Author: Emily

After border externalisation: migration, race and labour in Mauritania

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New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Hassan Ould Moctar.

In March 2024, the Mauritanian government signed a migration partnership agreement with Spain and the European Commission, the stated aim being to address a surge of unwanted migrant arrivals on the Canary Islands. While unprecedented in financial scope, this was just the latest in a long line of border externalisation strategies that have been implemented in Mauritania. In 2006, Spain and the EU adopted a range of military and surveillance measures off West Africa’s Atlantic coasts, opening a new period of migration control cooperation with West African states. Despite two decades of such efforts, the past year has seen both unprecedented sea arrivals in Spain and – more concerningly – unprecedented deaths on the Atlantic route.

For many scholars of migration and border policy, this persistence of deaths and unwanted arrivals occurs not despite the strategy of border externalisation, but because of it. Many have long illustrated how such policy approaches typically create more ‘irregular migration’, and thus more of the social condition of migrant illegality. Building upon these insights, my new book After Border Externalization: Migration, Race and Labour in Mauritania (Bloomsbury, 2024) examines how this process interacts with the social and historical landscapes of the contexts in which EU migration management increasingly operates. To this end, it analyses how externalisation intervenes within pre-existing histories of bordering and population management in Mauritania (chapters 3 and 4). It then takes an ethnographic turn, asking how the condition of migrant illegality interacts with the social relations that have emerged from this history (chapters 5, 6 and 7).

As such, the book is motivated by a desire to overcome the Eurocentrism that necessarily underpins EU border externalisation policies, but which can also seep into the scholarship, as critical migration and border studies scholars have suggested. To this end, I have drawn on ideas of Samir Amin, who coined the term ‘Eurocentrism’ and wrote a short book on the topic. In Amin’s view, the geographic imaginary of the Mediterranean was central to the Eurocentric ideological project; it acts as the source of a Eurocentric universalism which asserts that ‘the only possible future for the world is its progressive Europeanisation.’

Looking at this geographic imaginary from its margins in Mauritania unveils the contradictions of the historical juncture in which externalisation unfolds. On the one hand, externalisation is conditioned by the racial and territorial legacies of colonialism, in particular the division of the Senegal River Valley into the territories of Senegal and Mauritania, and a racialising colonial imaginary dictating who belongs on which side of the Senegal River. These developments were consistent with the ‘define and rule’ strategy of indirect colonial rule that Mahmood Mamdani has analysed, whose logic resonates in contemporary international development and migration management projects, as I show in chapter 4.

 At the same time, however, the form of this colonial legacy is shifting as externalisation unfolds. While Mauritania has periodically figured in the EU’s geographic imaginary of the Mediterranean – through the 5+5 dialogue and the Union for the Mediterranean – it has in recent years become more salient in its capacity as a Sahelian state. Drawing from interviews with officials in the permanent secretariat of the G5 Sahel in Nouakchott, my book argues that the Eurocentric universalising goals of the EU’s Mediterranean geographic imaginary – exemplified in norms such as democracy promotion, human rights and good governance – are giving way to a more security-driven imaginary of the Sahel. At the same time, this region has seen an unprecedented challenge to European dominance in recent years. Together, these facts yield epistemic openings that were not present at the time of Amin’s original writing of Eurocentrism. 

To examine these, the book’s ethnographic chapters foreground migrant agency, detailing from this perspective the social relations in which the condition of migrant illegality is infused in Mauritania. I start in the northern port city of Nouadhibou, detailing a dynamic interplay between Europe-bound migrants and an apparatus of externalisation in the city, before then illustrating how this interplay sits within the political economy of Nouadhibou. While European capital no longer dominates the scene in the city, the EU continues to play a crucial role in facilitating transnational capital flows, as its production of migrant illegality enables the labour exploitation of a precarious and transient workforce.

This Europe-bound transience is key in the context of Nouadhibou, but an exclusive focus on such Europe-bound trajectories also obscures the living legacies of colonialism. For this reason, I am also interested in the Senegal River Valley town of Rosso, which straddles the colonial border between Mauritania and Senegal. Turning my attention to migrants who weren’t on the move to Europe when I met them, I have contrasted their prior experiences of EU border violence with the relative lack of illegality in Rosso. In its absence, a violent history of racialised territorial belonging that I detailed earlier in the book resurfaces. Here, it takes the form of a rice industry that was erected against the backdrop of a spate of expulsions and dispossession in the late 1980s, which acts as the primary employer of migrant labour in the town today.

My final ethnographic chapter moves to the capital city of Nouakchott, where experiences of illegality and border violence are common. But the colonial legacy of racialised territorial belonging means that Afro-Mauritanian nationals can also get caught up in migration policing operations. The line between national and non-national is further blurred by the fact that such operations dovetail with an urban cleansing drive, and therefore often extend to everyone rendered ‘surplus’ and forced to survive on the urban margins. From this perspective, externalisation is the most visible element of a broader regime of spatially managing the racialised outcasts of contemporary capitalism.

It’s important to foreground the agency of those at the receiving end of this triad of illegalisation, racialisation and economic abandonment, and I conclude the book with a reflection on how those encountered in previous pages interpret their own agency. The response to this question opens a window into a non-Eurocentric universalism of the kind Samir Amin envisioned when he first wrote Eurocentrism.

