, 2015, p. 61), the state did not order or even directly sanction that activity, but the embedded logics of state racism, protecting the (British) population from intrusion, and hostility towards the ‘other’ infused the fabric of the border control regime and all of its dispositifs, including the motivations and ideologies of individual private security guards. Foucault (2007, p. 108) labels this interplay between institutions, tactics and ideologies as ‘governmentality’, which he defines as: ‘the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument’. Governmentality is the logic unpinning knowledge-­ gathering expressions of power, such as the state’s use of institutions and apparatuses to collect information about a population through the generation of statistics, health records, education records, prison and police data and potentially information relating to the whereabouts and income of asylum seekers housed in dispersed accommodation throughout the United Kingdom. The concept of governmentality allows for a re-­ examination of the earlier example of the government’s issuing of cashless ASPEN cards to asylum seekers waiting on appeals outcomes or whose applications for refugee status were rejected. The government’s retention of asylum seekers’ location and purchase information can be interpreted as an expression of sovereign power—as power over life—through the use of panoptic surveillance tactics. However, it can also be interpreted as a means of information gathering for the purpose of gaining knowledge of life, so that this information can be used to classify, order and demarcate the boundaries of societal inclusion and state protection. The aim of this information gathering, Foucault explains, is the protection of society. This position may seem paradoxical, because if the protection of society is the goal, it is reasonable to wonder why the state is engaged in such extensive harm of certain populations, including vulnerable asylum seekers. The answer lies in Foucault’s explanation of ‘biopower’ and ‘state racism’. The emergence of biopower is associated with the promotion of life within a population. Foucault suggests that from around the eighteenth

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century, expressions of sovereign power or public displays of the state’s control over a population and even life itself, eventually gave way to an expression of power that emphasised managerialism, administration, data collection and life-affirming tactics rather than the threat of death. Foucault (1998, pp. 136–137) explains that this ‘counterpart’ to sovereign power is a ‘life-administering power’; it ‘exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations’. In the eighteenth century, the state began to employ disciplinary techniques using schools, workshops, universities and hospitals to investigate economic conditions, ‘the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing and migration’ (ibid., p. 140). Foucault argues that capitalism was dependent on this type of organisation and conditioning, as it enabled the exploitation of labour within the factories and workhouses. The role of the state, then, was one that promoted a biopolitical approach to population management, which both generated and embraced ‘techniques of power present at every level of the social body’ (ibid., p. 141). Within the context of immigration control and the management of asylum seekers and other migrants in the United Kingdom, expressions of biopower might be identified within the internalised logics of security and social control embedded within the apparatuses of border control, including the Home Office, firms contracted to manage immigration removal centres and dispersed housing, and the technologies facilitating the exertion of control over asylum seekers’ lives. However, biopolitical logics permeate other institutions as well, such as the schools and universities expected to monitor foreign nationals as part of the government’s PREVENT strategy (Home Office, 2011). They are internalised by the general population and even in the self-surveillance actions of immigrants and asylum seekers (Moffette & Vadasaria, 2016). The protection of society does not equate to the protection of all life. Within a biopolitical framework, certain life is promoted often at the expense or neglect of other life. As Foucault explains, ‘[o]ne might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (original emphasis, Foucault, 1998, p.  138). In other words, the defence of a protected society or a population deemed worthy of protection is made possible through the

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rejection or abandonment of a population determined to be undesirable or a threat. ‘In the biopower system’, Foucault writes, ‘killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race’ (Foucault, 2004, p. 257). He is careful, however, to clarify that ‘to kill’ does not necessarily mean to ‘murder’. He is using the word both literally and metaphorically. Foucault states that what he means by ‘killing’ beyond murder is ‘every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection and so on’ (ibid., p. 256). Foucault’s framing of ‘killing’ as an abandonment and exclusion of certain life in the interest of defending permitted life serves as a useful basis for reflecting on the manner in which the state and its many related biopolitical dispositifs operate to ‘kill’ asylum seekers and other migrants deemed unworthy of protection. In the literal sense, the killing of asylum seekers is linked to an exposure to corporal death through neglect, as evidenced in unaddressed medical emergencies leading to death, and suicide attempts within immigration detention (Hollis, 2019; Siva, 2016; Weber & Pickering, 2011). It also occurs in instances where state actors or those contracted to carry out the state’s social control functions engage in direct violence that results in death, as occurred during Jimmy Mubenga’s deportation flight. Bodily death can also be an outcome of deportation, such as the murder of asylum seekers upon their arrival in a country to which they’ve been deported (Renteria, 2019; Sheridan, 2020; Taylor, 2019). It may also be a result of the despair and emotional trauma endured as a result of an inhospitable border control regime. Mumtaz Khan, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan living in Sunderland, faced deportation following the Home Office’s refusal of his asylum application. He expressed that the resultant stress had severely diminished his appetite and he was later found dead (Bulman, 2020). The metaphorical killing of asylum seekers is evident in the rejection of asylum seekers via deportation, their total isolation and diminishment of personal development within immigration removal centres and their virtual abandonment in far-flung immigration dispersal areas, distanced from essential social and support networks. It is this metaphorical killing that Agamben

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adopts in his focus on the sovereign ‘ban’, but Foucault notably did not situate this killing solely within the context of sovereign violence and it is here that Agamben’s interpretation diverges quite significantly from its Foucauldian roots. Like Galtung’s ‘structural violence’, which was explored in the introduction, Foucault’s argument is that power is pervasive; it is networked, and it arises out of social interactions and manifests in the tactics, techniques and apparatuses of institutions and individuals. It is within this framing of power and Galtung’s conception of structural violence that the privatisation of dispersed asylum housing in is introduced and examined in the next chapter.

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4 The Asylum ‘Market’: Deportation, Detention and the Privatisation of Dispersed Accommodation

Since the introduction of the Immigration Act 1971, the state has increasingly pursued a punitive response to the management and control of immigrants. This is evidenced in the proliferation of strategies mirroring criminal justice approaches to the containment and expulsion of immigrants and asylum seekers. The expanded use of detention, deportation and dispersal as means of isolating and excluding asylum seekers reflects the extent to which successive British governments have perceived asylum seekers as threats to societal order. These mechanisms of control serve a multitude of functions, both practical and symbolic, as they physically isolate and exclude asylum seekers within and outside the state’s borders while they also construct an image of the asylum seeker as an inherently dangerous entity that requires a similar response to that of a criminal offender. Deportation signals that the state is capable of expelling ‘criminal’ elements, while detention illustrates that the state is able to isolate ‘threats’ from the general population. Dispersal, or the process of distributing asylum seekers on a no-choice basis across the country, also serves an exclusionary function, as it segregates ‘undesirables’ into isolated enclaves where they cannot ‘burden’ local authorities in London and the South East. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. A. Hirschler, Hostile Homes, Critical Criminological Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79213-8_4

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The mechanisms of deportation, detention and dispersal comprise the normal operating functions of modern immigration policy. As Bloch and Schuster (2005, p. 491) write, these strategies are the ‘“essential” instruments in the ongoing attempt to control or manage immigration to Britain’. The use of privately contracted private security firms like G4S and Serco in the management of all elements of this social control regime reflects the coalescence of the securitisation and marketisation paradigms operating in the administration of British immigration policy. This chapter examines the punitive qualities of these triangulated apparatuses of control, and addresses state efforts to disincentivise future refugees from seeking sanctuary in Britain and to encourage those already residing within the country to leave. The neoliberal logic underpinning the expansion of immigration control markets underscores the exploitability of a paradoxically unwanted but nevertheless profitable population, at least for those firms contracted to carry out the managerial functions of immigration control. A brief history of the United Kingdom’s dispersal policy since the introduction of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 illustrates the inherent isolating and marginalising effects of a policy designed to scatter and unsettle asylum seekers from areas with robust support offerings and strong cultural or familial ties. This is followed by an examination of the transition to the COMPASS asylum housing programme, and the controversial histories of two of its primary contractors: Serco and G4S. Views from dispersed residents and refugee and asylum seeker support workers in three dispersal areas—Glasgow, West Yorkshire and the North East of England—reveal how those most affected by changes to the dispersal system reflected on the entry of private security firms into the management of asylum housing.

4.1 M  anaging through Exclusion: Deportation and Detention Deportation has been a feature of the United Kingdom’s immigration strategy since the Aliens Act 1905 and arguably earlier, as discussed in the previous chapter. The biopolitical justification for the expulsion of ‘enemy’ threats has long been based on the defence of society. Section 3

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of the 1905 Act empowered the secretary of state to expel foreign offenders and other undesirables, and this was extended to include virtually any ‘alien’ during a period of war or ‘great emergency’ in section 1 of the Aliens Restriction Act 1914. The distinctions made between ‘patrials’ and ‘non-patrials’ within the Immigration Act 1971 widened the net of those who were subject to immigration control and therefore eligible for deportation. Those caught between the comparatively inclusive terms of citizenship afforded by the British Nationality Act 1948 and the restrictive qualities of the Immigration Act 1971 and the British Nationality Act 1981 were suddenly in danger of being deported from the country. The effects of developments in immigration policy from the 1960s onward exposed a great number of people, particularly black people from Commonwealth countries in the Caribbean and Africa, to the possibility of removal if their right to remain in the United Kingdom could not be verified (Bloch & Schuster, 2005, p. 495). The criminalisation of migrants and asylum seekers through the expansion of immigration offences has increased the opportunities for a person to breach immigration law and therefore be eligible for removal. As Collinson (2020, p. 293) explains, the existing deportation regime in the United Kingdom is subject to a semantic distinction between ‘deportation’ and ‘removal’. The former is typically associated with the expulsion of foreign offenders under the Immigration Act 1971 and the latter is applied to the removal of those who are required to have leave to remain in the United Kingdom but have not acquired it. Given that a deportation order ‘invalidates any extant leave to enter or remain’ and that a removal order applies in the absence of leave to remain (ibid., pp. 293–294), the intended result of each is the expulsion of a foreign national. Walsh (2020, p. 2) writes that, ‘in ordinary language, deportation refers to a state’s removal of a foreign citizen from its territory’. Despite the fact that a legal distinction exists between ‘removal’ and ‘deportation’, the terms will subsequently be used interchangeably, as the focus is on the mechanisms and tactics employed in the removal of foreigners from the country. The racialised foundations of Britain’s deportation regime gained prominent attention during news reporting on the ‘Windrush scandal’, which highlighted the fact that people who had emigrated from the

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Caribbean to Britain before 1973 had been wrongfully detained or deported from the United Kingdom (Williams, 2020, p.  24). In her independent review of Home Office failings, Williams identified the ‘Windrush generation’ as a ‘racial group’ given that nearly all of those affected by the Home Office’s policies were black and descendent of those of ‘Caribbean ethnic and national origin’ (ibid., p. 112). Drawing on the Macpherson Report’s definition of ‘institutional racism’ following the murder of Stephen Lawrence and subsequent police (in)action, Williams isolated examples of institutional racism within the Home Office’s decision making, which included ‘evidence of negative stereotyping of racial groups by staff fostered through workplace culture’ and ‘the failure of the organisation to unequivocally recognise, acknowledge and accept the problem’ (ibid., p. 116). Williams linked the Windrush scandal directly to the hostile and compliant environment strategies pursued by successive UK governments, and recommended a ‘scrupulous’ review of these policies to determine ‘whether they are effective and proportionate in meeting their stated aim’ (ibid., p. 15). While the Windrush scandal publicly revealed the racial underpinnings of the United Kingdom’s detention and deportation strategies, the Windrush generation is not the exclusive target of racialised immigration policies. As de Noronha (2019) argues, race is central to the construction of the ‘illegal’ migrant. The disproportionate policing of non-white people in Britain and the administrative act of deportation are linked by ‘processes of race-making in multi-status Britain’ that define a structurally racist immigration system (de Noronha, 2019, p. 2427). The proliferation of racialised logics within the criminal justice and immigration systems is also evident in the deportation of foreign national offenders. As Bosworth (2011, p. 587) explains, the deportation of foreign national prisoners has become a politically expedient method of demonstrating the government’s ability to protect the public. Until 2013, non-EU foreign national offenders made up the majority of those deported. In 2010, nearly 83 per cent of deported offenders were nationals of non-EU countries. This trend began to reverse from 2014 onward and by 2019, EU nationals made up around 68 per cent of foreign national offenders deported from the United Kingdom (Home Office, 2020c).

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Deportation remains a looming threat for asylum seekers before they have even arrived in the United Kingdom, and it follows them throughout the entire decision process. At times, the deportation process can be expedient, and at other times, rejected asylum seekers can wait months or years for a deportation order to be carried out, if at all. Deportation serves a symbolic function illustrating that the British government is capable of ‘deter[ring] irregular immigrants and that it is in control’ (Vasta, 2011, p. 193). In reality, deportations are often difficult to implement, as conditions within asylum seekers’ countries of origin may be too volatile or a country may simply refuse to receive a returnee (Gibney, 2008, p. 152). Where it can, Britain has made use of the provisions of the ‘Dublin III’ EU Regulation 604/2013, which places the responsibility of processing asylum claims on the member state in which an asylum application was initially lodged (Home Office, 2020c). In the summer of 2020, the Home Office initiated deportation proceedings under Dublin III to return asylum seekers to France and Germany who had crossed the English Channel (Bulman, 2020b; Taylor, 2020a). The threat of deportation has resulted in forms of self-regulation amongst asylum seekers that have internalised the panoptic gaze of the Home Office. Drawing on interviews from 19 rejected asylum seekers, Bloch (2014) reveals some of the ways in which rejected asylum seekers moderate their activities to in response to fears of being deported, which include avoiding engagement with social groups and support organisations, and making the seemingly counterintuitive decision to avoid reporting to the Home Office despite regular signings being a condition of their ability to temporarily remain while awaiting appeals or other administrative developments. Darling (2014, p. 83) argues that this fear of deportation plays an important role in the state’s biopolitical governance of asylum populations, as it is used ‘to regulate the presence of irregular migrants and to ensure their invisibility’. Even as the number of enforced removals of asylum seekers steadily declined from 2010 to 2019,1 the British government continued to deport vulnerable asylum  In 2019, 1508 asylum seekers were involuntarily removed from the United Kingdom compared to 3617 in 2015 and 7033 in 2010 (Home Office, 2020d). Walsh (2020) reports that this reduction is attributable to changes to the immigration system that include a reduction in the use of 1

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seekers as a performative exercise in demonstrating its ability to remain tough on immigration. Following increases in attempted Channel crossings of asylum seekers from Calais during the coronavirus pandemic, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, framed the journeys in wholly criminalistic terms, citing the United Kingdom’s intention to pursue a ‘new operational approach’ to ‘crack[ing] down on the gangs behind this vile people-­ smuggling operation’ (Patel quoted in Tidman, 2020). In practice, this approach resulted in additional efforts to return asylum seekers under the Dublin Regulation. Deportation is visible in the sense that it is often overtly touted as evidence of the government’s success in dealing with the immigration and asylum ‘problem’. Public grandstanding, such as Theresa May’s declaration that she would pursue a ‘deport first and hear the appeal later’ approach to immigration policy (May  quoted in  Slack & Chapman, 2013), positions deportation as an essential and effective tool in the endless battle against human rights legislation and the meddling of the European Court of Human Rights in undermining British sovereignty. Nevertheless, deportation is also an opaque practice, as removals are typically conducted late at night and in the early morning hours to diminish opportunities for last-minute appeals and stays of deportation and removal orders. Airlines are advised to ensure that deportees are separated from other passengers at the time of check-in and during the flight and are instructed to minimise the visibility of restraints (International Air Transport Association, 2010  in Walters, 2016, p.  440). While some deportations are conducted on passenger airlines, others occur on chartered flights, hidden away from the visibility of campaigners and other citizens who might protest to the treatment of deportees. Walters (2018, p. 2806) writes that ‘charter flights seek to distance deportation activity from the practical reach of campaigners. They often fly from undisclosed airports, they are sometimes operated by undisclosed airlines, and often deport in the dead of night’. Deportation is therefore a highly visible policy while remaining rather clandestine in practice.

detention and the detention estate and a review of the use of involuntary deportation following the Windrush scandal.

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Deportation is not simply an expression of state power alone. The process relies upon the participation of non-state actors and their willingness to play a role in the separation of individuals from friends and family, as well as return vulnerable people to hostile destinations. Commercial airlines involved in the deportation of asylum seekers from the United Kingdom have included British Airways, easyJet and Virgin Atlantic, though Virgin ostensibly ended its agreement with the UK government in 2018 (Millward, 2016; BBC News, 2018; Alwakeel, 2019; Beard, 2019). The Home Office contracts private security firms to escort rejected asylum seekers during enforced removals. Following the death of Jimmy Mubenga while being restrained by G4S guards on a British Airways flight to Angola in 2010, another security firm, Reliance, took over the deportation escort contract from G4S (Gray, 2010; Whitehead, 2010). In a 2012 Home Affairs Committee analysis of deportation procedures following the death of Jimmy Mubenga, Nick Hardwick, the former HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, suggested that despite the change in provider, staff that had worked for G4S were simply transferred to Reliance (House of Commons, 2012: Ev 8). In 2011, another security firm, Armatus Risks, was contracted to provide emergency medical services on deportation flights (Miller, 2013). In December 2017, the outsourcing firm, Mitie, was awarded a government contract worth £525 million to carry out deportation escort services over a 10-year period (Mitie, 2017). The total average cost of deporting a single individual can range between £1000 for a voluntary removal and £15,000 for an enforced removal (Home Office, 2013, p. 4). In the last three months of 2019, four chartered deportation flights cost the Home Office a total of over £440,000, which amounted to about £12,000 per deportee (Taylor, 2020b). During the same period in 2020, the average cost of deporting a single individual increased to over £13,000 (Taylor, 2021). This deportation market is evidence of a symbiosis between the state’s immigration control regime and the profit-driven interests of private security firms that have expanded their offerings beyond the management of prisons and prison transportation into the business of corporal control over migrant bodies. Walters (2016, p. 438) refers to the deportation regime in the United Kingdom as a ‘political economy of violence’. The use of force in the removal of ‘non-compliant’ deportees, which includes potentially deadly

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forms of restraint, is an outcome of a marketised immigration control environment in which the ‘successful completion of the deportation’ is the measure of success, not the maintenance of deportees’ wellbeing (ibid., p.  443). The biopolitical logics underpinning the deportation machine is one in which a range of techniques of power are employed in the control of migrants. The dispositifs of security and population management are evident in ‘apparatuses, institutions, and rules’ (Foucault, 2004, p. 27), which, within the context of deportation, are comprised of the Home Office, its legal representatives, private security firms, airlines, and  immigration law and advice pertaining to the appropriate use of force when conducting deportations (see Independent Advisory Panel on Non-Compliance Management, 2014). The use of force is ‘not random’, as Walters (2016, p. 442) explains, but is ‘invested by various forms of calculation. It is not blind but calibrated by medical, penal, ethical and psychological knowledges, many of which have been trialled within the criminal justice complex’. The deportation market is associated with clear examples of direct forms of violence, including broken bones, lacerations and death (House of Commons, 2012, p. 6; Fekete, 2011, p. 92; Athwal, 2015), but it is also responsible for wider structural violence manifested in feelings of depression, loss of family and friendship ties, diminishment of wellbeing and life chances, financial hardship and sustained senses of anxiety and fear. Turnbull’s (2018) research into the experiences of recently deported migrants explores the compounding effects of removals and deportations. In one instance, a deportee spent five years attempting to seek asylum in the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany. Turnbull writes that the asylum seeker, Zahir, ‘wondered how he could have better spent the past five years and what he might have accomplished instead of irregularly migrating around Europe’ (ibid., p. 48). Others experienced family breakdown, the collapse of friendship and family networks, and feelings of isolation, humiliation and depression (ibid., pp. 49–51). In some instances, deportees face the prospect of sexual and discriminatory violence upon returning to their countries of origin. In 2013, an asylum seeker was unlawfully deported from the United Kingdom to Uganda, where homosexuality is illegal, because the Home Office rejected the woman’s claim that she was a lesbian and would face potential harm if returned. Since her