Hassan Ould Moctar is a Lecturer in the Anthropology of Migration at SOAS University of London. Focusing on West Africa and the Sahara, his research examines how the contemporary illegalisation of migration interacts with the racial and territorial legacies of colonialism, uneven development processes, and conflict and displacement dynamics. His recent book, After Border Externalization: Migration, Race, and Labour in Mauritania (2024), is published by Bloomsbury and available via Open Access here or in print with a 35% discount (use the code ABE35 by 24th October) here.

Home and researching home from near and far

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By Nyi Nyi Kyaw.

My self and my work

I am from Myanmar and most of my academic work on identity, displacement, migration, mobility and immobility focuses on this country. Having been (self-)exiled and displaced for a number of years I have had the opportunity to think about and research home from near and far, and yet I have to admit that it is taking an increasingly heavy toll on my thinking head and feeling heart.

Since the 2021 military coup in Myanmar I have had the privilege of teaching, mentoring and informally advising several Myanmar students, researchers and academics. We talk all the time and even text about Myanmar – our home. We miss it. But we have to or choose to research home, which has become the bane of our existence and work.

My academic work before the coup was privileged in the sense that I could always go back to Myanmar and research home at home, in addition to visiting family and friends. Now I can’t. These days I tell myself and others that I am both homesick and fieldsick. By homesick, I mean I miss home like any other person from Myanmar who is now (self-)exiled and cannot go back there for any reason. By fieldsick, I mean I miss my field because I can’t go home, visit places, meet people, and talk to people for research.

Myanmar, viewed from Thailand at the Mae Sai-Tachileik land border crossing, December 2023 (image: author’s own)

Where is home?

Where is home for scholars of displacement who are themselves displaced or (self-)exiled? For me, home is Myanmar. In recent years I have been fortunate enough to see it from across the border a few times, and yet I have still felt that home is far away. I have always returned from the border relieved that home would go on with or without me, but dismayed at the prospect that it would be different, most likely worse, when I am finally able to return. When home is fine, I can deal with homesickness. But my home bleeds, burns and suffers – it is being destroyed through tyranny, crisis and displacement. Then I feel the double blow of homesickness and pain for my country.

As an academic I sometimes have the feeling that I can keep in touch with home through reading, discussing and writing about it. But is this really home? Or am I encountering a virtual version of it? But must home be a physical entity? Or could it be an idea or a feeling? I still can’t find satisfactory answers to any of these questions.

Multiple homes in multiple locations at multiple times

In the past four years I have been based in Germany, Thailand and, most recently, the UK. I have encountered multiple homes or multiple Myanmars in all these places, depending on the time and circumstances. Very early on, just a few months after the coup, I arrived in Germany with memories of disturbing events and scenes from home. But the situation in Myanmar was not as bad as it is now, and the Spring Revolution was not yet in full swing. I had high hopes for a good future for all of us, and yet, as a political scientist, I was deeply concerned about what would or could happen next. In Germany, I was largely out of touch with my political folks, most of whom were still in Myanmar but about to flee to neighbouring countries, especially Thailand. Home felt so far away for me.  

But after I moved to Thailand in late 2022, the resistance was getting stronger and the displacement and humanitarian crisis was already worsening. Thailand is physically very close to Myanmar. I reconnected virtually and face-to-face with old friends and acquaintances in the political world and made new ones. I met all kinds of displaced people. Home felt closer, and we talked and texted about home all the time. I became part of the world of Signal, which became arguably the most popular channel of communication among people of, from and still in Myanmar. Also, I could sometimes see home from across the border.

Recently I moved to the UK and home feels very remote again. But this time I have brought many fresh memories, good, bad and mixed, and home does not seem as far away as it did when I was in Germany. So does this mean that home is indeed a feeling, a memory or an idea?

Researching home or homes

How do I research home now? How can I do it differently? Admittedly, losing access to Myanmar means that I have lost the privilege of doing research at home, with significant implications for topic selection, generalizability and multi-sited fieldwork and ethnography. But I am still digitally connected to people inside and outside the country, though I have to be extremely careful about what I tell and ask people inside, respecting their safety first and foremost, and also their privacy.

But every cloud has a silver lining. Over the past few years, I have been working on various types of displacement and forcibly displaced people in and from Myanmar. While one field site has closed, others have remained and new ones opened. Myanmar refugees, asylum seekers and migrants of all sorts, alongside the more established diaspora, are now dispersed across Southeast and South Asia and further afield. And many of my key informants, who are also my political people, have relocated outside of Myanmar. I also have new informants that I met after the coup. They are no less enlightening. I can move from place to place, meeting and talking to all kinds of people, displaced, exiled or self-exiled, about our homeland and our new homes or temporary shelters.

If home is made up of ideas, feelings, memories and people then it is everywhere. And for now, at least, I must be content with a home of this kind.

Nyi Nyi Kyaw is a Marie Curie Fellow in the School of Politics, Sociology and International Studies at the University of Bristol. His Marie Curie project examines the nexus between conflict, displacement and (im)mobilities with a focus on Myanmar since 2010. He previously held the position of Research Chair on Forced Displacement in Southeast Asia at Chiang Mai University. You can read his recent article about young people under Myanmar’s military rule in The Conversation here.

The nation and its others

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By Bridget Anderson.

Hostility to migration and claims about the negative changes that it brings are increasingly being mobilised to fan racism. At the same time, some of the most prominent anti-migration advocates are themselves people of colour. How can we understand the current relationship between the politics of race and the politics of migration?

While hostility towards migrants is growing across all regions of the world, each country has its specificities. In recent years in the UK, the prevention of Channel crossings by people in ‘small boats’ has become a stated political priority of both the Conservative and Labour parties, and the failure to carry this out, together with rising immigration more generally, is regarded as a source of ‘legitimate grievance’.

This was the reason given for last summer’s riots in England – the motivation was thus labelled as ‘legitimate’ even if the violence was condemned. There were arson attempts on hotels where asylum seekers are housed, and immigration advisers were also targeted. However, those singled out were not only asylum seekers; mosques and shops were also attacked. What mattered were not passports and immigration status but the colour of people’s skin: rioters blocking streets allowed ‘whites’ to pass, but not ‘non-whites’. For the rioters, ethnic minority citizens are ‘migrants’ and, regardless of rights or legal status, they simply do not belong.

In migration studies, there is increasing interest in ‘migrantisation’: the legal, social and political processes that turn people into migrants. While this is a rather clumsy and intellectual sounding term, this is precisely what rioters were doing. Giving themselves the authority to decide who were and who were not rightfully present, they ‘migrantised’ British citizens. Crucially, what mattered was not the legal status of citizenship but whether one belonged to ‘the people’, and more particularly the national people (no more a naturally occurring phenomenon of course than ‘migration’).

For migration policy and politics, nationalism and nationality have long been key mechanisms for navigating the treacherous waters that distinguish hostility to immigration from racism. While there is general agreement that racism is a bad thing, nationalism is treated as a far more nuanced phenomenon. Thus, while it is key to the legitimacy of immigration controls that they are not seen as openly racist, they are unabashedly a performance of nationalism. To discriminate or differentiate on the grounds of nationality is ostensibly quite different than to differentiate on the grounds of race.

What is being leveraged here is the ambiguity of nationality. Nationality can mean citizenship in the sense of a legal relation to a state, but nationality can also mean belonging to the nation in the sense of a particular national people. It is possible to be a national in the sense of having citizenship and yet not be regarded as a bona fide member of the nation. To belong to a nation is to make a claim to a history and to (cultural) values, which is why when white people intervened to stop the violence of rioters, they were taunted with the chant: ‘You’re not English anymore’. How one gets to become a part of the nation is, unlike citizenship, not subject to a set of procedures. The mechanism to make such claims is strongly imagined as through ancestry and cultural characteristics, both of which are also imagined as constituents of race.

‘The people’ calls on the class as well as the racialisation of the nation. Indeed, the justification of immigration restrictions lies in part on the representation of the migrant as the competitor with the national working class for privileges of membership. The terminology associated with migration exposes the class dimension of whiteness, which is not a singular identity: the visible whiteness of the ‘Eastern European migrant’ and of the ‘white working class’ both contrast with the invisible whiteness of the white middle class. In contemporary Britain, ‘migrants’ are not imagined as the well-to-do: the movement or presence of wealthy people is not considered a problem; ergo, they are not migrants.

This association between migration, class and race does not come about because the person in the street doesn’t understand who migrants ‘really’ are. Assumptions about migration do not float free of immigration and citizenship policies. It is rather the other way around: that everyday assumptions about who a migrant is make visible the underlying logic of these policies. Immigration controls are aimed at the negatively racialised global poor. A combination of skills, wealth and nationality determines how free a person is to cross international borders. To understand how anti-migration sentiment is being politically mobilised, it is necessary to appreciate the blurred boundaries between race and nation and between race and class and how this blurriness is drawn on in particular circumstances.

Crucially, we do well to remember that while the legal status of citizenship often offers very material advantages, there are exclusions within citizenship as well as from citizenship. Even in wealthy European and North American countries, neither citizenship (as a legal status), nor whiteness, nor the ‘right’ to work, nor even access to the welfare state fully protect people from domination, precarity and exploitation. Indeed, the welfare state itself can force citizens to move within country, that is, can ‘migrantise’ citizens. Finding similarities, parallels and connections and shared interests across differences is necessary to respond to the deeply embedded and highly affective tropes that are powerfully at work in our politics.

Bridget Anderson is Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship, and Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol at the University of Bristol. She is the editor of Rethinking Migration: Challenging Borders, Citizenship and Race (2025), available in paperback (use the code CNF25 for a 50% discount) or via open access here.

This post was originally published by Transforming Society, the Bristol University Press blog, on 3rd March 2025.

Call to arms, but to whom? Conscription, race and the nation in South Korea

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Minjae Shin.

Military service is mandatory in South Korea (hereafter Korea). Over the past ten years, one of the main concerns of the Republic of Korea Armed Forces (hereafter ‘Korean military’) is the integration of the country’s so-called Damunhwa (mixed heritage) soldiers into the military. In 2010, the Korean government announced a revision of the Military Service Act to expand the conscription base to all Korean nationals regardless of their ethnic background. It stated that ‘[Any Korean national] wishing to engage in mandatory military service or voluntary military service shall be protected against discrimination on the grounds of race, skin color, etc.’ Before then, the Act exempted men who were not a member of the Korean nation ‘by blood’ from bearing arms in service of the nation, for the simple reason that they were not ‘fully’ part of the Korean nation despite their legal status as citizens.