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deportation, the woman asserts that she was the victim of gang-rape and had to endure an unwanted pregnancy out of fear of being discovered by authorities (Bulman, 2020a). In such instances, the Home Office is implicated not only in the symbolic or structural violence of asylum seekers through restrictions on their liberty and wellbeing, but also in the direct violence some face upon their return to their determined country of origin. Similarly, the Home Office and its contractors bear responsibility for the structural, institutional and direct harm within immigration removal centres, as asylum seekers are subjected to racial abuse, demeaning treatment and systemic neglect within the United Kingdom’s largely privatised immigration detention regime. While detention has long been a feature of the United Kingdom’s immigration control strategy, its widespread normalisation as a routine method for managing the movements of immigrants and asylum seekers within the country is a relatively new development. Legislation empowering the Home Office to detain immigrants includes the Immigration Act 1971 (Sch. 2, para. 16; Sch. 3, para. 2), the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 (s. 62) and the UK Borders Act 2007 (s. 36). While detention is only lawful if ‘there is a realistic prospect of removal within a reasonable period’ (McGuinness & Gower, 2018, pp. 6–7), in practice it has been used to detain people for months and sometimes years, as there is no limit to the amount of time a person can be detained within the United Kingdom. Silverman et al. (2020, p. 9) report that from 2010 to 2019, one-third of detainees had been held for more than 28 days, and 3 per cent had been detained for more than 6 months. In 2019, around 24,400 people entered immigration detention; asylum seekers made up 58 per cent of the total number of people detained that year (ibid., p. 5, 8). The detention of children has been particularly controversial, given the prison-like conditions of immigration removal centres. In 2009, over 1100 children entered detention across the United Kingdom (Home Office, 2014). Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government, pledged to end child detention in 2010 (Clegg, 2010) and declared in 2012 that the practice of detaining children in immigration removal centres was effectively over notwithstanding ‘exceptional cases and border cases’ (Clegg & Nalumu, 2012). While child detention has not ceased, the numbers of children

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entering detention each year have reduced considerably; 23 children entered detention in 2020 (Home Office, 2020b). There are nine immigration removal centres (IRCs) currently operating in the United Kingdom, two of which are classed as short-term holding facilities. One IRC, Morton Hall near Lincoln, is operated by the HM Prison and Probation Service. The remainder are managed by various private security organisations, such as Mitie (Harmondsworth and Colnbrook), G4S (Tinsley House and formerly Brook House) and Serco (Yarl’s Wood and Gatwick). In practical terms, there is little that distinguishes immigration removal centres from prisons. They are enclosed spaces with protective barriers, such as high fences and barbed wire. Detainees are not allowed to have mobile phones with cameras or internet capabilities. If a detainee’s phone does not ‘comply’ with these restrictions, they are provided with one that does not have these capabilities (Home Office, 2018b). Visitations are restricted and must be scheduled in advance. The movements and actions of detainees are monitored, and IRCs are staffed by personnel effectively operating as prison guards. Indeed, Serco refers to its IRC guards as ‘Detention Custody Officers’ (Serco, 2021). Despite any pretences that IRCs are anything but detention centres—including their designation as ‘removal’ facilities—they are functionally institutions of incarceration. Asylum seekers are exposed to an acute level of potential harm within IRCs, as their confinement can lead to serious psychological and emotional trauma, and they can be subjected to intrusive and abusive behaviour by detention officers. In their systematic review of studies investigating the mental health implications for asylum seekers detained in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, Robjant et al. (2009, p. 306) conclude that detainees experience high levels of depression and anxiety as a result of detention, and they are likely to exhibit expressions of post-­ traumatic stress disorder. The authors also identify a prevalence of self-­ harm and suicidal thoughts amongst adults and children within detention (ibid., p. 309). Grant-Peterkin et al. (2014, p. 1) explain that such conclusions correspond with their own experiences serving the psychiatric needs of asylum seekers in detention, stating that ‘we have seen detention precipitate mental health disorders, cause severe relapses, and substantially increase the risk of self harm and suicide’. The authors also note that

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detainees’ needs are not adequately addressed within detention environments and that ‘no effective safeguards exist to prevent vulnerable people—for example, those who have been tortured—from being detained’ (ibid., p.  1). In his report following an unannounced inspection of Morton Hall IRC in 2019, Peter Clarke, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, makes several summary observations that reflect both the prison-like nature of the IRC as well as the risks and harms detainees were exposed to. Among these findings, Clarke (2020, p. 15) notes that there had been 113 reported self-harm incidents in the six months leading to the inspection. Citing Rule 35, a provision that requires IRC staff to report to the Home Office if a doctor determines that the detention experience is harmful to the detainee or if an individual is suicidal or has been the victim of torture, Clarke concludes that IRC staff demonstrated insufficient awareness of vulnerable detainees’ needs and did not process Rule 35 reports in a timely fashion (ibid., p. 14). Additionally, Clarke suggests that Morton House remains ‘too prison-like’, as it is an environment ‘reinforced by cellular accommodation and a large amount of razor wire’, and that the ‘[u]se of force’ in restraining detainees remained ‘high’ (ibid., p. 15). A similar report following an inspection of G4S-operated Tinsley House in 2018 found the IRC to be ‘reasonably decent and safe’, but also acknowledged that detainees had to be monitored due to risk of self-­ harm or suicide, and cited restrictions on detainees’ movements in the mornings and evenings for the purposes of ‘operational convenience’ had a deleterious effect on detainee’s wellbeing and meant that they were ‘unduly restricted to their units and communal rooms where ventilation was poor and windows could not be opened’ (Clarke, 2018, p. 5). The next section further explores issues of harm, discrimination and neglect in immigration detention facilities and specifically addresses detainees’ experiences in facilities managed by Serco and G4S, as these firms were also contracted to manage dispersed accommodation for asylum seekers. What is clear from these accounts, as well as examples from the observations above, is that the immigration detention estate within Britain is one in which immigrants and asylum seekers are exposed to significant risk of harm and are effectively treated as prisoners even in instances in which they have not committed an offence. The effectiveness of detention in achieving its purported aims—to facilitate the removal of

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immigrants via deportation—is also highly questionable given that only 37 per cent of detainees were deported in 2019 compared to 61 per cent that were released on immigration bail (Silverman et al., 2020, p. 10). As Welch and Schuster (2005, p. 403) explain, a large proportion of detainees are released for a variety of reasons, including their inability to be returned to countries of origin due to ongoing conditions or that state’s refusal or inability to issue necessary paperwork. Detainees may also be released on bail while they await appeals outcomes, and they can be discharged simply because their asylum claim is eventually successful. Many of the asylum seekers who participated in the research underpinning this book had previously been detained in immigration removal centres. Given that they were not deported and were instead rehoused via the Home Office’s dispersed housing programme, it is evident that detention is not entirely serving its stated function of facilitating removals. The criminalisation of immigrants and asylum seekers is a process that involves symbolic and practical elements that coalesce in the public consciousness as evidence that something is ‘being done’ about migration. Detention achieves both components of this process, as the visual spectacle of the immigration removal centre with its barbed wire and high walls serves a symbolic function while the physical removal of asylum seekers and other migrants from the general population achieves the political objective of demonstrating a concerted response to popular fears of foreign incursion. IRCs and similar containment facilities render migrants both visible and invisible at the same time. They are visible en masse as a controlled population, but the minutiae of their lived experiences within detention and their exposure to harm goes virtually unseen. Esposito’s concept of ‘immunisation’ is helpful here, as it illuminates some of the logic underpinning this phenomenon. Esposito (2008, pp.  29–32) draws on Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and biopower, but he notes that Foucault’s notion of biopower was not always clear about whether biopower represents a power of life or a power over life. As such, Esposito positions his notion of ‘immunisation’ as a way of addressing these two sometimes contradictory understandings of biopower. In the context of immigration control, the word ‘immunity’ draws on its biomedical roots and Esposito (Esposito, 2013, p. 61) describes it as a process that introduces a ‘tolerable portion of [disease] in order to

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inoculate the body against a full fledged infection’. In other words, the state simulates ‘immunisation’ through the introduction of a select number of highly controlled migrant populations, virtually inoculating citizens (the ‘community’) from the threat of the outsider. The containment of asylum seekers and other immigrants within IRCs is understood, then, as a means of overtly demonstrating to the ‘community’ that they are being protected against the foreign malady. Citizens are accordingly exempted from any domestic obligations to provide welfare and care for this population. As Esposito (2008, 2013) explains, immunity is the antithesis of ‘community’, and it frees citizens from their responsibilities to others. Bosworth (2012, p. 134) identifies a similar process, though she addresses the impact on detainees specifically as she explains that detention is designed to reinforce asylum seekers’ feelings of exclusion from society and remind them of their ‘absence of citizenship’. This exercise in demonstrative segregation and incarceration comes at a substantial financial cost, and the state is evidently willing to pay considerable sums to maintain this symbolic control over migrant bodies. Successive UK governments’ predilection for detention as a means of managing immigrant populations has given rise to a lucrative immigration control market in which firms contracted to carry out detention and deportation functions profit from the incarceration and surveillance of asylum seekers and other migrants. In the year ending March 2020, the total cost of the United Kingdom’s detention estate was over £90 million (Home Office, 2020a). By the end of 2019, it cost an average of just under £95 per day to detain a migrant in an immigration removal centre (Home Office, 2020 in Silverman et al., 2020, p. 11). It is of clear financial interest for private security firms to continue to manage IRCs if the financial cost of detaining people remains greater than the fines and reputational damage associated with the mismanagement of IRCs and the maltreatment of detainees. As addressed in the next section, the revelations about conditions within G4S-managed Brook House in 2017 resulted in the transference of the detention contract to Serco and the G4S’s stated intent to abandon the management of IRCs altogether (Busby, 2019; Home Office, 2020e). Counter to Hollifield’s (2004) ‘liberal paradox’, which identifies an inherent incompatibility between the neoliberal state’s dual imperatives of fostering the free market while

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maintaining highly restrictive border control, the United Kingdom’s detention estate reveals that these two goals can be complementary. Private firms profit substantially from providing the social control function of incarcerating immigrants. The entry of companies like G4S and Serco into the management of IRC detainees reflects the further normalisation of marketised approaches to immigration control. As Gill (2009) explains, the mundane, bureaucratic market imperatives of profits and key performance indicators serve to normalise detention, an otherwise extreme and exceptional exercise in sovereign control. Detention, he writes, ‘has become banal, with a focus more upon its operationalisation than upon its justification’ (Sidaway, 2003 in Gill, 2009, p. 187). This normalisation of the exceptional treatment of immigrants, including vulnerable asylum seekers, now extends beyond the stone walls and razor wire fences of detention centres into the intimate domestic spaces of destitute asylum seekers’ homes. The capitalist imperatives of ever-­expanding markets have resulted in the further valorisation of migrant bodies, as their movement around the country has become the source of yet another speculative opportunity for profit growth at the expense of human dignity and wellbeing.

4.2 Dispersed Accommodation for Asylum Seekers The United Kingdom’s policy of dispersing destitute asylum seekers to selected regions around the country and accommodating them on a no-­ choice basis while their applications for asylum are being decided or while they await appeals on initial decisions was initially justified on the grounds that local authorities in London and the South East of England were bearing too much of the ‘burden’ and resource expenditure in managing a disproportionate number of asylum seekers in the region. It was hardly surprising that asylum seekers were drawn to the capital, as the city offered a degree of diversity and an abundance of support networks that simply had not matured in the same way across other urban and suburban environments around Britain. Coupled with this image of London

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bursting at the seams was the incessant articulation of asylum seekers as illegitimate and, if not criminal in the strictest sense, at the very least deceptive and fraudulent. Early indications of New Labour’s intention to implement a dispersal strategy were evident in its White Paper, Fairer, Faster, Firmer (Home Office, 1998), which intimated that many asylum seekers were in fact economic migrants, and Section 1.14 declared that ‘[m]any claims are simply a tissue of lies’. Additionally, the document laid the foundation for the dispersal programme, including the use of local authorities and private actors in delivering a service that would ‘relieve the burden on provision in London’ and would involve ‘contracting with a range of providers to secure accommodation, including voluntary bodies, housing associations, local authorities and the private sector’ (ibid.: s8.22–8.23). There were some dissenting parliamentarians that highlighted the troubling implications of the dispersal policy, such as Neil Gerrard, the MP for Walthamstow, who accurately predicted that if the government were to ‘disperse to places where there is no shortage of housing, it is almost inevitable that those places will be deprived areas which are suffering unemployment and economic problems’ (Hansard, 1999, c86). Nevertheless, dispersal became embedded within immigration policy upon the successful passage of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. The Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 remains the foundation of the dispersal policy as it exists today, though the administration of dispersal has changed significantly since the first iteration of asylum accommodation contracts otherwise known as the National Asylum Support Service (NASS). The 1999 Act established the basis for no-choice dispersal in Section 97(a), which states that the Secretary of State may ‘not have regard to […] any preference that the supported person or his dependents (if any) may have as to the locality in which the accommodation is to be provided’. In other words, the Home Secretary and by extension, the Home Office, does not have to consider a destitute asylum seeker’s reasons for wanting to reside in a particular location on the basis of, say, friend, family or community connections. This differs significantly from policy that applies to citizens and residents eligible under United Kingdom’s homelessness legislation, which states that a local authority must consider if a person has a ‘local connection’ with a specific area, such as employment or family connections, before referring them to

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another local housing authority (Housing Act 1996, s198–199). Notably, if a person was previously housed under Section 95 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 within a local authority area—details of which feature in a moment—they may be considered to have a ‘local connection’ to that area, which a local authority must take into account when determining where the individual may be housed. In short, a homeless, destitute asylum seeker can be housed wherever the Home Office dictates, so long as it is within the boundaries established within immigration legislation; no ‘local connection’ needs to be considered. However, if an asylum seeker is successful in their application, is granted refugee status and becomes eligible for homelessness accommodation under the Housing Act, their previous local connection to a dispersal area as a former asylum seeker can be considered when determining their placement within local authority accommodation (ibid.: s199(6)). Legally and bureaucratically, asylum seekers’ claims to local area connections are meaningless until the Home Office recognises them as legitimately in need, a status it vigorously attempts to deny. Section 101 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 also established ‘reception zones’ including local authorities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Contracts with accommodation providers within each of these regions, including local authorities, housing associations and private landlords, resulted in the asylum seekers being moved away from London and the South East to new areas, many of which lacked the robust support network found in the capital and most were not as demographically diverse (Strang & Ager, 2010). Rapid increases in asylum seeker populations in some regions were accompanied by tensions and racially motivated violence. For instance, Glasgow did not have a significant number of asylum seekers prior to dispersal, but within four years of the introduction of the dispersal programme, the number of asylum seekers living in Glasgow increased by 10,000 (Wren, 2004, pp. 1–2). The 2001 murder of Firsat Yildiz Dag, a dispersed asylum seeker living in the Sighthill area of Glasgow, revealed the extent of discriminatory violence endured by newly dispersed residents and gave rise to a series of marches in which local advocates signalled that Glasgow was still a site of welcoming and inclusion (Malloch & Stanley, 2005). The tensions and strains of the dispersal policy were, however, immediately evident.

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Asylum seekers are divided into different categories within the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 to determine the nature and eligibility of their accommodation provision. These categories will arise later, as asylum seekers’ accounts of their dispersed accommodation experiences are explored in the next chapter, so it is worth addressing these groupings here. While an asylum seeker is awaiting a decision on their eligibility for longer term housing, they can be placed within temporary accommodation under Section 98 of the 1999 Act. While this accommodation is typically short term, ranging from days to weeks, experiences of initial accommodation vary. For instance, Angel Lodge, an initial accommodation centre near Wakefield Prison, was renowned for its overcrowding, inhospitable conditions and curfews placed on residents (Gledhill, 2012). Jeffrey, a former resident described his experience as ‘the worse situation one can imagine—it was like a prison’. He explained that asylum seekers were under constant surveillance: ‘my movement was always being monitored’ (interview, 21 August 2013). If an asylum seeker is deemed eligible for longer term accommodation support, they are rehoused under Section 95 of the Immigration and Asylum Act. It is under this section that many dispersed asylum seekers are accommodated, as the Home Secretary is empowered to ‘provide, or arrange for the provision of, support for’ destitute asylum seekers and their dependents; destitution is linked to one’s inability to obtain ‘adequate accommodation’ (s95(1–3)). Finally, under Section 4, the Home Secretary is empowered to arrange the accommodation of a person who is no longer an asylum seeker, or someone who has had an asylum application rejected. It is common given the high rate of initial rejections—42 per cent of asylum applications were initially rejected by the Home Office in 2019 (Sturge, 2021)—that asylum seekers may be waiting for the outcome of an appeal and therefore may be housed in dispersal accommodation under Section 95 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. Destitute asylum seekers whose applications have ‘failed’ may be housed under Section 4 if 21 days have elapsed since their application was rejected or 21 days after an unsuccessful appeal to the Home Office decision. Asylum seekers whose application for a judicial review has been granted can also be accommodated under Section 4, as can anyone taking ‘reasonable steps to leave’ the United Kingdom, but is unable to do so because of a medical reason or the fact that there is no

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‘viable route of return’ to their country of origin (Home Office, 2018a, pp. 7–9). The accounts from dispersed residents that feature in this book are from asylum seekers that were either on Section 95 or Section 4 support at the time of interview. In a few isolated instances, a respondent may have been granted refugee status and was reflecting on their dispersed accommodation experience prior to being housed by a local authority under the provisions of the Housing Act 1996 as discussed above. While the dispersal policy was ostensibly introduced to ease the ‘burden’ on local authorities in London and the South East of England, it also served to centralise the provision of asylum seekers’ accommodation. The biopolitical implications of this development are clear, as the state gained more granular knowledge of the unique placement and circumstances relating to individual asylum seekers’ housing situation, including their specific locations. As Darling (2011 in Darling, 2014, p. 77) explains, dispersal ‘represents a mode of governmentality which is not only concerned with securing circulation but also with fixing locations, imposing mobility and defining distributions’. It reflects ‘an administrative rationality of spatial partitioning, ordering and control’ (ibid., p. 78). Dispersal also fulfils another governmental objective grounded in the belief that asylum seekers can be disincentivised from remaining in the country if conditions are sufficiently unpleasant and uncomfortable, as is evident in the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, which it now refers to as the ‘compliant environment’ (Taylor, 2018, p.  1). Mynott’s (2000, p. 318) early reflections on dispersal still resonate, as he describes a belief that dispersal ‘was a deliberate ploy to make it harder for asylum seekers to make their claim and that they would in fact be dumped in areas where other people chose not to live, such as run-down council estates and blocks which were hard to let’. As the quote at the start of the next chapter illuminates, the perception of being ‘dumped’ is exactly how some residents view their dispersal experience. Dispersal is a key component of what Hintjens (2012, p. 88) refers to as a ‘deterrence-based UK immigration regime’, and the nature of its deployment and execution reflects the state’s pursuit of ‘producing discomfort’ (Darling, 2011, p. 268). Kissoon (2010, p. 22) describes the United Kingdom’s asylum support strategy, which includes dispersal, as ‘operating within a larger political objective of appearing in control and not a “soft touch”, an objective that has