Due to the country’s unique security environment, in which a significant proportion of the population has at least some role in the military – approximately 1% if counting just the standing army but 6.5% if including the reserve force – every military issue quickly receives great attention in civil society. Public reaction to the concern was polarised. There were positive reactions welcoming the advent of a Korea that embraces different ethnicities, but there were also voices questioning the Act’s impact on unit cohesion, combat effectiveness and the loyalty of these soldiers. This was yet another occasion shedding light on the racialised aspect of Koreanness.

South Korean soldiers stand guard inside of the Demilitarised Zone, June 2024 (Image: Free Malaysia Today)

Korea is a highly militarised society. Under the South Korean constitution mandatory conscription service for men is required of all male citizens. Under this ‘duty to the nation and the state’, all able-bodied men between 19 and 35 are required to serve in one of the three branches of the military. Failure to fulfil this obligation is punishable by prison sentence. Before their military service, men are constantly asked by friends, parents and schools about their detailed plan for the service, such as when and where they will do it; life in their 20s is essentially planned around military service. During their service, men re-establish their relation to the state and nation, as well as their place in society. Completion of the service means not only that one is a ‘normal’ man but also a ‘Korean’ man, who has fulfilled his duty to the Korean nation. The image of an ideal citizen intertwined with the military service is wired into its management of conscripted manpower.

Before 2010, this was applied only to ethnic Korean men. This meant that men from mixed heritage backgrounds were considered neither a Korean nor a man in Korean society. Since the concept of race, ethnicity and nation were conflated throughout colonial history, the core of the Korean identity entails physical aspects. Speaking Korean language and understanding Korean culture and history is not enough. One has to ‘look’ Korean, with ‘Korean skin tone’. Being a Korean therefore has a strong racial undertone in Korean society. The entrenched belief is that it is these ‘ethnic citizens’ who bear the duty to defend the nation and the state.

This belief is closely related to an almost unanimous outrage towards ethnic Koreans who do not serve the military. This can be seen in cases where Koreans who migrated abroad came back with children who are of foreign nationality. These children are often referred to as Geom-meo-oe, which literally translates as ‘black-haired foreigner’. As these male children enter their early 20s, they are casually asked by friends when they will apply for the military, as well as their preferred branch. When they identify themselves as foreign nationals, people express their negative view towards them for not serving in the military, even when they are not legally required to do so. It is at this point that Koreanness as a racial concept reveals an interesting paradox. On the one hand, it doubts the capacity of mixed heritage Korean citizens to fulfil military duties; on the other hand, it demands ‘ethnic Koreans’ of foreign nationals to serve the Korean nation.

Korea’s birth rate has been in constant decline since the late 1990s. A shrinking demographic is damaging for all militaries, but the combination of the heavily militarised border with North Korea and maintaining a conscription-based force in a state of constant readiness means that such a demographic shift hurts the Korean military more than most. The government’s decision to expand its conscription pool to all Korean nationals regardless of their ethnic background was its answer to this issue. Many of the new conscripts are the children born of cross-border marriages between Korean men and women from nearby Asian countries, which saw a steep rise since the 1990s. The young honhyol (‘mixed blood’) men had often been subject to discrimination from their childhood. But since 2010, as they have entered their late teens and early 20s, they have been called to bear arms to serve the nation.

As of 2022, the number of mixed-heritage conscripts reached 5,000, making up 1% of all military enlistees. The number will surpass 10,000 by 2030, making up 5%. Although it is a small proportion at the moment, the growth rate is exponential. This is a close reflection of the country’s changing demographic composition, with continuously increasing numbers of foreign nationals entering Korea, including North Korean defectors and multicultural households. In the face of this demographic shift, the government is making changes, such as including and accommodating mixed-heritage soldiers through policies related to their religions and dietary needs. However, expanding the conscription base will lead to more complex issues lying ahead. The mobilisation of mixed-heritage men challenges the historic racialisation of Korean identity and will raise questions about what ‘being a Korean man’ means in the near future.

Recent developments in global geopolitics means that the relevance of these discussions is no longer limited to countries such as Korea. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, European countries are rushing to re-build their military capacity, which has caused a wave of conscription panic. Already, the discussion around a military conscription system has been brought to the table in the UK. However, European countries’ defence policies are formulated in the context of a vibrant political tradition of civic nationalism less focused on ethnic purity. For example, the UK military includes numerous ethnic minorities in its ranks.  Its cultural diversity and officials’ experiences have been already investigated by scholars. By contrast, the Korean military is based on ethnic nationalism and a highly racialised identity. In this context, the conscription of mixed-heritage personnel presents a new set of challenges as it is forced to redefine itself. Will the incorporation of mixed-heritage soldiers in the ranks bring the myth of an ethnically pure country closer to its end, or lead its proponents to dig their heels in deeper?

Minjae Shin works in a teaching support role in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Bristol in 2023 with a thesis on ‘Representing foreign brides: Koreanisation, ethnic nationalism, and masculinity in South Korea’. Her research interest is gendered migration in Asia; discourses and practices of nationalism in receiving countries such as racialisation and discrimination by institutional stakeholders.

Are the UK’s immigration rules forcing couples into marriage?

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Nicole Hoellerer and Katharine Charsley.

The UK has one of the world’s most restrictive spouse and partner immigration systems. The UK government has long suggested increasing restrictions to the rights of citizens to be joined in the UK by a foreign partner are needed to prevent forced marriages and marriages of convenience for immigration purposes. There is therefore some irony in the fact that our research suggests bi-national couples are now finding themselves pressured into marriage by the UK’s immigration rules.