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‘institutionalised the difference between citizens and “others”’. Sales (2002, p. 456) writes that asylum policy reflects a ‘punitive system […] preoccupied with control’. Within the first decade of the dispersal programme, the negative impacts on asylum seekers were clearly identifiable. As Athwal and Bourne (2007, p. 108) argue, dispersal ‘took asylum seekers away from communities where they had kith and kin and access to support structures, including legal advice, and deposited them in poor, often all-white neighbourhoods where resentment was keen and legal advice often non-existent’. Research into the early years of dispersal reveals that the policy contributed to residents’ feelings of depression and isolation, and exposure to deprivation and racist discrimination (Phillips, 2006; Spicer, 2008; Bowes et al., 2009; Netto, 2011). These trends continued and intensified as the dispersal programme transitioned from a service provided largely through collaboration between statutory and private actors to one managed wholly by private security firms and their subcontractors by 2012. When the National Asylum Support Service (NASS) dispersal programme launched in 2000, the contracts between the Home Office, private landlords, housing associations and local authorities were established on a fixed-term basis. This provided a certain level of flexibility, as the Home Office could reassess its monetary outlay depending on fluctuations in asylum application numbers and the demand for accommodation support, particularly that which was covered under Section 95 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. In practical terms, fixed-term contracts provided the Home Office with the opportunity to dramatically reduce the amount of money paid to local authorities and housing associations for their accommodation services. When the dispersed housing contracts were renegotiated in 2005, reductions in asylum applications and Home Office efficiencies in processing applications were cited as justifications for reductions in payments to service providers (National Audit Office, 2005, p. 2). Additionally, the Home Office identified isolated instances of opportunism and operational disorganisation as further rationalisations for cutting costs. In some instances, accommodation providers were being paid for empty properties or paid double for the same property. A 2005 Home Office investigation uncovered that Angel Group, a private provider of dispersed accommodation, was being paid

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by both the Home Office and a local authority for the same property (Pallister & Bowcott, 2005). The period of contract renegotiation resulted in significant reductions in funding for asylum accommodation and support and introduced unique strains on existing service providers. For instance, the Glasgow Housing Association had the value of its contract halved, and in other areas, families faced the possibility of being moved from locations they had settled in for years (Ricketts, 2005). The turmoil of the 2005 transition and the significantly reduced compensation paid out to the original contract holders proved to be an important inflection point in the trajectory of asylum housing in the United Kingdom, because it signalled that the Home Office approach to dispersal was one of minimising expense rather than maximising service quality. The reductions in compensation to housing providers proved to be untenable for some contract holders and, as the second round of five-year contracts neared their termination in 2010, a number of local authorities sought higher, more dependable funding to continue housing asylum seekers in designated dispersal areas. These demands were heavily resisted, as the Home Office was looking to further reduce costs in the next round of contract negotiations, not increase them. While contract negotiations for the dispersed asylum housing programme typically attracted little attention in mainstream reporting, the situation in 2010 proved unique, as some contract holders became uncharacteristically vocal about their dissatisfaction with the proposed compensation for accommodation services. Birmingham City Council publicly exclaimed its intention to abandon the dispersal contracts, though it justified its position by adopting the politically tactical claim that it was prioritising the housing needs of ‘our own people’ over those of asylum seekers (Lines quoted in BBC News, 2010). Glasgow City Council terminated its contract with the Home Office in February 2011 due to disagreements about the level of funding necessary to sustain its accommodation commitments (Twinch, 2010). The steady collapse of the NASS asylum housing regime was accompanied by a change in government in 2010 and the new Home Secretary’s advancement of a ‘hostile’ approach towards the management of immigrants in the United Kingdom. For years, Theresa May publicly bemoaned the fact that the European Convention on Human Rights and, by

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extension, the Human Rights Act 1998 stymied the government’s ability to expel unwanted immigrants (May, 2011; Travis, 2013, 2017). When the Home Office began tendering bids for a new asylum accommodation programme in 2011, private security firms responsible for the detention and transportation of migrants became ‘primary bidders’ for contacts under the awkwardly named ‘Commercial and Operational Managers Procuring Asylum Support Services’ or COMPASS. The contracts, once secured, were worth a combined value of £620 million over six years and were intended to lead to cost savings of £150 million (Robertson, 2013). The three successful bidders—G4S, Serco and Reliance—were security firms without any prior experience delivering a large-scale accommodation service. Instead, they were largely associated with the government’s immigration control strategy.

4.3 C  OMPASS: The Entry of Private Security Firms into the Management of Dispersed Accommodation for Asylum Seekers The entry of private security firms like G4S and Serco into the management of the United Kingdom’s dispersed asylum housing programme seems rather incongruous upon first reflection, especially since neither of these companies had any meaningful accommodation management experience prior to their acquisition of the COMPASS contracts. However, given their established role within the United Kingdom’s immigration control regime as managers of detention facilities and as deportation escorts, their initial position as ‘preferred bidders’ and subsequent securing of the contracts seem almost inevitable in hindsight, particularly within the context of the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ strategy. G4S and Serco were contracted to manage immigration removal centres across the United Kingdom, including Brook House, Colnbrook and Yarl’s Wood. These detention facilities have been the subject of controversy, as the management of each has been scrutinised for poor, overcrowded conditions, and the racist and abusive treatment of detainees.

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Serco was scrutinised for its role in the death of a Colnbrook detainee in 2011. An inquest into the death of an asylum seeker at the facility concluded that the incident was due, in part, to neglect on the part of Serco employees for not notifying emergency services in a timely fashion (Taylor, 2012). In 2013, the question of Serco’s neglect of detainees resurfaced following the death of Khalid Shahzad, an asylum seeker who died hours after having been released from Colnbrook. Shahzad was deemed too ill to remain in detention and was sent unaccompanied on a train back to London; he later died on his onward journey to Manchester (Allison, 2013; Thompson, 2013). Serco’s management of Yarl’s Wood, an immigration removal centre used to detain women and families, has continually invited scrutiny since Serco began operating the facility in 2007. Yarl’s Wood featured in a Channel 4 (2015) documentary that uncovered Serco employees’ mistreatment and neglect of detainees, including the use of demeaning and derogatory language. Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent relocating of many of the facility’s detainees (BBC News, 2020), many of those interned were highly vulnerable and suffered from the psychological and emotional trauma of past events, and these tensions were exacerbated by the conditions within the facility. In their investigation into women’s experiences in Yarl’s Wood, Girma et  al. (2015) found that women were regularly observed by men while sleeping, getting dressed, bathing, using the toilet and while on suicide watch. This was particularly troubling for women who were survivors of sexual abuse. As one woman recounted, ‘I was a victim of rape, so it brought on all those memories when they came to my room’ (quoted in Girma et al., 2015, p. 12). The levels of despair within Yarl’s Wood were perhaps most acutely manifested in the form of hunger strikes within the centre. In 2018, detainees protested the poor quality of medical care within the centre and the use of indefinite detention by engaging in a hunger strike, which led to the Home Office threatening detainees with expedited removal from the country (Detained Voices, 2015 and Eleanor, 2018 in Seymour-Butler, 2019, p. 168). Frank Arnold, an independent doctor with experience treating detainees on hunger strike within UK detention facilities, notes that few of his patients receive ‘adequate care from detention centre doctors’ and suggests that such strikes evidence the desperation of those exposed to the injustices of the

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hostile environment (Arnold, 2018, p. 1). The conditions within Yarl’s Wood reflect a degree of re-traumatisation that represents not simply a consequence, but possibly an intended feature of the United Kingdom’s punitive immigration control regime. Like Serco, G4S has profited from immigration contracts with the UK government ranging from migrant transportation to the management of immigration removal centres. G4S operates on nearly every continent and within a wide range of sectors, including security services, health services, cash transportation, policing and border control (G4S, 2021). Alongside this rapid expansion, G4S has been implicated in the serious harm of prisoners, immigrants and asylum seekers under its control. In 2008, an Aboriginal Australian man died of heatstroke in the back of a G4S (then operating as GSL) prison van after being exposed to temperatures exceeding 56 degrees Celsius as he was transported over 350 kilometres across the Western Australian outback without air conditioning (Baldino et al., 2010, p. 420; Sambrook, 2012). The two G4S employees transporting Ward did not face charges associated with his death, though a coroner’s inquest in 2009 determined that a multitude of institutional failings resulted in his inhumane treatment and demise (Ward, 2009 in Baldino et al., 2010, p. 420). In 2014, G4S was the target of a class action lawsuit in Australia for its role in allegedly failing in its duty of care towards refugees detained within a processing centre managed by the firm on Manus Island, Papua-New Guinea. While the case was ultimately settled, the action highlighted the extreme conditions detainees face within the country’s remote and outsourced immigration management regime (Harding, 2018). Jimmy Mubenga, an Angolan asylum seeker, died while being restrained by G4S guards during a deportation flight out of London in 2010. Witnesses on the flight explained that Mubenga pleaded for up to ten minutes that he could not breathe before losing consciousness and ultimately expiring (Weber & Pickering, 2011, pp.  127–128). The Crown Prosecution Service did not initially charge the three guards (Lewis & Taylor, 2012), though a formal inquest into Mubenga’s death resulted in a jury’s determination that he was unlawfully killed and died as a result of his restraint. In its summary, the jury stated: ‘We find that [the guards] were using unreasonable force and acting in an unlawful

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manner. […] The guards, we believe, would have known that they would have caused Mr Mubenga harm in their actions, if not serious harm’ (Monaghan, 2013, p. 8). The three guards were eventually charged with manslaughter, but ultimately acquitted by a jury (Taylor & Booth, 2014). In that trial, the judge disallowed a series of racist text messages from being used as evidence against one of the G4S guards, though their content revealed the extent to which the sender despised the very people he was meant to be caring for during their transportation and deportation. One text message read: ‘Fuck off and go home you free-loading, benefit grabbing, kid producing, violent, non-English speaking cock suckers and take those hairy faced, sandal wearing, bomb making, goat fucking, smelly rag head bastards with you’ (quoted in Booth, 2014). While these attitudes and beliefs may reflect the views of an individual, in this case, a bigoted guard employed to transport asylum seekers from immigration removal centres to their deportation destination, they may also reflect the embedded institutionalised discrimination and racism within the operational culture of border enforcement agencies. As Weber and Pickering (2011, p. 119) note, the death of Mubenga and others in similar circumstances must ‘be understood as products of the social, legal and political context in which they are embedded’. In other words, the state and those contracted to carry out its border control functions are implicated in the direct harm of refugees and asylum seekers, because legislative and political apparatuses of control are violent by design. The systemic devaluing and dehumanising of asylum seekers throughout the UK immigration control regime, including by the Home Office and its contractors, reflects Foucault’s (2004) concept of ‘state racism’ in practice. It is the active demarcation of difference through apparatuses of exclusion that are often harmful and sometimes deadly. As Tyler writes, this is by design; it is the core logic of the immigration system, ‘in the most active and violent sense of the verb to design: to mark out, to indicate, to designate’ (original emphasis, Tyler, 2010, p. 62). In its delivery of border control contracts, G4S has embodied and embraced this violence by design. This is demonstrated in the disregard and ill treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers evidenced in the examples above, but it is arguably much more systemic to the organisation than a case of independently callous and racist actors or ‘bad apples’. The pervasiveness of xenophobic

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attitudes and employees’ propensity for callousness and cruelty are revealed in the firm’s management of immigration removal centres. Like Serco, which was scrutinised for its treatment of detainees within Yarl’s Wood, G4S staff engaged in the maltreatment of detainees within Brook House immigration removal centre. This conduct was revealed in a 2017 BBC Panorama documentary, in which secret camera footage captured G4S guards using derogatory language and engaging in abusive behaviours. In one instance, an officer restrained a suicidal detainee by the head, pressed his thumbs into the man’s neck and declared: ‘Don’t fucking move, you fucking piece of shit. I’m going to put you to fucking sleep’ (BBC, 2017). The revelations of the documentary resulted in the organisation of a Home Affairs Committee meeting investigating conditions within Brook House in September 2017. Witnesses included Reverend Nathan Ward, a former Duty Director at Brook House, as well as Peter Neden, the G4S Regional President for the United Kingdom and Ireland. Ward resigned in 2014, and he described an environment in which abusive behaviour was embedded not only within the operational cultures of Brook House and G4S, but the Home Office as well. In his witness statement to the Home Affairs Committee, Ward stated: ‘[W]hen a member of the Home Office staff says to me, “It’s all about who breaks first, whether the detainees or the Home Office, in relation to immigration cases”, it is a culture set not just by G4S but, far wider, by the Home Office’ (quoted in House of Commons, 2017b). Ward’s comments reflect the perception that the Home Office and its contractors effectively operate uniformly in the subjugation and victimisation of asylum seekers. Indeed, Ward states: ‘I think that in one sense the relationship has become too close. The Home Office is reliant on G4S as an operator to actually undertake what it needs to do’ (ibid.). It is this reliance on G4S and the private security sector more broadly in delivering the state’s immigration and social control objectives that may at least partially explain why firms like G4S and Serco have continuously been awarded contracts by the UK government despite previous contractual failings and even instances in which these firms have defrauded the government. During the transition from NASS to COMPASS in 2012, which resulted in asylum seekers being uprooted from existing properties and

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rehoused in properties operated by subcontractors to G4S and Serco, G4S was attempting to fulfil a contract with the UK government to provide security at the 2012 Olympics. The company was awarded £236 million for its provision of personnel and security technologies to ensure the safety of eventgoers and the public. However, it failed in the delivery of the contract and it was unable to provide sufficient staff to guarantee public safety. Lord Coe, the chairman of the 2012 Olympics, described the general incompetence of the firm, stating that G4S ‘failed to understand the size and complexity’ of its government contract (quoted in Travis & Gibson, 2012). As a result, the government deployed over 3000 military troops and personnel to fill in the gaps left behind by G4S’s mismanagement. G4S was required to pay a £70 million fine for its contractual failings, but it has since been successful in securing a multitude of government contracts including a £300 million contract to operate Wellingborough prison from 2022 (Maidment, 2013; Baynes, 2020). The continued success of G4S and Serco at securing government contracts is even more perplexing given the fact that both firms defrauded the government of millions of pounds when carrying out their contracts to issue and monitor prisoner ‘tags’ or ankle bracelets. In 2013, G4S and Serco were implicated in deliberately overcharging the government for their prisoner tagging contracts, as tags were issued to people who were dead, out of the country or already in prison (Meikle, 2013). After determining that fraud had occurred, the Serious Fraud Office fined G4S £44 million, and after admitting its guilt for the same offence, Serco was fined £19.2 million (Chapman, 2019; Davies, 2020). While such fines are relatively sizeable, they may not be sufficient punishment to ensure that these firms continue to operate ethically or, at the very least, to meet their contractual obligations. As discussed below and in the next chapter, these private security firms also failed in their duty of care to asylum seekers and in meeting their contractual duties to the Home Office under the COMPASS programme, and while G4S ceased its management of dispersed housing under the Asylum Accommodation and Support Contracts (AASC) agreed in 2019, both firms continue to benefit financially from their special relationship with the UK government. The legacies of these firms were known to asylum seekers and their advocates in advance of the closure of the bids for the COMPASS

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contracts, and a considerable amount of grassroots activism was leveraged against the awarding of the contracts to G4S and Serco particularly by small organisations like the South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group (SYMAAG). Following the revelation that G4S, Serco and Reliance were ‘preferred bidders’ for the COMPASS contracts in late 2011, members of the public, refugee advocates and academics were invited to a meeting in Sheffield on 24 February 2012 that included representatives from G4S and UK Border Agency (now UK Visas and Immigration and Border Force). The purpose of the meeting was ostensibly to discuss the suitability of the firms in managing the COMPASS contracts during a period of ‘due diligence’ and to answer questions of those in attendance. Given that G4S was a preferred bidder by the time this meeting occurred, it was unlikely that a meeting held at a refugee centre in the North of England was going to lead to significant contractual reversals. Nevertheless, Stephen Small, then Managing Director of Immigration and Borders at G4S, argued that the private security firm was successful in securing the COMPASS contracts, because it offered a technical and financial advantage over its competitors. When asked how the company might respond to concerns that the role of G4S in housing asylum seekers might be perceived as the firm’s further extension as an arm of the Home Office given its involvement in other immigration control industries, Small objected to associations made between G4S and the Home Office, arguing that the Home Office has power over immigration decisions whereas G4S does not. In an attempt to assuage fears that families accommodated by G4S or its subcontractors would be exposed to harm or distress during the transition to COMPASS, Andrew Gray, then an accommodation manager at G4S, asserted that the firm would work closely with Local Safeguarding Children Boards to conduct risk assessments and limit moves where possible. Representatives of both the Home Office and G4S made it clear that there was no contractual obligation to liaise with Local Safeguarding Children Boards, though under Schedule 2, Section 1.13 of the COMPASS contract, G4S was bound to the legal duties within Section 55 of the Border, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009 ‘to safeguard children from harm and promote their welfare’ (Home Office, 2012). Despite these assurances, the eventual delivery of the COMPASS contracts resulted in family moves with little notice and

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disruptions to children’s schooling. A Home Affairs Committee (House of Commons, 2017a: para. 93c) report identified a range of safeguarding issues inadequately addressed by service providers, including the fact that firms’ ‘insensitive allocation of shared accommodation’ contributed to ‘families with young children being placed in shared accommodation leading to concerns around safeguarding and child protection’. For dispersed residents with prior knowledge of G4S and Serco, the companies’ previous contractual failings and their role in managing immigration removal centres were sources of anxiety and frustration. Upon finding out about the COMPASS contracts, one asylum seeker succinctly exclaimed: ‘I do not want a prison guard as my landlord’ (quoted in Grayson, 2012). Of the twenty six current or former asylum seekers contributing their knowledge and experiences to the research underpinning this book, nine respondents cited prior knowledge of G4S or Serco outside of the companies’ role as dispersed accommodation providers. This awareness was predominantly associated with the role of these firms in the management of detention facilities, though in one instance, a resident explained he had first heard of G4S following its failure to fulfil the 2012 Olympics contract. Kadin, a resident in the North East of England, stated: The first time when I heard about [G4S] was in when they failed in the Olympics—their contract. This is when I first heard about G4S. While I was still in the process, I saw that and thought: ‘Welcome to [my] troubles!’. […] I knew them as private security. I knew that they ran prisons. I don’t know what they [are doing] with housing. […] I know that they do transport as well. (Kadin, interview, 26 June 2013)

Sadie explained that she was immediately concerned when she found out that Serco was the contract holder for dispersed accommodation in Glasgow, because she was aware that Serco ran detention centres. Sadie stated that she knew a woman who was denied her medication for a chronic condition while in an immigration removal centre and ultimately died (interview, 12 June 2013). Marion, an asylum seeker in West Yorkshire, said she knew about G4S, because of its history of ‘beating

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people’ during their deportation (interview, 06 September 2013). Leonie, another woman dispersed to West Yorkshire, explained that the death of Jimmy Mubenga while under restraint by G4S guards factored into her fears about G4S securing the contract to accommodate asylum seekers. She explained that she was concerned that G4S would engage in the same kind of surveillance that the firm employed in the management of IRCs and its transportation services. I got a letter from the Home Office […] saying that G4S were taking over [dispersed housing]. That really, really scared me to death […]. What does that say? That we’re going to be watched every now and then or, probably, to make it easier for the UKBA [UK Border Agency] to get me arrested? Since G4S is my landlord, it can bring in a prison van and come and get me out of the house. So, I felt like I’m in prison. None of us were actually happy, to be fair, because every asylum seeker knows that G4S is a prison guard company. […] Especially with what happened to Jimmy Mubenga. That really worries me, because if I’m having G4S as my landlord, what’s going to happen to me or other people if we didn’t do what they wanted us to do? Probably they will just come and, you know, bundle us into a prison van. (Leonie, interview, 22 August 2013)

For asylum seekers with prior detention experiences, G4S and Serco were associated with the isolation, discomfort and the institutionalised violence of immigration removal centres. Saira noted that her experience in detention was like being in prison, and her opinions of Serco, which was contracted to accommodate dispersed asylum seekers in Glasgow, were largely shaped by her recollection of Serco staff working in Yarl’s Wood IRC, who she described as invasive, insensitive and rude (interview, 19 July 2013). Shahid, an asylum seeker housed by Cascade, a subcontractor to G4S in West Yorkshire, opined that G4S must have been the lowest bidder in securing the COMPASS contracts given the poor quality of Cascade properties. In his words, dispersal in West Yorkshire simply represented ‘two companies profiteering’ at the expense of vulnerable residents with no choice but to accept living in unsanitary, substandard conditions and ‘suffer in silence’. He cited an example of a woman on

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dialysis due to a chronic kidney ailment who was placed in an overcrowded Cascade property with four bedrooms and seven residents. Mental health issues, Shahid explained, were exacerbated due to housing conditions that contributed to a decline in the psychological wellbeing of ‘decent, sociable people’ and led to expressions of violence and aggressiveness (interview, 07 September 2013). When Edward considered G4S’s management of detention centres and the firm’s subsequent procurement of Home Office contracts to accommodate destitute asylum seekers, he simply said that it represented an ‘abuse of human rights’ (interview, 22 August 2013). Edward was given a day’s notice before being moved out of his existing property into one managed by Cascade, a G4S subcontractor. The reflections of dispersed residents like those above reveal an awareness of the violence and harm private security firms are responsible for in the management of the state’s border control regime. Often, these views are not based on hearsay or supposition, but on lived experiences and revelations amongst a population of people in a shared state of liminality, precarity and fear. Leonie’s dread that her status as a dispersed asylum seeker would result in exposure to a similar level of surveillance as that of an IRC detainee is based on sound logic and an awareness of G4S’s legacy of mismanagement and coercive conduct. The lived experiences of dispersed asylum seekers are marked by the perception of  being under a constant state of observation, as they are required to ‘sign’ with the Home Office at regular intervals and must adhere to the strict conditions of their accommodation support under the dispersal programme. The inclusion of private security firms into the oversight of their domestic spaces contributes to the perception that the panoptic gaze of the state extends to all corners of an asylum seeker’s minute-by-minute existence. The governmentality of immigration control and the synergies between the Home Office and its favoured contractors spawn practical fears about the extent to which the government’s acquisition of total knowledge about asylum seekers’ locations and routines may be used to further control, subdue and ultimately expel them. It is a fear of what Foucault (2007, p. 296) refers to as the ‘mechanism of security’, which he describes as the ‘maintenance of the relation of forces and development of the internal forces of each element, linking them together’. In the context of

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dispersed housing, these mechanisms of security are represented by the relationship—a relationship earlier identified as ‘too close’—between the Home Office and the private security firms it contracts to literally and figuratively constrain migrant bodies. The objective for this ‘relation of forces’ is to promote market expansion while achieving the symbolic aim of restricting the entry of asylum seekers and demonstrating that the experiences of those already present are grounded in uncertainty and despair. During a 2013 Home Affairs Committee investigation into the management of the COMPASS contracts during the transition phase, the then Chief Executive of Serco in the United Kingdom and Europe, Jeremy Stafford, claimed that the COMPASS contracts were not profitable, implying that profit was not the objective of the firm. When asked why Serco would bother with delivering the contracts if its profits amounted to just £0.21 for each asylum seeker per night in COMPASS accommodation, Stafford’s response was not that the company wanted to maximise the quality of service it offered to dispersed asylum seekers. Instead, he stated that ‘[w]e felt that we could establish a very good platform that was scalable’. Citing Serco’s global footprint offering services like prisoner transportation, Stafford asserted that ‘we felt accommodation management was an important development area’ (quoted in House of Commons, 2013). The effects of this commitment to scalability over human dignity and the pursuit of future profitability over residents’ wellbeing in the delivery of the COMPASS contracts are the focus of the next chapter.

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HM Government. (1971). Immigration Act 1971. Retrieved June 18, 2019, from https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1971/77 Hollifield, J. (2004). The Emerging Migration State. International Migration Review, 38(3), 885–912. Home Office. (1998). Fairer, Faster, Firmer: A Modern Approach to Immigration and Asylum. Cm 4018. Stationery Office: London. Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/264150/4018.pdf Home Office. (2012). COMPASS Project: Accommodation & Transport— Statement of Requirements. Schedule 2. Retrieved October 25, 2019, from https://data.gov.uk/data/contracts-­f inder-­a rchive/download/503103/ ce88be88-­62c0-­4491-­b903-­5c6b02cc368c Home Office. (2013). Operation Vaken: Evaluation Report—October 2013. Retrieved August 28, 2020, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/254411/ Operation_Vaken_Evaluation_Report.pdf Home Office. (2014). Detention Data Tables Immigration Statistics October to December 2014. Table dt_01. Retrieved April 03, 2021, from https://assets. publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/405705/detention-­q4-­2014-­tabs.ods Home Office. (2018a). Asylum Support, Section 4(2): Policy and Process. Retrieved April 01, 2021, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/682495/asylum-­support-­ section-­4_2_-­policy-­and-­process-­v1.0ext.pdf Home Office. (2018b). Mobile Phones and Cameras in Immigration Removal Centres. GOV.UK. Retrieved April 04, 2021, from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/mobile-­p hones-­a nd-­c ameras-­i n-­i mmigration-­ removal-­c entres/mobile-­p hones-­a nd-­c ameras-­i n-­i mmigration-­ removal-­centres-­accessible-­version Home Office. (2020a). Annual Report and Accounts 2019–20 (for the Year Ended 31 March 2020). HC 334. Retrieved April 05, 2021, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/902593/HO_Annual_Report_and_Accounts_2019-­20_FINAL.pdf Home Office. (2020b). Detention Summary Tables, Year Ending December 2020. Table Det_02b. Retrieved April 03, 2021, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/963054/detention-­summary-­dec-­2020-­tables.xlsx

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Jeffrey. (2013, August 21). Interview with Steven Hirschler. North East, England Kadin. (2013, June 26). Interview with Steven Hirschler. North East, England Kissoon, P. (2010). From Persecution to Destitution: A Snapshot of Asylum Seekers’ Housing and Settlement Experiences in Canada and the United Kingdom. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 8(1), 4–31. Leonie. (2013, August 22). Interview with Steven Hirschler. West Yorkshire, England. Lewis, P., & Taylor, M. (2012, July 20). Failure to Bring Charges in Jimmy Mubenga Case ‘perverse’, says peer. The Guardian. Retrieved April 08, 2021, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jul/20/jimmy-­mubenga-­case­charges-­perverse Maidment, N. (2013, February 12). G4S Takes 70 Million Pound Loss to Settle Olympics Dispute. Reuters. Retrieved April 06, 2021, from https://www. reuters.com/article/uk-­g4s-­olympics-­idUKBRE91B0BF20130212 Malloch, M. S., & Stanley, E. (2005). The Detention of Asylum Seekers in the UK: Representing Risk, Managing the Dangerous. Punishment & Society, 7(1), 53–71. Marion. (2013. June 09). Interview with Steven Hirschler. West Yorkshire, England May, T. (2011, October 4). ‘Theresa May Speech in full’. Politics.co.uk. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-­analysis/2011/ 10/04/theresa-­may-­speech-­in-­full-­2/ McGuinness, T., & Gower, M. (2018). Immigration Detention in the UK: An Overview (Briefing Paper No. 7294; pp. 1–30). House of Commons Library. Retrieved April 03, 2021, from https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/ documents/CBP-­7294/CBP-­7294.pdf Meikle, J. (2013, December 12). G4S and Serco Hand Over Offender Tagging Contracts Over Fraud Claims. The Guardian. Retrieved April 06, 2021, from http://www.theguardian.com/uk-­n ews/2013/dec/12/g4s-­s erco-­t agging-­ contracts-­fraud-­allegations-­monitoring-­criminals Miller, P. (2013, April 29). Security Industry Provides Medics for UK Deportation Flights. openDemocracy. Retrieved August 28, 2020, from https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/shine-­a-­light/security-­industry-­provides-­ medics-­for-­uk-­deportation-­flights/ Millward, D. (2016, September 11). Passengers Terrified on easyJet flight as Deported Migrant Screams ‘death is coming’ 17 times. The Telegraph. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/ 11/passengers-­terrified-­on-­easyjet-­flight-­as-­deported-­migrant-­screa/

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Mitie. (2017, December 14). Mitie Awarded Contract with the Home Office. Mitie. Retrieved August 28, 2020, from https://news.mitie.com/news/ mitie-­awarded-­contract-­with-­the-­home-­office Monaghan, K. (2013). Inquest into the Death of Jimmy Kelenda Mubenga: Report by the Assistant Deputy Coroner, Karon Monaghan QC, under the Coroner’s Rules 1984, Rule 43. Retrieved March 30, 2021, from https://irr.org.uk/app/ uploads/2014/02/JimmyMubenga_R43.pdf Mynott, E. (2000). Analysing the Creation of Apartheid for Asylum Seekers in the UK. Community, Work & Family, 3(3), 311–331. National Audit Office. (2005). National Asylum Support Service: The provision of Accommodation for Asylum Seekers. Retrieved April 08, 2021, from http:// www.nao.org.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2005/07/0506130.pdf Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, Chapter 24. Stationery Office: London. Retrieved April 07, 2021, from http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/2002/41/contents Netto, G. (2011). Identity Negotiation, Pathways to Housing and ?Place?: The Experience of Refugees in Glasgow. Housing, Theory and Society, 28(2), 123–143. Pallister, D., & Bowcott, O. (2005, August 3). Inquiry into Firm’s Asylum Contracts. The Guardian. Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/aug/03/immigration.immigrationandpublicservices2 Phillips, D. (2006). Moving Towards Integration: The Housing of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Britain. Housing Studies, 21(4), 539–553. Ricketts, A. (2005). Asylum Upheaval ‘chaos’ Predicted. Inside Housing. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/ news/asylum-­upheaval-­chaos-­predicted-­8352 Robertson, G. (2013). Taking Over the Asylum. Inside Housing. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/insight/ taking-­over-­the-­asylum1-­34251 Robjant, K., Hassan, R., & Katona, C. (2009). Mental Health Implications of Detaining Asylum Seekers: Systematic Review. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 194(4), 306–312. Sadie. (2013, June 12). Interview with Steven Hirschler. Scotland. Saira. (2013, July 19). Interview with Steven Hirschler. Scotland. Sales, R. (2002). The Deserving and the Undeserving? Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Welfare in Britain. Critical Social Policy, 22(3), 456–478. Sambrook, C. (2012, June 6). Like it or not, G4S is securing your world. openDemocracy. Retrieved August 13, 2021, from https://www.opendemocracy. net/en/opendemocracyuk/like-it-or-not-g4s-is-securing-your-world/

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Serco. (2021). The Role of a DCO and How to Apply. Serco. Retrieved April 04, 2021, from https://www.serco.com/uk/careers/immigration-­careers/ the-­role-­of-­a-­dco-­and-­how-­to-­apply Seymour-Butler, A. (2019). Escaping the Sunken Place: Indefinite Detention, Asylum Seekers and Resistance in Yarl’s Wood IRC. Denning Law Journal, 31, 167–186. Shahid. (2013, September 07). Interview with Steven Hirschler. West Yorkshire, England. Silverman, S., Griffiths, M., & Walsh, P.  W. (2020). Briefing: Immigration Detention in the UK. The Migration Observatory, University of Oxford. Retrieved November 29, 2020, from https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/ wp-­c ontent/uploads/2020/05/Briefing-­I mmigration_Detention_ in_the_UK.pdf Slack, J., & Chapman, J. (2013, September 30). Theresa May: I’ll Kick Out Illegal Migrants BEFORE they Get Chance to Appeal. The Daily Mail. Retrieved August 27, 2020, from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article­2 438130/Theresa-­M ay-­I ll-­k ick-­i llegal-­m igrants-­B EFORE-­c hance-­ appeal.html Spicer, N. (2008). Places of Exclusion and Inclusion: Asylum-Seeker and Refugee Experiences of Neighbourhoods in the UK. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 34(3), 491–510. Strang, A., & Ager, A. (2010). Refugee Integration: Emerging Trends and Remaining Agendas. Journal of Refugee Studies, 23(4), 589–607. Sturge, G. (2021, April 2). Asylum Statistics (Briefing Paper No. SN01403; pp. 1–30). House of Commons Library. https://commonslibrary.parliament. uk/research-­briefings/sn01403/ Taylor, D. (2012, May 25). Detention Centre Failures Contributed to Death of Asylum Seeker, Inquest Finds. The Guardian. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/may/25/detention-­centre­death-­asylum-­seeker Taylor, D. (2020a, August 13). Asylum Seeker Removal Flight Takes off Despite Last-minute Court Actions. The Guardian. Retrieved August 26, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-­n ews/2020/aug/12/asylum-­s eeker­removal-­flight-­go-­ahead-­despite-­last-­minute-­court-­action Taylor, D. (2020b, February 12). Deportation Flights for 37 People Cost Home Office £443,000. The Guardian. Retrieved August 28, 2020, from https:// www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/12/deportation-­flights-­for-­37-­ people-­cost-­home-­office-­443000

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Taylor, D. (2021, March 23). Home Office Spends £13,354 per Person on Deportation Flights. The Guardian. Retrieved April 03, 2021, from https:// www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/mar/23/home-­o ffice-­s pends-­ 13354-­per-­person-­on-­deportation-­flights Taylor, M., & Booth, R. (2014, December 16). G4S Guards Found Not Guilty of Manslaughter of Jimmy Mubenga. The Guardian. Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-­news/2014/dec/16/g4s-­ guards-­found-­not-­guilty-­manslaughter-­jimmy-­mubenga Taylor, R. (2018). Impact of ‘Hostile Environment’ Policy. [Library Briefing]. House of Lords. Retrieved April 02, 2021, from https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/research-­briefings/lln-­2018-­0064/ Thompson, D. (2013, April 17). Probe After Sick Asylum Seeker Deemed Unfit for Detention Dies on Train. Manchester Evening News. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-­ manchester-­news/sick-­asylum-­seeker-­cheetham-­hill-­2728237 Tidman, Z. (2020, July 13). Record Number of Migrants Reach UK on Day Priti Patel Announces new Approach to Deal with English Channel Crossings. The Independent. Retrieved August 27, 2020, from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-­news/uk-­migrants-­english-­channel-­priti-­patel-­ boat-­crossings-­a9615626.html Travis, A. (2013, July 08). Theresa May Criticises Human Rights Convention after Abu Qatada Affair. The Guardian. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/08/theresa-­m ay-­h uman­rights-­abu-­qatada Travis, A. (2017, July 07). UK Would Have to Declare State of Emergency to Change Human Rights Laws’. The Guardian. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-­news/2017/jun/07/uk-­would-­have-­ to-­declare-­state-­of-­emergency-­to-­change-­human-­rights-­laws Travis, A. and Gibson, O. (2012, September 11). G4S Failed to Understand Size of Olympic Security Job, Says Lord Coe’. The Guardian. Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/sep/11/g4s-­failed-­ olympic-­security-­lord-­coe Turnbull, S. (2018). Starting Again: Life After Deportation from the UK, in Khosravi, S. (ed.), After Deportation: Ethnographic Perspectives. Global Ethics Series. eBook. Palgrave Macmillan. Twinch, E. (2010, November 11). Glasgow Asylum Deal Terminated. Inside Housing. Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/ news/glasgow-­asylum-­deal-­terminated-­23861

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Tyler, I. (2010). Designed to Fail: A Biopolitics of British Citizenship. Citizenship Studies, 14(1), 61–74. UK Borders Act 2007. c. 30. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2007/30/contents Vasta, E. (2011). Immigrants and the Paper Market: Borrowing, Renting and Buying Identities. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34(2), 187–206. Walsh, P.  W. (2020). Briefing: Deportation and Voluntary Departure from the UK. The Migration Observatory, University of Oxford. Retrieved August 24, 2020, from https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/wp-­content/uploads/ 2019/07/Briefing-­Deportation-­and-­Voluntary-­Departure-­from-­the-­UK.pdf Walters, W. (2016). The Flight of the Deported: Aircraft, Deportation, and Politics. Geopolitics, 21(2), 435–458. Walters, W. (2018). Aviation as Deportation Infrastructure: Airports, Planes, and Expulsion. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(16), 2796–2817. Weber, L., & Pickering, S. (2011). Suspicious Deaths. In L. Weber & S. Pickering (Eds.), Globalization and Borders: Death at the Global Frontier. Palgrave Macmillan. Welch, M., & Schuster, L. (2005). Detention of Asylum Seekers in the UK and USA: Deciphering Noisy and Quiet Constructions. Punishment & Society, 7(4), 397–417. Whitehead, T. (2010, October 29). G4S Loses Deportation Contract. The Telegraph. Retrieved August 28, 2020, from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/uknews/immigration/8097347/G4S-­loses-­deportation-­contract.html Williams, W. (2020). Windrush Lessons Learned Review: Independent Review by Wendy Williams (HC 93; p. 276). House of Commons. Retrieved July 08, 2020, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/876336/6.5577_HO_Windrush_ Lessons_Learned_Review_LoResFinal.pdf Wren, K. (2004). Building Bridges: Local Responses to the Resettlement of Asylum Seekers in Glasgow. Scottish Centre for Research on Social Justice, University of Glasgow.