In the Brexit Couples research project we are working with couples with one UK and one EU partner (without settled status in the UK). Since Brexit, EU citizens come under the UK immigration rules, so if these couples want to live together in the UK, they have to meet various requirements, including a rapidly increasing Minimum Income Requirement.

Illustration by Michael Grieve for the ‘Kept Apart‘ report (2020).

Most fundamentally, they must demonstrate that they are a couple. Couple relationships in contemporary Britain take many forms, but immigration rules tend to be based on more normative models. UK spouse/partner visa applicants must prove they are either in a recognised marriage or civil partnership, or have been living together as a couple for at least two years. This was recently amended to allow relationships in which the couple ‘cannot live together, for example because you’re working or studying in different places, or it’s not accepted in your culture’, but the strongest evidence of relationships remains documentary, such as shared bills and evidence of financial support.

There are a variety of reasons couples may not have lived together or cannot provide evidence. UK-EU couples have been used to Freedom of Movement between each other’s countries (continuing through visa-free visits since Brexit), so one couple told us: ‘Actually proving ourselves as a couple on paper, because we’re not married, it’s not at all easy, and because we’ve lived quite a sort of free, freedom of movement life… we don’t have this neat paper trail that shows that we’ve been living together consistently.’

Some couples did not want to get married at all but felt forced to do so. One participant explained that the institution of marriage was incompatible with her values, but now,

‘I feel like we have to do it… if we are not married then we have to prove all sorts of different things and we thought that was way more complicated… One of the reasons we haven’t got married is because we don’t think that an institution or the state should know who we love or who we sleep with or anything like that. But… all the information we would have to provide to prove that we are in a relationship would be so much more personal than just getting married… I haven’t told any of my friends or anything about it, because to be honest I feel embarrassed because I’ve generally been a bit against marriage, so it’s sort of going against something that I’ve always had as a value. So it’s really frustrating that we’re having to do that.’

Several described their marriages as pragmatic; as simply routes to their visa and life together. One participant told us, ‘we’ve decided we’re just going to get married just because we feel we want to make it more bullet proof, our relationship evidence’, whilst another stressed: ‘We are not religious people. We don’t see any value in marriage other than in practical terms… For us, that’s what marriage is: to get things done and make things work… So, maybe pressured a little bit, but… marriage doesn’t mean anything to us.’ This did not, however, mean the decision was necessarily unemotional, as the stakes are high. Hence one interviewee said, ‘I asked her to marry me out of desperation.’

Other couples may have married eventually but felt rushed into it: ‘We feel like we have to do things in accordance with another person’s timetable, not on your own terms.’ Younger couples in newer relationships (less than five years) particularly struggled with this compression of the timescale for an important life decision: ‘Even though we’re like, “Oh yeah, we want to get married,” we’re not there yet. I’m 25… I’m still very young in my mind in some ways, so I need that time to grow up… I think we want to stabilise ourselves first.’ Another argued directly that the immigration process ‘forces us to get married, which is not what we would do right now, only for the visa. But it feels like that’s the only way.’ Some felt their relationship progressed ‘too fast’: ‘It definitely put some more pressure about making things work, making things official’ [original emphasis]. Couples resented what they saw as state interference in their relationship. One noted that, ‘our relationship has been sort of interfered with by a lot of administration from different angles’, while another complained of ‘someone making these decisions for us in a way, like the situation demanding that we do something, just because it will make our lives easier.’

Some couples resist, fearing negative impacts on their relationship, as this participant put it: ‘I just think we would have both kind of resented being obliged to do things for the sake of bureaucracy’, whilst another was clear that ‘we want to do it on our schedule and our own timeline of our relationship, and the romance, not for the sake of a visa.’

Back in 2012, when the rules were first dramatically tightened, the government presented increased restrictions as necessary to prevent both forced marriages and marriages of convenience for immigration purposes. Thirteen years later, it is striking to hear couples use the terms ‘force’ and ‘for the sake of a visa’ to describe the immigration system itself pressuring them to marry when they otherwise would not. This pressure was set to increase again as couples rushed to meet visa requirements before the previous Conservative government’s planned further increase to income requirements for partner visas – which would have raised them to a level at which roughly 75% of working adults in the UK would be unable to sponsor the immigration of their partner. The incoming Labour government put these plans on hold whilst the Migration Advisory Committee reviews the financial requirements for family visas. We (along with thousands of bi-national couples) await the outcome of that review.

Nicole Hoellerer is an anthropologist whose work focuses on migration. She is a Research Associate in the School of Politics, Sociology and International Studies at the University of Bristol, and a researcher for the ESRC-funded Brexit Couples project. Before joining this project, she ethnographically investigated the practice-policy gap in UK refugee resettlement (Brunel University), and as the lead researcher for the ASYFAIR research project (University of Exeter) conducted research on asylum appeal court hearings in Europe.

Katharine Charsley is Professor of Migration Studies in the School of Politics, Sociology and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work focuses on migration, gender and families, with a particular interest in transnational marriages and relationships. She is PI of the ESRC-funded Brexit Couples project looking at the impact of the immigration rules on UK-EU couples after Brexit.

Privatised border regulation, AI, MigTech and public procurement

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Migration, Mobilities and Digital Technologies – a special series published in association with the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.

By Albert Sanchez-Graells.