5 Hostile Environments: Life Within Privatised Dispersed Housing

They just take us and dump us wherever they feel like. It’s like we died, but they didn’t bury us yet —Eloise, interview, 06 September 2013

Since the implementation of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, living conditions within dispersed asylum housing have been a source of concern for residents and their advocates. Prior to the introduction of COMPASS in 2012, dispersed housing was managed by various consortia of local authorities, housing associations and private landlords under the Home Office’s National Asylum Support Service (NASS). The no-­ choice basis of housing allocation and the contractual nature of accommodation support contributed to concerns about residents’ wellbeing, including asylum seekers’ increased social exclusion (Stewart, 2005; Spicer, 2008), greater exposure to discriminatory victimisation (Kissoon, 2010) and diminished access to the well-established support services available in London and the South East of England (Zetter & Pearl, 2000). Additionally, the quality of NASS housing was inconsistent across regions and providers; this was particularly true of accommodation © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. A. Hirschler, Hostile Homes, Critical Criminological Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79213-8_5

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contracted or subcontracted to private firms and landlords. Angel Group, an initial accommodation provider during the NASS years, was notable for the poor conditions of its housing, and it was the target of a Home Office investigation into irregular finances involving the firm charging for properties unfit for occupation (Pallister & Bowcott, 2005; Webber, 2010). In their study of residents’ experiences in Leeds, Dwyer and Brown (2005) identified inadequacies in the delivery of asylum support, including asylum seekers’ placement in substandard accommodation. Residents’ dissatisfaction with their housing conditions was illustrated in accounts citing the dangers of water from leaky toilets streaming onto power outlets and the ‘very, very dirty’ state of accommodation infested with insects (ibid., p. 377). Oversight of NASS accommodation was impeded by the often convoluted structure of housing provision, as accommodation providers entered into ‘complicated sub-contracting arrangements […] involving several tiers of sub-contractors’ (Garvie, 2001, p. 27). This contributed to failures in the proper vetting of properties before they were allocated to dispersed asylum seekers, which in turn resulted in the placement of residents into unsuitable housing. Shelter’s investigation into private rented asylum accommodation across five local authorities in England revealed significant problems with NASS provision. Garvie (2001, pp. 43–45) notes that 17 per cent of the 154 dwellings inspected were ‘unfit for human habitation’ due to extreme disrepair, dampness and poor ventilation; 86 per cent were deemed unsafe as a result of inadequate access to fire escapes. Citing reports of disrepair and uninhabitable accommodation environments, the Joint Committee on Human Rights (2007) determined that dispersed housing for asylum seekers fell short of basic living standards and threatened residents’ quality of life. We consider that in some cases the quality and terms of accommodation provision under section 95 of the 1999 [Immigration and Asylum] Act interferes with the rights of asylum seekers and their children to respect for family and home life under Article 8 ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights], and the right to adequate housing under Article 11 ICESCR [International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights]. (Joint Committee on Human Rights, 2007: s3, para 104, p. 35)

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Such findings reveal that conditions within asylum housing during the first decade of dispersal were inconsistent and, at times, seriously impacted residents’ lived experiences. In analysing the state of dispersed accommodation since 2012, it can be tempting to view the NASS years through rose-tinted lenses given the extreme examples of adversity notable during the COMPASS period, some of which are evidenced in residents’ accounts found later in this section. However, many of the problems associated with both incarnations of asylum housing are outcomes of the very logic of dispersal. The placement of asylum seekers into properties on a no-­ choice basis was justified on the grounds that it would ease the burden on local authorities in London and the south east of England, but an emphasis on housing availability rather than suitability in dispersal areas contributed to asylum seekers’ exposure to inhospitable conditions. In Wren’s (2007, p.  406) description of NASS accommodation in Glasgow, she notes that ‘[t]he housing allocation process […] meant that asylum seekers have largely been dispersed to local authority housing estates in areas suffering from multiple deprivation’. During the 2012 transition to a wholly privatised asylum housing programme with security firms as the primary deliverers of the Home Office’s dispersed accommodation programme, profit preserving endeavours intensified existing harms linked to asylum seekers’ placement into uninhabitable residences. The home can be a vital space for individuals and families to establish a sense of security and respite. Fullilove (2010) describes the availability of suitable housing as a ‘fundamental resource, necessary for survival’. A growing body of research investigating the physical and mental health effects of occupying poor quality housing reveals a moderate to significant relationship between housing conditions, such as infrastructural stability and the availability of functional utilities, and residents’ wellbeing (Shaw, 2004; Gibson et al., 2011; Liddell & Guiney, 2015). Exposure to cold, damp and mould due to insufficient ventilation and heating has been associated with respiratory problems and susceptibility to illness (Evans et al., 2000; Pevalin et al., 2008; Sharpe et al., 2015). Beyond the direct physical side effects linked to unhygienic living conditions, residents’ anxieties about the state of their housing can contribute to

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despondency, depression and negative mental health outcomes. In their study of 200 residents in upstate New York, Evans et al. (2000) identified a negative correlation between housing quality and levels of psychological distress and found that a significant relationship existed between housing quality and mental health. Larger studies have resulted in similar findings. For instance, Pevalin et al. (2017) conducted a longitudinal analysis consisting of over 80,000 responses to the British Household Panel Survey over a period of 13 years. They found that prolonged exposure to poor living conditions was significant in contributing to respondents’ reported mental health. Following their analysis of 536 social housing residents in South-West England, Boomsma et al. (2017, pp. 386–387) concluded that a majority of people living in cold houses also dealt with problems associated with condensation, damp or mould. Respondents noted that these conditions contributed to feelings of stress, worry and helplessness. For asylum seekers living in dispersed accommodation across the United Kingdom, poor living conditions can exacerbate existing anxieties associated with pre-arrival trauma and previous experiences in the UK immigration system, including detention. The expansion of market-­ driven housing solutions for asylum seekers operated by subcontractors to G4S and Serco, such as Jomast in the North East and Orchard and Shipman in Glasgow, coincided with the placement of asylum seekers into substandard accommodation in deprived suburban areas. Alongside the attendant strains of being placed far from community and support networks, dispersed individuals and families faced stresses associated with exposure to insecure and unsanitary residential environments. Significant levels of disrepair, insect infestations and a lack of essential goods contributed to intensified levels of unease, unhappiness and fear among asylum seekers within COMPASS accommodation throughout the contract period. Occasionally, extreme examples of asylum seekers’ experiences were explored in media reports, though coverage was limited to a few outlets and the work of a handful of dedicated individuals. For instance, John Grayson, an independent researcher associated with the South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group (SYMAAG), investigated the state of COMPASS asylum housing over the whole of the contract period (Grayson, 2012, 2018). His findings featured in written evidence

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provided in a number of investigations relating to asylum housing, including a review of G4S’s contractual failings during the 2012 Olympics (House of Commons, 2012) and the Home Affairs Committee annual report on the state of asylum accommodation (House of Commons, 2017). Official investigations into the state of asylum housing, such as those conducted by the National Audit Office (NAO) (2014) and the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI) (2018), were reliant on evidence provided by a number of refugee and asylum agencies, such as the Refugee Council, Glasgow’s Govan & Craigton Integration Network and Middlesbrough Council (House of Commons, 2017). The testimony of third sector representatives was important, as it aggregated many of the common housing complaints asylum seekers anecdotally reported to refugee and asylum support workers and volunteers. However, there was little direct engagement with dispersed asylum seekers about the impacts poor living conditions had on their physical and mental health during the course of these investigations. Additionally, during the tumultuous months of the transition period, neither the Home Office nor housing providers conducted systematic reviews of asylum housing that featured residents’ accounts of the conditions they faced within their accommodation. The 2014 National Audit Office report into the COMPASS contracts makes this explicitly clear: ‘The Department [Home Office] and providers have not yet carried out any surveys or focus groups with service users to look at their experiences under the new contracts’ (Part 3, para 3.17). There are legitimate reasons why asylum seekers may not have been directly consulted by the Home Office and firms like G4S and Serco. Plenty of evidence suggests that asylum seekers often fear contact with Home Office representatives and other statutory officials due to concerns that their asylum applications may be compromised and they may face deportation if exposed to additional scrutiny or retaliated against for making a complaint (see Bloch, 2014; Griffiths, 2014; Campbell, 2018). Interviews and focus groups conducted by Home Office employees or those from private security firms like G4S and Serco would have perhaps compounded these anxieties. However, sensitivity to these issues was unlikely the reason asylum seekers were not approached for feedback. Instead, as scrutiny of the delivery of COMPASS reveals, residents’

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complaints were often simply ignored or disregarded. The ICIBI (2018) noted that in addition to obstacles preventing asylum seekers from making complaints, including fear of reprisal and language barriers (s.3.16), service providers’ approaches to complaints management were inconsistent (s3.19, s3.37). The remainder of this chapter features anonymised, individual accounts from dispersed residents sharing their experiences during and immediately following the transition to the privatised COMPASS asylum accommodation programme. It draws on interview data from 26 asylum seekers collected in the pursuit of the author’s doctoral research project. While COMPASS has since been replaced by the Asylum Accommodation and Support Services Contracts (AASC), and G4S is no longer contracted to accommodate asylum seekers under the government’s dispersal programme, the reflections capture a specific moment in the development of the dispersal scheme, as private security firms became the primary providers of asylum seekers care and accommodation. Additionally, many of the problems identified at the time persist under the new AASC contracts, as a recent National Audit Office (2020) report into the conditions of asylum housing under Serco, Clearsprings Ready Homes and Mears Group reveals.

5.1 ‘Not fit for purpose’: Life in Substandard Asylum Housing For asylum seekers resident in COMPASS accommodation, poor housing quality, high levels of disrepair and unhygienic conditions were consistently cited as sources of anxiety and concern relating to physical and mental health. Unlike other consequences of the transition to COMPASS, such as the enduring effects of being moved away from important support networks and friendship groups, evidence of substandard housing was often immediately identifiable upon entry. As asylum seekers were moved into properties that had otherwise been difficult to let or were quickly acquired, they were faced with tangible evidence that the COMPASS programme prioritised profitability over human need. Poor living standards extended to properties operated by subcontractors to

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both G4S and Serco, and were not limited to newly acquired properties, but also applied to accommodation previously operated by former asylum housing providers. General structural issues and levels of disrepair featured heavily in reports of asylum seekers’ housing conditions and, for some, evidenced the fact that the privatisation of asylum housing was leading to serious concerns regarding residents’ welfare. The deterioration of properties acquired from previous housing providers and the poor quality of newly acquired properties reflected a failure on the part of COMPASS providers in meeting the basic requirements of their contract with the Home Office, specifically that their properties were ‘safe, habitable, fit for purpose and correctly equipped’ (Home Office, 2012: s2.1.1). Volunteers and organisers of refugee and asylum seeker support organisations were well positioned to reflect on asylum seekers’ general experiences in COMPASS housing, and offered perspectives on the infrastructural issues residents faced in properties subcontracted to local providers. James, a volunteer at a Sunderland drop-in centre, explained that while Jomast, the regional subcontractor to G4S, had initially acquired properties from the previous accommodation provider, these were not being maintained: ‘Quite a lot of the properties are the same as before [the COMPASS transition]. Therefore, you can’t say that the housing has deteriorated, but by the same token, the upkeep of the properties is deteriorating. Therefore, the property itself is deteriorating. In that respect, it’s worse obviously’ (James, interview, 30 January 2013). Disrepair and poor-quality accommodation featured heavily in discussions with asylum seekers that cited negative experiences within COMPASS housing. While other complaints, such as unsatisfactory interactions with accommodation management staff and distance from support networks, featured in respondents’ accounts of their housing experiences, the physical condition of properties remained a central concern. Asylum seekers reported spending a significant amount of time in their COMPASS properties, because they were legally disallowed from seeking employment and because support services and drop-ins were only available a couple of times per week. Exposure to deteriorating infrastructure and potential health concerns like mould and insect infestations were therefore inescapable for many.

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Exposure to extreme conditions within dispersed housing has a destabilising effect. It serves to remind asylum seekers of their liminality and dispensability. Structural collapse, unhygienic shared spaces and insect infestations lead to despair and a sense of futility. Fears for physical and mental wellbeing dominate residents’ reflections on their living conditions. Masoud, an asylum seeker accommodated in the North East of England, explains that drainage from the toilet above his room leaked through the ceiling onto the carpet for months. Despite repeated appeals to Jomast, the subcontractor at the time, the issue was never resolved. Masoud reports suffering from illness due to exposure to unhygienic conditions, but states that Jomast employees could not understand why he was complaining. He was ultimately rehoused, but the second property was by no means suitable; Masoud explains that he had to affix bin liners to his window, because they were unbearably draughty. His mattress was so worn that he opted to sleep on the floor instead (Masoud, interview, 06 February 2013). Nyarai, a resident in one of Serco’s subcontracted properties in Glasgow, describes a scenario in which the ceiling caved in on top of her while she was sleeping: ‘I had to jump off the bed, and I was screaming. I thought someone [was] breaking into the house and was on the bed’ (interview, 28 May 2013). Nyarai’s multiple attempts to resolve the issue with the subcontractor, Orchard and Shipman, were initially dismissed; she was told that repairs were the responsibility of the landlord. After four weeks and after travelling to the Orchard and Shipman offices at her own expense, the repairs were finally carried out. Nyarai notes, however, that no attempt was made to clean up after the works were done. The dust and debris left over made it difficult to breathe, and Nyarai states: ‘I wasn’t well. […] Everything was upside down’. Nathan, a resident in a Jomast property in the North East of England, declares: ‘They dumped me in a rubbish house. It wasn’t a house—it was garbage’. His room had such a strong odour, he explains, that he ‘couldn’t breathe’ (interview, 21 August 2013). When exploring asylum seekers’ lived experiences within dispersal housing, there is a tendency to analyse such experiences through the lens of macro-level institutional harm, but residents’ subjection to the systemic violence of the dispersal programme often occurs within the context  of incessant  and routinised exposure to low-level  hostility and neglect. Much critical focus on the treatment of dispersed asylum

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seekers centres on the direct action or inaction of statutory agencies and private firms in delivering accommodation services. Asylum seekers are the targets of institutional authority, and their housing experiences are driven by the design and implementation of public policy (see: Stewart, 2011). In Darling’s (2016) analysis of dispersed housing within the context of UK austerity policies, he suggests that accommodation provision for asylum seekers presented a ‘relatively easy area’ to implement austerity measures and demonstrate reductions in public expenditure, because asylum seekers are prohibited from voting and working and are routinely accused of exploiting Britain’s benefits systems within popular media (Sales, 2002 in Darling, 2016, p. 489). The instability and inadequacy of COMPASS accommodation were attributable to ‘political neglect, shrinking accountability and the slow recession of support services and expertise’ (ibid., p. 483). For dispersed residents, though, daily exposure to institutional harm is often manifested in repetitive, low-level disregard and antagonism, which operate in tandem with revanchist immigration policy and hostile institutional approaches to the management of populations of asylum seekers. Exposure to substandard and, at times, inhumane conditions within COMPASS housing was coupled with deliberate disregard for residents’ concerns by individual employees of G4S, Serco or one of their subcontractors. When Leonie was moved into a property in West Yorkshire operated by Cascade, a subcontractor for G4S, she was immediately struck by the security features that were ostensibly designed to protect from intrusion, but in fact presented significant safety risks, as chains prevented windows from opening. Leonie recounts an environmental officer visiting and noting that the chains represented a hazard, as no one could use windows as a means to escape in the event of a fire. Security gates and barred windows suggested to Leonie that this property was in a rough area. They also reminded her of immigration removal centres and G4S’s involvement in the management of prisons and detention centres. She states: ‘I thought: “G4S…they are a prison company.” So, it felt like I was in prison’ (interview, 22 August 2013). There were also significant health risks within the property, which left Leonie concerned for the health of her baby. The house was infested with insects and vermin. Leonie explains that ‘there were cockroaches, slugs [and] rats’, and ‘the house was damp as well’. When a pest control representative was called out to the

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property, he instructed Leonie to inform Cascade of the extent of the problem. Anticipating further inaction from Cascade, Leonie approached the local authority, and an environmental health official was despatched to inspect the property. According to Leonie, the inspector stated that the property was ‘not fit for human beings to live in’ and categorised it as a ‘Category 1 Hazard’, a condition the Housing Health and Safety Rating System defines as presenting an ‘extreme’ probability of causing harm and ‘exposing an individual to a hazard’ (UK Government, 2006, pp. 12–16). Leonie was concerned about her baby crawling on the floor, as she feared his exposure to cockroaches and slugs. ‘When I complained’, she states, ‘the staff from G4S came and said: “Even if your baby eats slugs, it’s not going to harm him.” He thought he could get away with that because I am an asylum seeker’ (interview, 22 August 2013). The anxiety associated with being made to occupy substandard and dangerous accommodation was amplified by the fact that residents’ complaints were actively dismissed by the staff they engaged with. In asylum seekers’ accounts of their interactions with representatives of G4S, Serco and their subcontractors, employees’ responses to complaints ranged from trivialising to aggressive. Of the 26 asylum seekers interviewed for this research, only five recalled at least one positive experience with accommodation staff. All five of those respondents lived in Glasgow within accommodation managed by Orchard and Shipman, which had taken on a number of staff from the pre-COMPASS provider, Ypeople. In one instance, a respondent suggested that her experience with Orchard and Shipman staff was preferable to her interactions with Ypeople, which she described as ‘harsh’ (Sadie, interview, 12 June 2013). For the vast majority of respondents, however, engagement with representatives of housing providers was a source of angst and frustration, as repair requests were ignored or met with insincere placations. Asylum seekers noted that staff would use belittling language and were sometimes outright confrontational. Employees’ disregard and antagonism of residents resulted in distressing physical and mental health outcomes for dispersed asylum seekers. Hazim, a resident within Jomast accommodation in the North East of England, explains that the property was unbearably cold and that he had not been provided with adequate bedding. His complaints to Jomast went unanswered and when he sought the advocacy of Refugee Council, its representatives were also unable to get a response from

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Jomast  (interview, 06 June 2013). Qasim, another Jomast resident, explains that visits and home inspections by Jomast employees were infrequent, and on those occasions when staff would appear, they showed little concern for his wellbeing. Qasim states that in the six months he had been in the property at the time of the interview, no regular checks were conducted to review the suitability of the property he occupied. ‘They are incompetent’, he explains, ‘they are irresponsible, they are careless. [The staff] is not good. Most of the people—when they come—they are in such a hurry, they don’t want to talk’ (interview, 26 June 2013). Employees’ dismissiveness of residents’ concerns resulted in prolonged exposure to poor living conditions, further exacerbating residents’ distress. When Marion was deposited at a dispersal property in a different city than she was informed she would be going to, she explains that the Cascade employee transporting her stated that she was ‘just destitute’ and had ‘no right to complain’ (interview, 06 September 2013). Later, Marion attempted to call G4S about the hazardous conditions within her subsequent dispersal property, but the telephone representative simply hung up on her. Kadin, an asylum seeker living in the North East of England, was exposed to many of the same substandard conditions within his Jomast property, including dirty sheets, a worn mattress and a lack of materials necessary to keep the property clean. Additionally, the thermostat in the property was regulated in such a way that the residents could not adjust the temperature within. Kadin took photos of the thermostat, which revealed the temperature to be 8 degrees Celsius, but his complaints to Jomast were dismissed. When a local refugee agency attempted to contact G4S about the issue, agency representatives received no response. Kadin describes the ‘emotional impact’ of the conditions and the lack of humanity afforded to dispersed residents, stating that ‘we felt like insects’ (interview, 26 June 2013). The analogy of being treated like insects was sometimes paired with exposure to literal insect infestations, as evidenced in Leonie’s experience above. Eveline, a resident of Orchard and Shipman in Glasgow, notes that her dispersal property was full of insects, particularly within the carpet. When a representative visited the home, Eveline highlighted the issue, but was rebuffed (interview, 13 June 2013). Eveline resigned herself to the reality that the issue would never be dealt with and did not raise a complaint again. She continued to live amongst the insects.

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5.2 A  Continuum of Fear and Discomfort: Prior Trauma, Exposure and Extremity Within the disciplines of criminology and victimology, ‘secondary victimisation’ can refer to the victimisation of parties adjacent to primary victims, such as the immediate family or network of someone who has been directly harmed. Secondary victimisation can also refer to a primary victim’s exposure to negative experiences during the criminal justice process following a traumatic event, which results in the resurfacing of past suffering or contributes to new harms altogether. Symonds (2010 [1980], p. 37) refers to this as a ‘second injury’, which reflects a victim’s ‘perceived rejection and lack of expected support from the community, agencies, treating personnel, society in general, as well as, family or friends’. Condry (2010, p. 236) writes that secondary victimisation is what ‘happens to primary victims after the offense as their victimization is prolonged, compounded, and made worse by the reactions of others and their treatment in the criminal justice process’. Vulnerable victims can be particularly susceptible to secondary victimisation, as they may be asked to relive a traumatic event, submit to a medical examination and potentially have their personal histories and lifestyles used to discredit them within a trial (ibid., pp. 238–239). Secondary victimisation can lead to emotional distress, depression and a lack of faith in state institutions and one’s own community. In her quantitative analysis of victims’ experiences within the Canadian criminal justice system, Wemmers (2013) explores the mental health impacts of secondary victimisation related to victims’ perceptions that criminal justice procedures are fair. Wemmers identifies a significant relationship between one’s perceptions of procedural justice and their expression of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. In other words, as faith in the procedural fairness of the criminal justice process decreases, expressions of PTSD symptoms increase. Experiences of secondary victimisation extend beyond traditional criminal justice institutions. Asylum seekers’ exposure to adverse living conditions, incarceration within detention centres and subjection to demeaning interactions with representatives of the Home Office and housing contractors compound and exacerbate trauma suffered in

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countries of origin and during the asylum journey. In their qualitative study of asylum seekers’ expression of PTSD symptoms following predeparture traumatic events and their asylum journeys, Silove et al. (1997) conclude that those who had experienced longer and more intense trauma prior to fleeing their countries of origin were more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD. The authors also note that the post-migration experience has a significant impact on expressions of PTSD symptoms, stating that ‘post-­migratory factors’ including ‘delays in processing refugee applications, interviews by, and conflict with, immigration officers’ exacerbate the stresses of asylum seekers with PTSD (ibid., p. 356). Asylum seekers and refugees are particularly vulnerable to the challenges of depression and post-traumatic stress. As a result of their meta-analysis of 20 qualitative studies capturing the experiences of nearly 7000 refugees across seven countries in Europe, North America and Australia, Fazel et  al. (2005, p. 1312) conclude that ‘about one in ten adult refugees in western countries has post-traumatic stress disorder’. The asylum interview can be particularly anxiety inducing, as asylum seekers may be subjected to accusatory questioning and hostile attitudes from their interrogators. As Schock et al. (2015, p. 1) note, the intensity of the asylum interview often follows refugees’ experiences of previous traumatisation associated with war, torture and persecution. In their quantitative analysis of the impacts of the asylum interview on the mental health outcomes for asylum seekers, Schock et al. identify a significant relationship between the interview experience and increases in posttraumatic ‘intrusions’, such as reliving pre-departure traumatic events. The authors warn that ‘[s]tress factors after the asylum interview might affect the recuperation process, the processing of the traumata and foster chronification of the symptoms’ (ibid., p. 7). In the United Kingdom, the Home Office interview can retraumatise highly vulnerable asylum seekers, such as victims of sexual violence (Bögner et al., 2007). For asylum seekers who have experienced prior trauma, the confrontational qualities of the Home Office interview can contribute to further distress. In their qualitative analysis of interview data from 27 asylum seekers, Bögner et al. (2010) found that respondents generally viewed their Home Office interview experiences negatively in large part because of the unsympathetic and, at times, hostile approaches of Home Office officials.

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Respondents explained that they felt that they were being treated like criminals and that Home Office officials reminded them of state police in their countries of origin. This resulted in asylum seekers being fearful of revealing too much about their prior experiences and personal histories (ibid., pp. 526–527). In their attempts to establish the veracity of asylum seekers’ claims, Home Office officials have subjected asylum seekers to demeaning and distressing questioning and treatment. Beyond the compulsion to relive past traumas, asylum seekers have been made to demonstrate their claims by divulging extremely personal details, such as their specific sexual activities. Gay and lesbian asylum seekers fleeing deadly violence have been made to defend themselves against accusations of falsifying their sexual preferences by ‘proving’ their sexual orientation through describing sexual encounters in lurid detail (Taylor & Townsend, 2014; Brewer, 2020). As Lewis (2014) explains, homosexual asylum-­ seeking claimants in the United Kingdom face such high levels of disbelief that some have felt compelled to provide the Home Office with documentary evidence in the form of filmed sexual encounters with same-sex partners in order to verify their claims of facing persecution in their countries of origin on the basis of their sexual identities. Lewis notes that while the production of this level of evidence has led to isolated instances in which some applicants have received positive Home Office decisions, it increases the burden of proof on other applicants, as officials come to expect this level of evidence despite explicit Home Office guidelines that state that filmed evidence is not required to establish an applicant’s claims regarding sexual orientation. For instance, lesbian applicants face the paradoxical expectation that they can both hide their sexuality while also being challenged on not adequately evidencing their homosexuality (ibid., pp. 959–965). Beyond the interview, asylum seekers’ post-arrival experience can reignite memories of past traumas as well as introduce entirely new series of harms ranging from psychological angst associated with being under constant surveillance to the physical and emotional effects of being detained in an immigration removal centre or housed in substandard accommodation. By the time asylum seekers reach the stage at which they are housed in a dispersal area, they may have suffered a multitude of harms within the apparatuses of the immigration control regime and wider social

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environments, including direct discrimination, harassment, demeaning or degrading treatment and fears associated with incarceration and the threat of deportation. Chapter 4 outlined some of the direct and institutional violence endured within immigration removal centres. Some of these themes re-emerge here, as asylum seekers’ accounts of pre-dispersal trauma include harms incurred within detention, initial accommodation and in interactions with housing staff. The memories of pre-migration trauma underpin dispersed residents’ subsequent experiences of stress and duress throughout the asylum process. For those describing life within COMPASS housing, exposure to the direct and structural harms of the United Kingdom’s asylum regime often occurred within the context of previous suffering. Residents’ fears for their own lives and the lives of those left behind framed their reflections of the asylum process and their accommodation experiences. This was particularly true for recent arrivals, but pre-migration experiences also informed the narratives of residents who had been in the United Kingdom for many years. For Asif, a resident in a Jomast property in the North East of England who had been in the country for less than a year, the asylum journey remained extremely fresh and descriptions of conditions in his home country were interspersed within accounts of his COMPASS housing experience. His family raised thousands of pounds to help him escape Syria in advance of the military bombardment of Aleppo by loyalists of President al-Assad. He was more preoccupied with his concern for family in Syria than the condition of his dispersed housing. However, Asif did note that since being housed, he had not been contacted or visited by representatives of Jomast or G4S to check on his wellbeing in the property in the four months of his residence despite having been told he would receive visits once or twice a week (interview, 06 March 2013). Alicia, a West African woman dispersed to COMPASS accommodation in Glasgow, had been in the United Kingdom for over five years at the time of interview (19 July 2013). She fled her country of origin after being abducted by members of state police, subjected to a sustained sexual assault and told she would be killed if she reported the incident. The memory of the experience was fresh, but so too were recollections of her asylum journey within the United Kingdom. After being maltreated and

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exploited by a relative she came to the United Kingdom to live with, Alicia sought refuge at various friends’ homes before she was apprehended by the Home Office and sent to an immigration removal centre. Alicia was unaware that she needed to formally seek asylum upon arrival into the United Kingdom and was found to be in breach of immigration rules. It is common for refugees to be unaware of official asylum policies and procedures, and they tend to be more preoccupied with fleeing violence and persecution than familiarising themselves with the idiosyncrasies of the immigration systems of any potential host country they may end up in (Gilbert & Koser, 2006; Robinson & Segrott, 2002). When Alicia was released from detention after submitting an asylum claim, she was sent to Glasgow and lived in a dispersed property operated by the charity, Ypeople. The accommodation experience was generally positive and Alicia explained that she felt well supported: ‘If I wanted anything, I would ask them’. The accommodation had an on-site healthcare facility and if Alicia had any concerns, she could contact the Scottish Refugee Council operating within the building. When Serco took over the dispersed housing contract in Glasgow, the move from Ypeople to the new subcontractor, Orchard and Shipman, was abrupt. Alicia was given three days’ notice prior to being moved to a new property. The strains of living in substandard dispersed accommodation exist on a continuum of discomfort infused within the asylum process itself and reflected in the potential for victimisation within the wider societal environment. Pre-migration trauma is a component of the psychological toll of the asylum journey, but exposure to violence within countries of arrival can continue to threaten asylum seekers’ wellbeing and frame future distress associated with the asylum journey. Discriminatory, hate-fuelled interpersonal harm is one manifestation of this. Extreme cases, such as the violent attack against a teenage Kurdish asylum seeker in Croydon (BBC News, 2017) and the assault on a refugee mother in Bolton that left her hospitalised with brain haematomas (Pidd, 2018), reflect the harrowing conditions refugees and asylum seekers can encounter in  locations they had hoped would offer a reprieve from violence. The limits of existing conceptualisations of hate crime are evidenced in the violence enacted against asylum seekers based on their perceived difference and vulnerability rather than simply perceptions of their identity or collective

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membership (Chakraborti & Garland, 2012). The true extent of hate crime victimisation amongst asylum seekers is difficult to assess, as immigration status is not factored into hate crime recording, discriminatory violence is so normalised that victims may not consider it worth reporting, and asylum seekers may fear that any contact with state authorities may jeopardise the status of their asylum applications (O’Nions, 2010, p. 237). Where direct violence towards asylum seekers can be identified, it often occurs within the context of sustained negative constructions of asylum seekers in media reporting and political rhetoric. Restrictive immigration legislation and policies aimed at incentivising asylum seekers to return to their countries of origin and deter future arrivals, as Frost (2007 in O’Nions, 2010, p. 252) argues, have ‘helped create a culture of suspicion and disbelief which has permeated public opinion’.

5.3 P  eripheral Living and Challenges to Family Life The violence of the COMPASS programme extended beyond the deliberate placement of asylum seekers in homes unfit for habitation and the exposure of residents to possible re-victimisation, as sensitivities to specific needs and vulnerabilities were  also ignored. As housing providers pursued cheaper, easily available housing, residents were moved away from urban centres resulting in further isolation from needed support services, friendship networks and even Home Office signing locations where asylum seekers are required to check in on a scheduled basis. Residents’ further proximity from asylum and refugee support agencies and shops catering to specific dietary needs contributed to exacerbated feelings of distress and loneliness. The profit-driven objectives of private firms contracted to accommodate dispersed asylum seekers resulted in further manifestations of structural violence contributing to a diminishment of residents’ wellbeing. As Galtung (1969) argues, violence occurs at the point at which a disparity exists between ‘potential’ and ‘actual’ realisations of one’s physical and mental wellbeing. The transition from NASS to COMPASS resulted in a significant widening of this gap, as

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residents found it more difficult to access support networks they were reliant upon to navigate challenging experiences and mitigate the emotional trauma of the asylum experience. Additionally, while COMPASS contractors intimated that they would limit moves for families with school-aged children and conduct appropriate risk assessments to determine the potential impacts of moves on vulnerable people, this proved to be a specious claim, as there was little evidence that these considerations were meaningfully made prior to asylum seekers’ relocation. In its report on the status of the COMPASS programme, the Home Affairs Committee determined that accommodation providers had inadequately considered the ‘needs of particularly vulnerable asylum seekers, such as expectant mothers, those living with mental health needs and the victims of trafficking, rape and torture’ (House of Commons, 2017: para. 97). The report also noted that while the movement of dispersed residents without their consent is permitted up to twice per year, COMPASS providers had moved some residents three times or more with little to no notice (ibid.: para. 100). This movement, the committee noted, ‘can disrupt vital support networks and can cause emotional distress to the individual’ as well as disrupt ‘[c]hildren’s school or nursery education’ (ibid.: paras. 100, 102). Evidence of each of these findings is reflected in the accounts below of asylum seekers’ COMPASS housing experiences. While the Home Affairs Committee report may have represented an official acknowledgement of some of the harm residents were subjected to within dispersed accommodation, their recommendations were not holistically embraced in the post-COMPASS period. In its report on the asylum accommodation contracts that replaced COMPASS, the National Audit Office (2020: para. 2.2) states that while the Home Office suggested that it aimed to make meaningful changes to its support strategy for asylum seekers, it ‘did not have enough time to design, procure and implement a significantly different model’. The NAO found that while the transitionary moves between COMPASS and the Asylum Accommodation and Support Services Contracts (AASC) went more smoothly than they had during the transition from NASS to COMPASS, providers such as Mears and Serco were unable to consistently source acceptable accommodation quickly or more asylum seekers on to new properties in a timely fashion (ibid.: para. 3.11). Additionally, even prior

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to disruptions due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, providers under AASC were heavily reliant on housing asylum seekers in ‘contingency accommodation’ including hotels, because of high demand for initial accommodation. The NAO noted that, according to residents and volunteer support organisations, long-term accommodation in contingency housing contributed to lack of access to health services, as asylum seekers could not register with general practitioners. Families were unable to enrol children in schools, and children lacked access to suitable facilities (ibid.: para. 3.17–3.18). Under COMPASS and now AASC, dispersed residents have been consistently exposed to the pervasive structural violence of neoliberal market imperatives that have prioritised corporate convenience and profitability over meeting the needs of a uniquely vulnerable population that is subjected to involuntary mobility, as asylum seekers can be moved from their properties without consent, and compulsory immobility, as they are dispersed across the country on a no-­ choice basis. During the transition to COMPASS, subcontractors to G4S and Serco began sourcing inexpensive and less desirable housing, as it was otherwise hard to let and was in areas that were often experiencing significant economic decline following the recession of the late 2000s and the uncompromising austerity measures introduced by the coalition government that were continued under the Conservative government that followed. The economic emaciation of areas around Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Stockton and the peripheries of Leeds and Glasgow resulted in the availability of inexpensive accommodation that was otherwise vacant. In some cases, specific contractors like Jomast in the North East of England already owned properties of this type, and asylum seekers whose accommodation income was guaranteed by the Home Office became firms’ preferred occupiers for housing that was too deteriorated or too far removed from essential amenities to let to the private rented market. As noted in the previous section, the unsanitary and unfit nature of many of these properties evidences why prospective renters may have been disinclined to rent homes in such poor condition. This was not a phenomenon unique to the COMPASS programme. Kissoon (2010, p. 19) notes that similar tactics were employed during the previous NASS regime as ‘[a]sylum seekers were made to occupy undesirable units in areas away

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from close social ties for the duration of their claim, which could take years’. Nevertheless, under COMPASS, these problems were arguably exacerbated by the market imperatives driving private security firms’ entry into the contracts. When asked about his experience during the transition from NASS to COMPASS, Jeffrey, a dispersed resident in the North East of England, said that the move from local authority accommodation to housing provided by Jomast, a subcontractor to G4S, was the start of ‘all of the chaos’ (interview, 21 August 2013). Jeffrey’s concerns about the Jomast house he was dispersed to related to the poor, unhygienic conditions within. He was moved a second time to another property in the same city, and the new property lacked a working oven, grill and working boiler. ‘I suffered a lot! I was recovering from an operation, and I had to use a metal pot to wash—to clean myself ’. While Jeffrey’s frustrations were associated with the conditions of his property, his reflections on the chaotic nature of the transition effectively evoke the disarray of the COMPASS programme during its initial stages and arguably beyond, given the acknowledgement of COMPASS providers’ contractual failings within both the National Audit Office’ (2014) report and the Home Affairs Committee’s (House of Commons, 2017) investigation into the conditions of dispersed asylum accommodation. An early example of the disruptive and perplexing effect the transition had on residents was the ineffective distribution of ‘welcome packs’ that were meant to contain information about the local area to which asylum seekers were being rehoused. Jomast had previously accommodated asylum seekers under the terms of the outgoing dispersal scheme, but some residents were nevertheless moved between properties as the company sourced additional accommodation in its pursuit to fulfil the expectations of the COMPASS contract. In other locations, residents were effectively moved en masse and given little warning in advance. In Glasgow, dispersed asylum seekers that had previously been accommodated by the charity Ypeople suddenly faced relocation as Serco’s subcontractor in the region, Orchard and Shipman, procured additional properties. One of the distinctions participants in this research noted about the differences between NASS and COMPASS was that under the previous asylum housing contracts, residents were likely to be accompanied by a housing

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officer that would escort them around the local area, signalling where they could find essential services like the GP surgery. Based on participants’ stated experiences, this practice was not adopted consistently amongst COMPASS contractors and subcontractors. Instead, generic ‘welcome packs’ were issued as an alternative to this personalised experience. Shahid, a dispersed resident in West Yorkshire, explained that during a previous move prior to COMPASS, a social worker with the local authority toured him around the local area. When he was moved into a Cascade property during the transition to COMPASS, he simply received a printed welcome pack (interview, 07 September 2013). In the welcome packs’ unaltered form, the information an asylum seeker received living in Cascade accommodation in Wakefield was the same as the information provided to an asylum seeker accommodated by Jomast in Middlesbrough, as G4S was the primary contractor for both dispersal areas. Additional information was needed—often in the form of handwritten annotations—to make the contents of each pack relevant for a specific dispersal area. Supplemental documentation, such as flyers advertising local services or a printed map, might also be included to further tailor the information to the asylum seekers’ specific needs. If this added information was not included, the packs were virtually useless apart from instructing asylum seekers about their duties as residents in accommodation they were dispersed to on a no-choice basis. Alicia, a resident in an Orchard and Shipman property in Glasgow, explained that the pack overemphasised the expectations of the resident and did not feature enough information about what a resident might expect from the accommodation provider (interview, 19 July 2013). The packs were also supposed to include information in English and a language appropriate for each resident or family. Given the high frequency of moves during the COMPASS transition and the disruption these caused to dispersed residents’ lives and general welfare, it was particularly important that these packs contained accurate information. Instead, the details in them were often vague, incomplete or packs were simply not provided. While the sample for this qualitative research comprised 26 current or former dispersed residents across three dispersal regions in the United Kingdom, the problems with welcome packs were seemingly widespread. The National Audit Office’s report on the COMPASS transition, which

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featured evidence gathered through consultation with refugee and asylum support agencies like Refugee Action, the South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group and the Scottish Refugee Council, addressed the issue of welcome packs and acknowledged that the packs ‘should be provided when arriving in new accommodation, but these are often absent. The packs are not routinely translated’ (National Audit Office, 2014, p. 38). G4S responded stating that welcome packs were provided to residents in multiple languages and that residents were provided access to a helpline if they needed further clarification regarding the information in the packs (ibid., p. 38). However, residents’ accounts contradict this assertion. Seven out of ten respondents who directly addressed the issue of welcome packs said that the packs were either unhelpful or incomplete. Qasim and his family were moved to a Jomast property in the North East, and despite the fact that they received a short tour of the surrounding area, the welcome pack was printed only in English and he was given no further explanation of its contents. ‘Not everybody speaks English’, he noted (interview, 26 June 2013). Eveline’s account was similar, as she explained that the information pack she received from Orchard and Shipman was not translated into her native language. Katherine, a former Orchard and Shipman employee, explained that the firm was more preoccupied with operating as a ‘business rather than a service’. She said she ‘felt embarrassed’ providing residents with a welcome pack, because the documentation was so ‘utterly useless’. During the interview (10 June 2013), she produced a copy of the map distributed to dispersed residents, which was little more than a grainy approximation of the whole of Glasgow rather than of the specific area a resident was being housed, and it included no meaningful information, such as street names or the location of local shops or the GP practice. When Sabeen and her son were dispersed to an Orchard and Shipman property, they were not provided with a welcome pack, and Sabeen noted that her son ‘found everything’ without the assistance of the housing provider (interview, 29 May 2013). Beyond relying upon their own resourcefulness, some dispersed residents relied on other services to fill in the information gaps in the absence of welcome packs. Eloise explained that G4S provided her no information relating to her Cascade accommodation in West Yorkshire, so she approached the local authority to find out information regarding

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her community. It was via this assistance from a local authority representative that she was able to discover the location of her bus stop. Given the Home Office’s requirement that asylum seekers ‘sign’ at a designated office as a means of confirming their continued presence in their assigned dispersal area, access to public transportation is essential to dispersed residents to ensure they do not breach immigration rules and face possible detention and deportation. Something as seemingly mundane and of little consequence as a welcome pack therefore takes on added significance in the context of a population exposed to the punitive apparatuses of the state’s immigration control regime. The COMPASS transition and regional subcontractors’ propensity for procuring inexpensive and readily available housing contributed to asylum seekers often being moved to the periphery of dispersal regions. This contributed to a significant amount of distress and emotional harm, as residents faced long commutes into town centres to source culturally specific foods, to access essential support services and to travel to the designated Home Office location for signing. Moves resulted in disruptions to children’s school and the possibility of an excessively long commute for children wishing to remain at their previous school. Given the sparse cash support offered to destitute asylum seekers, which amounted to about £36 per weeks for individuals in 2013, residents were faced with having to dip into their already meagre budgets to pay for transportation, a calculation that sometimes meant other essentials were going amiss. As Galtung (1969, p. 168) explains, violence occurs ‘when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realisations are below their potential realisations’. In the accounts that follow, the United Kingdom’s contribution to the deliberate destitution of asylum seekers (Joint Committee on Human Rights, 2007; Darling, 2009) coupled with the neoliberal prioritisation of profit over welfare resulted in measurable instances of social harm and structural violence, as the gap between residents’ potential and actual acquisition of contentment and wellbeing widens. Given the specific conditions within each dispersal area, asylum seekers dispersed to Glasgow had a different experience to those sent to West Yorkshire or the North East. Nevertheless, the impacts of moves to relatively distant areas within dispersal zones were similar for those exposed