Moving across borders used to involve direct contact with the State. Moving people faced border agents attached to some police corps or the army. Moving things were inspected by customs agents. Entry was granted or denied according to rules and regulations set by the State, interpreted and enforced by State agents, and potentially reviewed by State courts. Borders were controlled by the State, for better or worse.

As States pivot to ‘technology-enhanced’ border control and experiment with artificial intelligence (AI) – let’s call this the ‘MigTech’ shift – this is no longer the full story, or even an accurate one.

More and more, crossing borders involves interactions with machines such as eGates, with increasing levels of automated facial recognition ‘capabilities’ (see Travis Van Isacker’s blogpost in this series). Face-to-face interviews are progressively (planned to be) replaced by AI ‘solutions’ such as ‘lie detectors’ or ‘emotion recognition’ tests. The pervasiveness of AI touches moving people’s lives before they start to move – such as when visa and travel permits are granted or denied through algorithmically-supported or automated decision systems that raise red flags or draw inferences from increasingly dense and opaque data thickets (see Kuba Jablonowski’s discussion of the UK’s shift from border documentation to computation). The movement of things is similarly exposed to all sorts of technological deployments, such as ‘smart sensors’ or drone-supported surveillance.

(Image by Markus Spiske on Unplash)

We could think that borders are now controlled by technology. But that would, of course, conflate the tool with the agent. To understand the implications of this paradigm shift towards MigTech we need to focus on control over these technologies. Control rarely rests with the State that purports to use the technology. Control mostly lies with the technology providers. Digitalisation thus goes hand in hand with the privatisation of border regulation. Entry is granted or denied as a result of ‘technical’ embeddings over which technology providers hold almost absolute control. Technology providers increasingly control borders, mostly for the worse.

There is a rich body of research on the impacts of digitalisation and automation of border control on people, communities and injustice. And also increasing calls for a reconsideration of this approach in view of its harms. At first sight, it could even seem that new legislation such as the EU AI Act addresses the risks and harms arising from digital borders. After all, the EU AI Act classes as ‘high-risk’ the use of AI for ‘Migration, asylum and border control management’. High-risk classification entails a long list of obligations, including pre-deployment fundamental rights impact assessments. By subjecting the technology to a series of ‘assurances’, the Act seeks to ensure that its deployment is ‘safe’. This regulatory approach can create the illusion that the State has regained control over the technology by tying the hands of the technology provider. Indirectly, the State would also have regained control of the borders, for better or worse.

My research challenges this understanding. It highlights how the regulatory tools that are being put in place – such as the EU AI Act – will not sufficiently address the issue of ‘tech-mediated privatisation’ of ‘core’ State functions because, in themselves, these tools transfer regulatory power back to technology providers. By focusing on how the technology reaches the State, and who holds control over the technology and how, I highlight important gaps in law and regulation.

The State rarely develops its own AI or other digital technologies. On most occasions, the State buys technology from the market. This involves public contracts that are meant to set the relevant requirements and to complement regulatory frameworks through tailor-made obligations. To put it simply, my research shows that public contracts are not an effective mechanism to impose specific obligations. Take the example of a State buying an ‘AI lie detector’. The ‘accuracy’ and the ‘explainability’ of the AI will be crucial to its adequate use. However, the EU AI Act does not contain any explicit requirement or minimum benchmark in relation to either of them. Let’s take accuracy.

The EU AI Act solely establishes that ‘High-risk AI systems shall be designed and developed in such a way that they achieve an appropriate level of accuracy’ (Art 15(1)). Identically, the model contractual clauses for the procurement of AI that support the operationalisation of the EU AI Act do not contain specific requirements either. They simply state an obligation for the technology provider to ensure that the AI system is ‘developed following the principle of security by design and by default … it should achieve an appropriate level of accuracy’ (Clause 8.1). The specific levels of accuracy and the relevant accuracy metrics of the AI system are meant to be described in Annex G. But Annex G is blank!

It will be for the public buyer and the technology provider to contractually agree the applicable level of accuracy. This will most likely be done either by reference to the ‘state-of-the-art’ (which privatises the ‘art of the possible’), or by reference to industry-led technical standards (which are poor tools for socio-technical regulation and entirely alien to fundamental rights norms). Or, perhaps even more likely, accuracy will be set at levels that work for the technology provider, which is most likely going to have superior digital and commercial skills than the public buyer. After all, there are many ways to measure and report an AI system’s accuracy and they can be gamed.

In most cases, the operationalisation of the EU AI Act will leave the specific interpretation of what is ‘an appropriate level of accuracy’ in the hands of the technology provider. The same goes for explainability, and for any other ‘technical’ issue with large operational implications. Which does not significantly change the current situation, and which certainly does not mitigate the effects (risks and harms) of the privatisation of AI regulation – or, in the context of MigTech, the privatisation of border regulation. The EU AI Act – and other approaches to ‘AI regulation by contract’, including in the UK under the ‘pro-innovation approach’ to AI and the recently announced AI Opportunities Action Plan – creates a funnel of regulatory power that dangerously exposes the public sector to risks of regulatory capture and commercial determination. And, ultimately, exposes all of us to the ensuing risks and harms. A different regulatory approach is necessary.

Albert Sanchez-Graells (he/him) is a Professor of Economic Law at the University of Bristol Law School. He is also an affiliate of the Bristol Digital Futures Institute. Albert’s current research focuses on the role of procurement in regulating public sector AI use, on which he recently published the monograph Digital Technologies and Public Procurement: Gatekeeping and Experimentation in Digital Public Governance (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Refugee women’s struggles for rights and stability: insights from an intersectional lens 

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Maite Ibáñez Bollerhoff. 