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to these disruptions. One of the common effects expressed amongst respondents was the fact that such moves resulted in residents’ diminished access to support services, culturally specific grocers and required Home Office appointments. In Glasgow, asylum seekers previously housed by Ypeople and those newly arriving into the city were moved by Orchard and Shipman to areas further afield, such as Easterhouse, where the infrastructure for asylum and refugee support was not as developed. Additionally, as asylum seekers are required to attend regular meetings with the Home Office to confirm their continued presence in their dispersal location, the added distance and expense became nearly unsustainable for some. Respondents explained that the Home Office maintains a ‘three-mile’ rule, meaning that the Home Office will reimburse asylum seekers for their journey to their signing appointment if the distance between their dispersed accommodation and the signing office is greater than three miles. Those living just inside this three-mile radius, even by as much as a single street, reported that they were denied reimbursement for their travel costs. Additionally, asylum seekers explained that they regularly dipped into their small financial support stipend to pay for buses into town centres to attend GP appointments and support meetings at local refugee and asylum support organisations. Glasgow’s integration networks attempted to provide asylum seekers with small amounts for travel, but as residents were moved to areas further afield, the capacity of the networks to fund these expenses diminished and service users reported additional hardship and feelings of isolation. Sadie, an asylum seeker living in Glasgow, stated that the transfer from Ypeople to Orchard and Shipment accommodation resulted in a significant deterioration to her social life (interview, 12 June 2013). Fifteen out of twenty six respondents who commented on the effects of being accommodated in more distant locations declared that their lives were deleteriously affected, as they were unable to access essential needs, including markets that would take their Home Office-issued Azure cards; specific shops would accept that form of cashless payment. Sixteen respondents explained that they were distressed by the inability to access dietary or culturally specific food, as the distance of their accommodation prohibited their ability to journey into city centres, particularly given the cost of transportation. Eveline, a resident in Orchard and Shipman

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accommodation, stated that her journey into Glasgow city centre to source appropriate food consisted of excessively long waits and prohibitively high expenses. She stated that she began with a 25 minute walk to the closest bus stop, which was followed by a 45-minute bus journey and a subsequent 10-minute train journey (interview, 13 June 2013). Alicia, another resident in Glasgow, said that the 30-minute journey into the city centre was not a particular concern of hers, but the expense was ‘a big problem’. She was paying £38 for a four-week bus pass, as she had to regularly attend a number of appointments in the city. It is ‘eating my money’, she said (interview, 19 July 2013). Mehran, a Cascade resident in West Yorkshire, described having been dispersed into a ‘very rough area’ that was around 30 minutes and two bus journeys away from the town centre. His journeys to purchase food were exceptionally difficult, he said, because he had recently suffered from a minor stroke and had been diagnosed with cancer. Mehran was only able to walk with the assistance of crutches. His request to be moved into a self-contained facility due to his health concerns—it was not clear if this request was made to the Home Office, Cascade or G4S—was denied. ‘They don’t give a damn’, he said (interview, 29 July 2013).

5.4 E  mergent Power Within Inhospitable Environments: Acts of Expression and Resistance Asylum seekers’ experiences within dispersed housing and the apparent wholesale indifference of the agencies hired to accommodate them seem to validate Agamben’s argument that some populations of human beings are reduced to a state of ‘bare life’, completely subjected to the force of the law and the power of the state but unprotected by both. There is plenty of compelling evidence to reinforce the position that asylum seekers are left exposed to death, Agamben’s ‘living dead man’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 131). The desperation and despondency in some asylum seekers’ accounts reveal the torment of their dispersal experiences. Leonie’s accommodation experience left her in a state of ‘continuous mental torture’

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(interview, 22 August 2013). Edward lamented that his exposure to harm within the asylum dispersal programme undermined his willingness to live. ‘This life’, he stated, ‘is not worth living for me’, He continued, stating that he viewed his treatment by the Home Office and COMPASS contractors as ‘an abuse of my human rights’. He noted that the Home Office was able to act with impunity and that no agency could protect him or his family from the harm to which it exposed them (interview, 22 August 2013). In some respects, Edward is correct. Unless the state identifiably violates his family’s rights under, say, Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights—and that can be evidenced and successfully tried— then Edward and his family have little recourse outside of direct domestic legal action against the Home Office or its contractors. As Tyler (2006) states, the violence committed against Edward is not illegal; it is permissable, because the state has effectively used legal measures to circumvent its humanitarian obligations. She writes: ‘Inscribing the category of asylum-seeker in British law through the enactment of a series of punitive asylum laws has enabled the British Government to manoeuvre around the rights of the refugee as prescribed by international law’ (ibid., p. 189). Still, there are avenues of resistance via direct action on the part of asylum seekers, and also through a variety of conduits, such as third sector support agencies and asylum and immigration solicitors. Opposition can also be expressed through asylum seekers’ own assertions of their right to ‘rights’. As Edward asserted, ‘[p]eople will not be honest enough to’ admit the harm I’ve endured ‘is the fault of the Home Office. Instead, they’ll say it’s my fault. But I don’t care what they say’ (interview, 22 August 2013). In embracing Foucault’s more nuanced reflections on power as something arising from human interactions and expressed through multiple nodes—not just limited to sites of traditional sovereign power like the state and its various agents, but emergent within an array of institutions and individuals—the promise and potential of resistance are possible. He states that ‘[t]he individual is not […] power’s opposite number […]. The individual is in fact a power-effect, and at the same time, […] the individual is a relay: power passes through the individuals it has constituted’ (Foucault, 2004, pp. 29–30). In other words, while the individual may be a conduit for repressive power, say, in the way that one might

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self-­regulate their own actions or engage in forms of self-surveillance as a result of a control environment promoted by a state, they may also be the conduit for resistance and a counteractive power to that imposed by the state. In a limited sense, that resistance is evident in dispersed residents’ assertion of their identities through self-enrichment activities, such as taking English language classes, and in some asylum seekers’ willingness to expose themselves to possible Home Office retaliation by actively protesting the conditions to which they are exposed within the country’s immigration control regime. Asylum seekers’ capacity to engage in resistance and enrichment activities varies based on individual circumstances, and one’s ability to assert their own identity and capabilities may be impacted by the specific structural constraints they find themselves within. Intersecting inhibitors influenced by one’s location in the country, age, physical and mental wellbeing, gender, nationality and cultural constraints may result in vastly different outcomes for two asylum seekers dispersed to privatised asylum accommodation. As Healey (2006, p.  260) explains, ‘[a]sylum seekers and refugees respond in different ways to the opportunities and constraints available to them within the structures that they face’. The participants contributing to the accounts in this book took different approaches to their strategies of self-assertion. For instance, Edward expressed that he did not want to work in a voluntary capacity, because as an asylum seeker, he was refused the ability to work for money (interview, 22 August 2013). Others expressed that volunteering with their local support agencies gave them a sense of purpose. Three dispersed residents said that they felt that their volunteering experience equipped them with essential skills, but also provided an escape from the boredom and isolation of their dispersed housing. For some, English language acquisition was a source of personal empowerment. Sabeen reported that she had attended college for five years and had successfully achieved an intermediate level of English language attainment and comprehension. ‘Without language’, she said, ‘you’re not living here’ (Glasgow, interview, 29 May 2013). Marion in West Yorkshire stated that a command of English is the only way that asylum seekers were able to express their dissatisfaction with their treatment. She conjectured that the reason agencies did not receive an even higher frequency of complaints was because many residents do not speak English (09 June 2013).

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Some residents within COMPASS accommodation felt that their best chance to combat the conditions of their housing was to get directly involved in workgroups and protest strategies aimed at raising awareness of asylum seekers’ experiences. Sadie (interview, 12 June 2013) noted that many asylum seekers are afraid to make their voices heard, because they fear reprisals by the Home Office or its COMPASS contractors. However, she felt that speaking up and making complaints was ‘the only way you can air your grievances’. Sadie explained that her activism gave her strength ‘when things are getting out of hand’. Rowena described her eagerness to be a representative to the Home Office as a member of a Women’s Strategy Group, stating that it provided her the opportunity ‘[t]o sit there and tell them my feelings, and tell them what I want’ (interview, 28 May 2013). While many asylum seekers may not wish to expose themselves to the punitive and retributive gaze of the state, it is evident that some of the most fervent advocacy is not coming from outside communities of asylum seekers, but from within.

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Spicer, N. (2008). Places of Exclusion and Inclusion: Asylum-Seeker and Refugee Experiences of Neighbourhoods in the UK. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 34(3), 491–510. Stewart, E. (2005). Exploring the Vulnerability of Asylum Seekers in the UK. Population, Space and Place, 11(6), 499–512. Stewart, E. (2011). UK Dispersal Policy and Onward Migration: Mapping the Current State of Knowledge. Journal of Refugee Studies, 25(1), 25–49. Symonds, M. (2010). The “Second Injury” to Victims of Violent Acts. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 70(1), 34–41. Taylor, D., & Townsend, M. (2014, February 8). Gay Asylum Seekers Face ‘humiliation’. The Guardian. Retrieved February 15, 2021, from http://www. theguardian.com/uk-­news/2014/feb/08/gay-­asylum-­seekers-­humiliation-­ home-­office Tyler, I. (2006). ‘Welcome to Britain’: The Cultural Politics of Asylum. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 9(2), 185–202. UK Government. (2006). Housing Health and Safety Rating System, Operating Guidance: Housing Act 2004 Guidance About Inspections and Assessment of Hazards Given Under Section 9. Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Retrieved January 03, 2021, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/15810/142631.pdf Webber, F. (2010, September 18). Asylum-seeking Families in Glasgow Face Imminent Move. Institute of Race Relations. Retrieved September 19, 2019, from http://www.irr.org.uk/news/asylum-­seeking-­families-­in-­glasgow-­face-­ imminent-­move/ Wemmers, J.-A. (2013). Victims’ Experiences in the Criminal Justice System and Their Recovery from Crime. International Review of Victimology, 19(3), 221–233. Wren, K. (2007). Supporting Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Glasgow: The Role of Multi-agency Networks. Journal of Refugee Studies, 20(3), 391–413. Zetter, R., & Pearl, M. (2000). The Minority Within the Minority: Refugee Community-based Organisations in the UK and the Impact of Restrictionism on Asylum-seekers. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 26(4), 675–697.

6 The Role of Third Sector Organisations and Concluding Remarks

The existing landscape of networks and agencies offering support and advocacy for asylum seekers in the United Kingdom is an outcome of successive policies aimed at distributing responsibility for care and welfare across statutory and voluntary agencies. The expansion of New Labour’s ‘partnership’ scheme and the Conservative-driven ‘Big Society’ agenda contributed to an increased reliance on community and faith-­ based organisations to provide essential support and welfare services for asylum seekers (Diamond, 2010, p. 9; Mills, 2012, p. 664). Neoliberal approaches to the delivery of support provision have resulted in diminished statutory aid and a voluntary sector that is stretched thin in terms of capacity and resources. Coupled with the impacts of years of austerity politics and deliberate efforts to ensure the continued destitution of asylum seekers, third sector agencies provide the bulk of practical and emotional support while operating on increasingly diminished finances. Larger organisations that receive statutory funding can be somewhat compromised, as they can be compelled to administer the government’s immigration control strategies. For instance, from 2011 to 2015, Refugee Action delivered the government’s assisted voluntary return programme through its government-funded Choices service (Refugee Action, 2015). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. A. Hirschler, Hostile Homes, Critical Criminological Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79213-8_6

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Smaller community and faith-based organisations are dependent on individual donations and a shrinking pool of modest grant funding. Despite these obstacles, third sector agencies play an important role in advocating for asylum seekers, asserting their place within local communities and, at times, resisting the harmful actions of the Home Office and affiliated contractors. The mere existence of these organisations and their capacity to both affirm the political identity of asylum seekers and occasionally contest the state’s social control tactics reflect a capacity for biopolitical resistance that contradicts constructions of asylum seekers principally as bare life. Third sector support for asylum seekers varies widely. Organisations differ with regard to size, support focus, funding dependencies and staffing. While larger organisations, such as Refugee Action and the Refugee Council, are recognisable for providing advice, generalised support and advocacy, the vast majority of third sector support agencies consist of small organisations driven primarily by volunteer labour. While these organisations may be registered charities, their funding may be inconsistent, and they are not necessarily generally known outside of the service users, organisers, volunteers and funding bodies associated with them (Phillimore & McCabe, 2010  in Mayblin & James, 2019, p.  376). Nevertheless, they often serve an important function in meeting the support gaps arising from inadequate statutory provision (Mayblin & James, 2019), and they provide an important window into the experiences of service users for the purposes of parliamentary and independent investigations into the effectiveness of contracted service provision. For instance, the report of the Home Affairs Committee on asylum (House of Commons, 2013a) relied upon written evidence (House of Commons, 2013b) from a wide range of small third sector organisations to illustrate inadequacies in asylum support and dispersed housing provision. Some of those providing evidence included representatives from Positive Action in Housing, City of Sanctuary, Justice First, the Scottish Refugee Council and a small drop-in support organisation based in Sunderland. The extent to which individual organisations engage in direct action and resistance strategies vary for a variety of reasons. Scarcity of resources often limits the breadth of agencies’ offerings. While small drop-in centres in the North East of England or West Yorkshire may be able to assist

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asylum seekers on a one-to-one level in filling out paperwork, securing food and clothing and engaging in local awareness-building, they may be unable to maintain steady national-level campaigning as an individual entity. In Price’s (2016, p. 14) study of asylum support services in London, Birmingham and Nottingham, he noted that restricted access to funding ‘forced organisations […] to shift their priorities to front-line delivery over and above policy work or campaigning’. Additionally, given that funding applications are often tied to specific service offerings, campaigning may exceed of the scope of a particular organisation’s focus. Mary, a worker for one of Glasgow’s integration networks, explained that activities falling outside of a charity’s remit can sometimes be a source of concern. She stated that campaigning ‘is probably one of the areas we’re weakest in, to be honest. […] Part of that is because when I started, the board was quite antsy about charitable status and what we were going to do and what we weren’t going to do and I probably kind of picked that up a wee bit’ (interview, 13 June 2013). Clare, a project manager for a charity in the North East of England, explained that her organisation generally avoided campaigning, because it would fall outside the limited scope of the organisation’s funding. Clare (interview, 06 June 2013) stated: We are not overtly political. We need to retain impartiality, and also because we don’t receive any government money; we have to apply to charitable trusts for our funding in addition to what we can raise through our own fundraising efforts. If you actually submit a funding application saying that your primary aims are A, B and C, […] it’s quite a dishonest position to suddenly go off on a tangent with campaigning activity, for example. That’s not what we’re funded for. However, we do believe that if we identify a pattern of need or a pattern of injustice amongst groups of asylum seekers, it would be unhelpful to our clients not to flag that up.

While larger organisations may engage in broader awareness-building exercises, such as Refugee Action’s ‘Stand Up for Asylum’ and ‘Lift the Ban’ campaigns (Refugee Action, 2020), reliance on Home Office funding1 and the delivery of voluntary returns information and services can  In 2018, Refugee Action received £1.5 million in grant funding from the Home Office (Refugee Action, 2019). 1

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dilute intended advocacy objectives. Nevertheless, the ‘Lift the Ban’ campaign, which is targeted at reversing British policy disallowing asylum seekers from working, has gained some traction. In a 2020 House of Commons briefing paper detailing the Conservative government’s review of the policies affecting asylum seekers’ right to work, ‘Lift the Ban’ and endorsements from ‘over 200 civil society organisations, businesses, local authorities, faith organisations and others’ are cited as factors in the government’s consideration of possible policy changes (Gower, 2021, pp.  12–13). Smaller organisations that are not necessarily reliant on Home Office funding may still engage in contradictory approaches to asylum support, especially in instances where calls for inclusivity are not paired with an active rejection of the institutional framework perpetuating destitution and marginalisation. City of Sanctuary UK encourages local authorities to formally adopt a welcoming environment for asylum seekers through awareness-building exercises with local communities, businesses and schools. The charity provides drop-ins that signpost useful resources and act as a social hub for asylum seekers, and it has been involved in limited campaigning efforts (City of Sanctuary UK, 2021). However, as Squire and Darling (2013) argue, the City of Sanctuary movement has not meaningfully challenged the state’s role in contributing to the structural harm of asylum seekers. They write that ‘City of Sanctuary may formally call for an expansion of the remit of hospitality, […] but this in itself does not disrupt a statist account of politics and sanctuary. […] City of Sanctuary stretches the limits of hospitality, but does not exceed its limitations in any disruptive sense’ (ibid., p.  69). While additional limitations and concerns relating to third sector service provision are addressed in the following section, third sector organisations remain important conduits for asylum seekers to raise concerns about the quality of dispersed housing, and at times, deliver essential goods and services that are not adequately provided through statutory support. The number of third sector charities offering support services for asylum seekers and refugees expanded rapidly from the early 2000s onward. In their analysis of data from the Charity Commission, Mayblin and James (2019, pp. 382–383) note that while around 30 refugee third sector registered charities with an income over £5000 were operating in

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1999, by 2017, that number had risen to over 140. Mayblin and James interpret this increase as possible evidence that the demand for support illustrates that Home Office subsistence support may be insufficient (ibid., p.  383). They also note that regionally, cities like Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Stockton have comparatively large numbers of third sector organisations, which they find somewhat perplexing. They state (NCVO, 2015 cited within ibid., p. 385): Aside from having high numbers of applicants supported under Section 95, there is no obvious reason why these cities have some of the highest number of RTSOs [refugee third sector organisations] in the country. […] These are not major urban areas; they are located in the North East of England—which generally has the lowest concentration of charities of any region in the UK; and in areas of high deprivation such as these, we would usually expect to see fewer—not more—TSOs [third sector organisations].

A possible explanation for the unexpected presence of a relatively large number of third sector organisations in regions like the North East of England is that the poor conditions of dispersal accommodation and the inadequacy of subsistence support in ‘areas of high deprivation’ have contributed to asylum seekers’ need for support from charitable organisations. The Home Affairs Committee review of COMPASS accommodation revealed that G4S, the primary COMPASS contractor in the North East of England, had failed in its contractual duty to ensure that asylum accommodation was safe and clean, and that residents had adequate furniture, bedding and other necessary provisions (House of Commons, 2017). During the transition to COMPASS, local third sector organisations helped residents pursue complaints against G4S and its subcontractor in the region, Jomast. At a drop-in linked to the North of England Refugee Service (NERS), volunteers accepted donations of clothing and other goods to help asylum seekers meet their needs. A NERS worker, Michael, shared an account of a volunteer who felt compelled to provide bedding for asylum seekers whose requests for extra bedding due to poor home insulation were turned down by the accommodation provider.