As a researcher exploring the experiences of refugee women in small German towns, I have come to understand the critical importance of applying a postcolonial and intersectional lens to capture the complexity of these women’s lives, particularly in relation to accessing rights and entitlements. My research has underscored the need for a broader understanding of the multiple, intersecting factors that shape refugee women’s experiences, moving beyond a narrow focus on predetermined categories of identity. 

Ayla’s* story is a powerful illustration of this. As a young, recently divorced single mother, Ayla encountered significant obstacles due to her initial dependence on her husband and limited access to language classes, childcare and mental health support. Her struggle to navigate the complex legal systems in Germany, from immigration rights to divorce and family rights, was further compounded by language barriers and a learning disability, undiagnosed until recently: 

I had been going through post-partum depression when we separated. Everything happened so fast, I had to look for housing and learn the language to get a job as soon as possible. I had no money, all friends I had through my husband. Only later I found out that there would have been financial help for us, help with my daughter and so on […] It took me a long time to get my life together. [Ayla]

(Image by Ayush Kumar on Unsplash)

Ayla’s experience highlights common challenges faced by refugee women who come to Germany through family reunification but who are facing separation or divorce. Many of these women face barriers in accessing crucial support services and information about their rights and entitlements. Additionally, several women in my research reported feeling at a disadvantage in legal proceedings, particularly in cases involving divorce and child custody, where they felt that their husbands had more power due to their longer residence in Germany, better language skills and greater understanding of the legal system. 

In the case of Miran, a refugee woman who experienced domestic violence, these challenges were further exacerbated by a lack of support from authorities and social services. Miran described feeling disempowered and unsupported in her interactions with the court and social services: 

I don’t really trust authorities and I didn’t know where to go […] I only found out many years later that there is specific support for families like ours from charities. The youth welfare office and the council, and another organisation I visited […] everyone said we don’t help with this kind of thing. I wanted someone maybe to go to the youth council with me or to my children’s schools or the immigration office. The biggest stress for me was with the youth welfare office. […] I was always worried they would take my kids away, the youth welfare office. But I never felt they wanted to help me or us as a family. No. [Miran] 

Miran‘s story underscores how refugee women’s lack of knowledge about their rights and the legal system, combined with a lack of cultural sensitivity and support from authorities, can create significant barriers to accessing justice and support.  

For hijab-wearing women like Hiba, the challenges in accessing these entitlements are further compounded by experiences of prejudice based on their religious identity: 

I worried a lot before. It was hard to think about anything else, you know. I thought maybe for me, for Muslim women, it‘s more difficult to be accepted here, to get the right to remain […] When I walk into the job centre, for example, I see how they look at me, how they talk to me. They look down on me.

Hiba‘s story highlights how the intersection of gender, religion and refugee status can create additional barriers to accessing support. The way she felt seen and treated in society overall as a Muslim refugee woman, such as at the job centre, increased her anxiety about how this discrimination might affect her asylum claim. Her experience elucidates the heavy toll that a prolonged state of instability, closely tied to not receiving her rights and entitlements, has on refugee women’s mental health and well-being. Research has shown that women have poorer physical and mental health stemming from gender-specific challenges and traumas before, during and after flight (Cheung and Phillimore, 2017; Hollander et al., 2017; Keygnaert et al., 2014). The constant fear of return, dealing with complex bureaucratic systems, and often-times concern for their children’s wellbeing, all contribute to heightened levels of stress and anxiety (Vromans et al., 2021). 

The women’s experiences underscore the importance of considering a wide range of rights relevant to refugee women in Germany beyond citizenship and immigration policies, such as divorce rights, family law, reproductive rights and maternal care. While rights related to the public sphere such as language attainment and labour market integration are more commonly at the forefront of available migration studies (for example, Mihalcioiu, 2016; Verwiebe et al., 2019; Vogtenhuber et al., 2018), rights related to the private sphere were of high relevance to the women I interviewed. 

The stories of Ayla, Miran, Hiba and others illustrate how the interplay of various factors, such as gender, religion, family status and experiences of violence and discrimination, creates unique challenges for refugee women in accessing support. These diverse experiences underscore the limitations of existing research on refugee women’s lives, which, while increasingly recognising the significance of intersectionality, often focuses on a narrow set of predetermined identity categories, in particular gender and religion.

Embracing the broadness of the concept of intersectionality serves as a powerful tool to capture the complex reality of refugee women’s lives and the diverse range of factors that shape their access to rights and entitlements. By recognizing the multiple, intersecting barriers these women face, we may work towards developing more inclusive and responsive support systems that adequately address their unique needs and challenges. 

* Participants’ names have been changed for anonymity.

Maite Ibáñez Bollerhoff is an ESRC-funded Doctoral Researcher at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research aims to better understand how refugee support organisations work with refugee women in small towns in Germany. She is also Head of Impact, Evaluation and Monitoring at Bristol Refugee Rights, a Bristol charity. 

Ukrainian refugees – the new white Other in British discourses?

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Magda Mogilnicka.