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One of the workers in the team said that she was absolutely appalled, because [the asylum seeker residents] said they were too cold—they wanted extra bedding. The guy who was managing it said, ‘no, you can’t’. So, this woman felt so embarrassed about it, she went out one weekend and bought a load of blankets from charity shops and washed them, dried them and took them round to asylum seekers’ houses. (Interview, 16 July 2013)

Prior to the introduction of the dispersal programme with the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, a relatively robust infrastructure of charities and support organisations existed in London and the South East to support asylum seekers that had historically congregated near the capital due to existing family and friendship networks and the range of services, grocers and shops available in culturally heterogenous areas. In 2000, third sector services tailored specifically to the needs of refugees and asylum seekers were almost exclusive to London and the South East. Rutter (1994 in Zetter & Pearl, 2000, p. 682) identified forty-three such services in London, but only four outside of the city. When dispersal was implemented, asylum seekers arrived in newly established regions in which virtually no bespoke support services existed. Legislative developments in the 1990s and early 2000s had increasingly limited asylum seekers’ access to welfare and housing benefits and disallowed them from working except in isolated circumstances. Additionally, they were restricted to a small cashless stipend that was barely sufficient for meeting essential needs. Until 2008, this weekly stipend amounted to 70 per cent of the rate of income support, the baseline allowance available to British citizens who would otherwise be destitute. From 2009, the link to income support rates was severed, and asylum seekers were provided a weekly allowance that has remained virtually unchanged (Mayblin & James, 2019, p. 377). In 2021, a single asylum seeker was eligible to receive cashless support on an automatically loaded ‘ASPEN’ debit card amounting to £39.63 per week for ‘food, clothing and toiletries’ (UK Government, 2021a) compared to £74.70 per week, the base rate of income support for an individual over the age of 25 (UK Government, 2021b). Faced with these constraints, asylum seekers were also isolated and marginalised, as they arrived in areas that had not previously hosted asylum seekers and refugees in great numbers. Wren (2004, pp. 19–20) writes

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that the availability of housing during the initial stages of dispersal was the ‘primary criterion’ driving the dispersal agenda and, as a result, asylum seekers were predominantly sent to areas ‘with no pre-existing BME [Black and Minority Ethnic] communities’. Smaller third sector organisations began arising almost immediately to fill gaps in provision, but support levels were not uniform across dispersal areas, particularly as local authorities differed in their ability to respond to the arrival of new NASS residents. When Glasgow was contracted to receive the majority of asylum seekers dispersed to Scotland, third sector organisations had to quickly adapt to the specific needs of dispersed residents and new integration networks were established to help develop community ties and offer support for new arrivals. As Wren (2004, p. 23) writes, ‘there was no city-wide strategy to facilitate a co-ordinated response from the voluntary sector. When dispersal began, many areas lacked any structure or forum for the voluntary sector to address the needs of asylum seekers’. Liam, a worker for the Maryhill Integration Network, explained that this lack of general support for asylum seekers was an impetus for the organisation’s establishment in 2002. He noted that ‘people found at that time that there were no groups […] for refugees available to them or no support available to them to help them to integrate into Scottish society’ (interview, 17 May 2013). In addition to the Maryhill Integration Network, nine other networks were established in the first three years of dispersal to help asylum seekers familiarise themselves with the community, receive assistance in language acquisition and socialise with others (Doyle, 2003  in Wren, 2007, p. 396). Many of these networks eventually registered as charities within the first ten years of the dispersal programme. The Govan and Craigton Integration Network, now the Govan Community Project, began as an informal drop-in offering a social space where residents could meet for a tea and coffee, but ultimately began offering a range of services by the time it became a registered charity in 2010; its current offerings include English classes, interpreting services and assistance on asylum applications and appeals (Leanne, interview, 10 June 2013; Govan Community Project, 2021). Some services established before dispersal had to adapt their offerings to address the developing needs of new residents. When the Kingsway Health and Wellbeing Centre (KHWC) was first

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established in 2000, its services were primarily centred on offering support for the local community in the northwest of Glasgow on issues ranging from alcoholism to deprivation. As asylum seekers began arriving into the area, it became clear that changes were needed to address new challenges. Wayne (interview, 19 July 2013), a support worker at KHWC, described the suddenness of the changes to the operation of the centre, stating: One night, two buses full of people were dropped in this area with no prior knowledge or information. [The workers] were swamped, as the asylum seekers coming here didn’t know where the shops were or what’s what. So, they started coming to the centre. The management committee were helping as much as they could. They found that there were a lot of asylum seekers and refugees with lots of different issues and they never dealt with asylum seekers or refugees. They decided that they needed a specialised service to deal with the issues of asylum seekers and refugees.

Over time, third sector organisations increasingly began fulfilling intermediary roles in assisting asylum seekers in forwarding housing complaints to accommodation providers. Disparities in the quality of dispersed housing under NASS led third sector organisations to liaise with local authorities and other housing providers to address inadequacies and inconsistencies in the quality of provision (Dwyer & Brown, 2008). As the provision of dispersal accommodation shifted from local authorities and housing associations to companies like G4S and Serco under COMPASS, the ability of third sector organisations to affect change through direct communication with accommodation providers was somewhat diminished. According to workers within the third sector interviewed for this book, this was compounded by the fact that regular interagency meetings, which had been a feature of the previous dispersal regime, became more infrequent and less fruitful. In the early years of dispersal, interagency collaboration between various institutions, including the Home Office, the police, health services, local authorities, housing associations, schools, children’s services and Victim Support, served to address potential safeguarding issues and promote information sharing

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between statutory and third sector organisations to address equality impact concerns and possible discrimination in dispersal areas. The establishment of regional consortia at the outset of dispersal was grounded in the awareness that a single agency would be inadequate in addressing the needs of dispersed asylum seekers. In its 2000 report on dispersal, the Audit Commission acknowledged the need for collaborative working across government departments and other agencies to ensure asylum seekers’ needs were met under the NASS housing programme. While provision of housing and subsistence represented support components, they were insufficient in themselves without ‘adequate healthcare, education and social support’ (Audit Commission, 2000, p.  20). Interagency collaboration was deemed necessary to avoid potential ‘endemic problems of unemployment, poor health and exclusion’ (ibid., p.  20). While interagency collaboration aimed to respond to potential service gaps, it did not always result in improved outcomes for residents within NASS accommodation. Dawson (2002, p. 12) acknowledges the shortcomings of the early dispersal period, stating that ‘poor channels of communication within the [regional consortia] and between different departments of the local authority […] led to considerable uncertainty concerning responsibility for asylum-seeker affairs’. This resulted, Dawson argues, in significant pressure being placed on services and institutions that operated as asylum seekers’ ‘first point of contact’ (ibid., p.  12). Nevertheless, the coordination between agencies during the first decade of dispersal was perceived as valuable for some within third sector refugee and asylum support organisations. James, a volunteer at a drop-in in the North East of England, explained that despite flaws in the consortia model of dispersed accommodation, interagency meetings were more consistent and contributed to greater transparency than the environment under COMPASS. The meetings between housing providers, children’s services and the UK Border Agency helped address concerns around poor quality housing and discrimination in dispersal areas (interview, 30 January 2013). A manager at a charity specialising in providing advice to asylum seekers throughout their application process suggested that one of the reasons interagency collaboration was stronger in the pre-COMPASS period was due to the central involvement of local authorities. The presence of local government oversight of the dispersal programme resulted

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in other agencies receiving timely updates on imminent policy changes and accommodation issues (Clare, interview, 06 June 2013). Within the context of the COMPASS housing programme, third sector organisations became an important resource for dispersal residents seeking resolutions to problems related to their accommodation. Interview respondents consistently reported that requests for repairs and complaints about living conditions went unacknowledged or were not taken seriously. Asylum seekers living in COMPASS housing explained that calls to dedicated phone lines provided by subcontractors rarely resulted in meaningful or swift resolution to their issues. Kanesha, a resident in Orchard and Shipman accommodation in Glasgow, stated that she made regular complaints about the state of her housing over the course of six months to no avail. She explained that a common refrain was that the representative promised to ‘ask the manager’, though nothing ever came of these promises (interview, 12 June 2013). Hazim, a resident in a Jomast property in the North East of England, complained of the unbearable cold within his dispersal property and presented Jomast representatives with photos of the thermostat as evidence, but his concerns were consistently ignored (interview, 06 June 2013). Edward explained that his Cascade property in West Yorkshire was cold and he did not have the necessary appliances to maintain the property, such as a vacuum cleaner. When he would notify Cascade employees during their fortnightly visits, they would engage in performative actions, such as writing his concerns down, but did nothing to improve his situation (interview, 22 August 2013). Due to the inadequacies of the state’s provision of support for destitute asylum seekers, which are arguably a result of deliberate policies intended to perpetuate economic precarity and to incentivise voluntary returns (Lewis et al., 2017; Coddington et al., 2020), third sector organisations are integral to the asylum support environment. Where the state fails to provide for asylum seekers and actively diminishes their opportunities to fulfil essential needs, charities and voluntary organisations attempt to mitigate the worst effects of asylum seekers’ exposure to destitution, abject living conditions and social isolation. This patchwork of diverse and interconnected services acts as an informal safety net that the Home Office can indirectly exploit to fill the gaps in its welfare provision as well

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as the contractual failings of its contracted asylum support and accommodation providers. One way to interpret the third sector’s role in relation to statutory providers is that charities and voluntary organisations operate as a ‘shadow state’ silently performing the social welfare duties the British government is deliberately or neglectfully failing to execute. Geiger and Wolch (1986) introduce the concept of the ‘shadow state’ as a way of articulating the interdependence of the voluntary and statutory sectors and the shifting contours of service delivery from the state to voluntary organisations. They explain that the neoliberal turn to managerialism and outsourcing during the 1980s was grounded in arguments that the transference of responsibilities to the voluntary sector improved efficiency, consumer choice and democratic participation (Geiger & Wolch, 1986, p. 351). This mythologised account of voluntarism based on the purported benefits of localised expertise and individual choice masks a calculated economic agenda that outsources the burden of societal welfare to voluntary agencies. This deliberate relegation of responsibilities gives rise to a shadow state, ‘an institutional sector with collective service responsibilities, but administered outside traditional democratic politics’ (ibid., p. 352). Wolch (1990) extends this definition to include the fact that this transference of responsibilities does not reflect a ceding of state control. Wolch (1990, p.  201) describes the shadow state as a ‘para-state apparatus with collective service responsibilities previously shouldered by the public sector, administered outside traditional democratic politics, but yet controlled in both formal and informal ways by the state’. While the support offered through third sector organisations is essential to the wellbeing of asylum seekers, the creeping shift in responsibilities from the state to the charitable organisations may signal the compromising and hollowing out of third sector organisations’ traditionally oppositional role to the harms of the state. As funding dependencies and limitations whittle down service offerings to only those that mitigate the most extreme conditions arising from institutionalised marginalisation and destitution, the effectiveness of resistance efforts is at best minimised and at worst subsumed into the informal delivery of the state’s asylum support regime. At the start of this book, Galtung’s (1969) concept of ‘structural violence’ was introduced as a means of illustrating a type of pervasive harm

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that is difficult to identify, because rather than going against the grain of social attitudes, societal norms and legal precedent, it is a violence that flows alongside these institutions and subjectivities. It is hidden, because it is embedded within the very fabric of neoliberal market economies. In Galtung’s words, this violence is less like turbulent ‘waves on otherwise tranquil waters, […] it is the tranquil waters’ (original emphasis, ibid., p. 173). In exploring Britain’s legacy of inhospitality and successive governments’ use of legislation to further demarcate the boundaries of belonging along racial lines, it became increasingly evident that the state plays a very active role in the fostering and nurturing of these ‘tranquil waters’. While the Hobbesian Leviathan was abandoned in favour of Foucault’s more nuanced approach to expressions of power, the state nevertheless retains a significant position in reaffirming the imagined identity of ‘nationality’ by utilising diffuse tactics, techniques and ideologies to reinforce public perceptions of legitimacy and illegitimacy. One of these strategies includes the involvement of other social control mechanisms, such as the services offered by private security firms, to demonstrate to a ‘permitted’ population that the state is capable of reining in and controlling the perceived threat of the outsider. This is achieved in symbolic ways, such as through the detention of asylum seekers in prison-­ like immigration removal centres, but it also incorporates traditionally unseen practices, such as early morning raids and deportation flights, as a means of accomplishing the quantifiable goal of reducing the overall net immigration rate, often at enormous expense to the taxpayer. The UK’s asylum dispersal programme, dominated by private security firms under COMPASS and practically unchanged under the quasi-new management of the Asylum Accommodation and Support Services Contracts, occupies a space between the observable and the invisible. Asylum seekers sent to designated dispersal areas are conspicuous, perhaps, within communities historically underexposed to the presence of foreign-born residents. However, the suffering of asylum seekers, as they are exposed to unhygienic conditions, dilapidated accommodation, physical and social marginalisation and the prospect of state-reinforced destitution, remains hidden unless an exceptional case makes its way through domestic or international courts. This book has stopped short of identifying dispersed residents as wholly subjugated individuals who have

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been denied all political value and agency, as Agambenian perspectives suggest. Instead, through the testimony of those enduring the harshest conditions of asylum dispersal, including respondents like Hazim who stated that his depression and the frequency of his bad dreams resulted in him constantly sleeping with the aid of medication (interview, 06 June 2013), it is clear that asylum seekers long for better treatment and a select number are willing to expose themselves to the punitive and retributive gaze of the state in order to achieve more humane outcomes for themselves and others. Third sector organisations, immigration solicitors and committed individuals remain important advocates for asylum seekers and can sometimes give a voice to those oppressively silenced, such as detainees who are not permitted to visually document detention experiences with the use of mobile phone cameras, and destitute asylum seekers who may not have the means to adequately draw attention to their treatment. Future challenges to the United Kingdom’s asylum dispersal regime must  meaningfully incorporate the voices of those enduring the harm and violence of privatised immigration control regimes, as it is insufficient to rely upon the claims of those contracted to carry out the discriminatory social control functions of the state. Accountability cannot be achieved through a virtually exclusive reliance on accounts from Home Office representatives and personnel from asylum accommodation contractors as was the case with the National Audit Office’s (2014: p. 40) investigation into the COMPASS contracts. Instead, the unmediated testimony of asylum seekers must be the primary driver of such inquiries, and witnesses must be sufficiently empowered to provide evidence of their treatment while simultaneously protected against retaliatory action by the state. Where the written evidence of third sector representatives is used to assess dispersal provision (see: House of Commons, 2017: pp. 75–76), this must be accompanied by meaningful opportunities for asylum seekers to individually or collectively address their concerns. Isolated financial penalties for contractual failure will not adequately mitigate the future harmful conduct of accommodation providers if those providers are effectively guaranteed government contracts in other arenas. The United Kingdom’s COMPASS and AASC dispersal programmes are modern iterations of the country’s legacy of centralised management and control of immigrant populations, and they demonstrate the human cost

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of marketised approaches to social care in which profit is prioritised over human need. Disincentivising financial gain within the immigration control regime may be an important first step in reversing this trend.

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Gower, M. (2021). Asylum Seekers: The Permission to Work Policy (Briefing Paper No. 1908). House of Commons. Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-­briefings/sn01908/ Hazim. (2013, June 6). Interview with Steven Hirschler. North East, England. House of Commons. (2013a). Home Affairs Committee—Asylum: Seventh Report of Session 2013–14, Volume I (HC 71). Stationery Office: London. Retrieved September 1, 2020, from https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/ cmselect/cmhaff/71/71.pdf House of Commons. (2013b). Home Affairs Committee—Asylum: Seventh Report of Session 2013–14, Volume II (HC 71). Stationery Office: London. Retrieved September 2, 2020, from https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/ cmselect/cmhaff/71/71vw.pdf House of Commons. (2017). Asylum Accommodation: Twelfth Report of Session 2016–17 (HC 637; p. 80). Retrieved September 4, 2020, from https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhaff/637/637.pdf Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. c. 33. Retrieved August 14, 2021, from https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1999/33/contents James. (2013, January 30). Interview with Steven Hirschler. North East, England. Kanesha. (2013, June 12). Interview with Steven Hirschler. Scotland. Leanne. (2013, June 10). Interview with Steven Hirschler. Scotland. Lewis, H., Waite, L., & Hodkinson, S. (2017). ‘Hostile’ UK Immigration Policy and Asylum Seekers’ Susceptibility to Forced Labour. In Vecchio, F. and Gerard, A. (eds.) Entrapping Asylum Seekers. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Liam. (2013, May 17). Interview with Steven Hirschler. Scotland. Mary. (2013, June 13). Interview with Steven Hirschler. Scotland. Mayblin, L., & James, P. (2019). Asylum and Refugee Support in the UK: Civil Society Filling the Gaps? Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45(3), 375–394. Michael. (2013, July 16). Interview with Steven Hirschler. North East, England. Mills, K. (2012). Under the Radar: Impact of Policies of Localism on Substance Misuse Services for Refugee and Asylum Seeking Communities. International Social Work, 55(5), 662–674. National Audit Office. (2014). COMPASS contracts for the provision of accommodation for asylum seekers. The Stationery Office. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from ­https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/10287-001-­ accommodation-­for-asylum-seekers-Book.pdf Price, J. (2016). Meeting the Challenge: Voluntary Sector Services or Destitute Migrant Children and Families. COMPAS: University of Oxford. Retrieved

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Index

A

Agamben, G., 9, 25, 53, 64–72, 74–79, 82, 83, 161

Criminology, 5, 148 Crimmigration, 9, 51–83 D

B

Biopower, 9, 53, 67–83, 106 C

Commercial and Operational Managers Procuring Asylum Support Services (COMPASS), 4, 10, 59, 96, 115–125, 137, 139–143, 145, 151, 153–157, 159, 162, 164, 175, 178–180, 182 Commonwealth immigrants, 18, 42, 62

Deportation, 3, 6, 8, 9, 23–25, 30, 31, 34, 53–56, 58, 60–63, 65, 67, 79, 82, 95–125, 141, 151, 159, 182 Detention, 5, 6, 9, 10, 37, 43, 52, 55–60, 62, 63, 65, 68, 74, 76, 78, 82, 95–125, 140, 145, 148, 151, 152, 159, 182, 183 Dispersal, 1, 4–7, 10, 23, 24, 34, 59, 61, 62, 67, 70, 82, 95, 96, 109–114, 123, 124, 139, 142, 144, 147, 150, 156, 157, 159–162, 175–180, 182, 183

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. A. Hirschler, Hostile Homes, Critical Criminological Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79213-8

187

188 Index E

Esposito, R., 10, 69, 106, 107 F

Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, 3, 10, 24, 26, 34, 52, 59, 70, 96, 109–111, 113, 137 Immunisation, 10, 106, 107

Foucault, M., 9, 53, 65, 68, 69, 75–83, 102, 106, 118, 124, 162, 182

P

G

S

Galtung, J., 6, 7, 83, 153, 159, 181, 182 G4S, 3, 4, 9, 10, 24, 67, 79, 96, 101, 104, 105, 107, 108, 115, 117–124, 140–143, 145–147, 151, 155–158, 161, 175, 178 Governmentality, 9, 106, 112, 124 H

Harm, 2, 5–7, 9, 10, 17, 22, 52, 64, 74, 80, 102–106, 117, 118, 121, 124, 139, 144–146, 148, 150–152, 154, 159, 162, 174, 181, 183 Hollifield, J., 10, 107

Powell, J. E., 17, 26, 29, 42

Serco, 3, 4, 9, 10, 57, 96, 104, 105, 107, 108, 115–117, 119–123, 125, 140–146, 152, 154–156, 178 Sovereignty, 68, 71, 72, 75, 78, 100 Structural violence, 6–8, 83, 102, 103, 153, 155, 159, 181 Stumpf, J. P., 9, 52–54, 60 V

Victimisation, 6, 10, 119, 137, 148, 152, 153 Victimology, 5, 148 W

Windrush generation, 3, 23, 43, 63, 98

I

Immigration Act 1971, 8, 25, 38, 42, 51, 70, 95, 97, 103

Z

Zemiology, 5, 6