This year has marked the 20th anniversary of the EU enlargement when eight countries from Central and East Europe, with Poland as the largest accession state, joined the European Union. The UK was one of only three European Union (EU) countries* allowing new accession members to work with almost no restrictions. As a result, many people, exercising their new right of freedom of movement as EU citizens, came to the UK. The freedom to move across European borders without a passport or a work permit became a privilege taken for granted until 2016, when the Brexit campaign put EU mobility in the spotlight, resulting in the UK leaving the EU.

Since Brexit, EU citizens in the UK have had to formalise their immigration status through the EU settlement scheme. For many Western Europeans Brexit unsettled their sense of belonging for the first time. But for the EU’s newest members from Central and East Europe, including Romanians and Bulgarians who joined the EU in 2007, belonging had long been questioned: they had experienced discrimination and racialisation long before Brexit. At first they were welcomed for filling gaps in the growing labour market economy, replacing labour migration schemes of overseas ‘low-skilled’ workers, a policy that raised questions about privileging white migrants over migrants of colour. But soon they became pejoratively labelled as ‘East Europeans’ in media and political discourses. A positive message about working hard and contributing to British economy gradually turned into a negative one as the number of immigrants steadily increased. Represented as culturally homogenous and economically inferior, constructed as ‘low-skilled’ economic migrants threatening British workers, putting pressure on public services, eating swans and being racist, they discursively became the ‘white Others’. While they may have been welcome at first, they soon became a target of hostile discourses that vilified them in racialised ways. We can see similar patterns emerging in discourses about Ukrainian refugees.

(image: UK Government website)

More than 280,000 Ukrainians have arrived in the UK since the Russian invasion in early 2022 under the Homes for Ukraine and Ukrainian Family or Extension schemes, which significantly increased the Ukrainian-born population. Under the former scheme, British families can apply to temporarily host a Ukrainian family in their home and receive some financial support from the government to do so. Ukrainian refugees are allowed access to education and healthcare and have the right to work. The scheme has been extended until September 2026.

The relatively generous policy towards Ukrainian refugees that offers access to public services and employment, as well as overwhelmingly positive public reception contrast with policies – and public support for – restricting movement for non-European asylum seekers. With the exception of resettlement schemes for Afghan and Hong Kong citizens, the policy focus has been on reducing migration through the Illegal Immigration Act 2023, which criminalises non-European asylum seekers entering the UK through routes that are not legally recognised. Opening borders to Ukrainians occurred at the same time as the former Conservative government was pushing for the Rwanda resettlement plan that aimed to permanently remove those asylum seekers with no possibility to return to the UK.

Although the Rwanda plan has been scrapped by the new Labour government, the current asylum-seeking process for other incomers is lengthy, complicated and leaves people living in limbo sometimes for years before they are granted refugee status and a right to work and can then start a route to settlement. Hence, the Homes for Ukraine scheme can be seen as a whitewashing policy that privileges white European migrants over people of colour. Indeed, whiteness and Christianity were implicitly pointed at in many Western media reports at the beginning of the war to emphasise the Europeanness of Ukrainians who ‘look like us’. In a similar way, when ‘East European’ EU citizens joined the EU in 2004, their presumed ability to ‘socially integrate’ (Home Office 2005, p.21) more easily (due to their economic activity) had subtle racialised undertones.

However, despite the privileges offered to Ukrainians, the four-year time limit of the 2022 scheme suggests that they are not expected to stay. Their acceptance therefore seems contingent upon them eventually returning home. Most Ukrainian refugees are women and have been employed in ‘low-waged’ sectors, as many face an English language barrier and have issues with their qualifications not being recognised. But even before the war, Ukrainians have predominantly been employed as temporary seasonal workers in the UK, which shows the same ‘low-skilled’ employment pattern as ‘East European’ EU citizens. Moreover, they have been represented as struggling to accept ethnic diversity: in this report by Channel 4 Ukrainian refugees’ crude racist practices are simplistically contrasted with a tolerant attitude of the British majority.

In my own research, I draw attention to migrants’ processes of learning to live in multicultural Britain. Many of my Polish participants, having expressed crude racist attitudes at first, grew to appreciate cultural diversity and made efforts to live in diverse neighbourhoods. The Channel 4 report depicting Britian as a tolerant multicultural bubble that intolerant Ukrainian newcomers struggle to accept, paradoxically excludes Ukrainian refugees while emphasizing inclusivity. Similarly to EU ‘East European’ citizens, Ukrainians’ status is therefore not, in fact, ‘white enough’ in public discourses.

Being contingently accepted is a familiar story, reminding me of discourses about EU citizens from Central and East Europe 20 years ago, which over time changed from welcoming to more hostile. This discursive division between British and ‘East Europeans’ continues a nation-making project that constructs a binary of citizen and migrant. In recent media reports Albanians have also resurfaced in political debates as criminal migrants, a long-known trope of dangerous East European masculinity. The mixed reception of Ukrainians demonstrates that migration continues to produce racialised difference of ‘East Europeanness’.

* The other two were Sweden and Ireland.

Magda Mogilnicka is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Southampton. Until recently she was Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, where she remains an Honorary Lecturer. Magda’s research interests are in the area of migration, ethnicity, lived diversities and belonging.

Read about Magda’s research on how Polish people in the UK were impacted by Brexit and COVID in her previous MMB blogpost ‘Brexit, COVID and stay/return narratives amongst Polish migrants in the UK’.

From documentation to computation: the shifting logic of UK border control

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Migration, Mobilities and Digital Technologies – a special series published in association with the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.

By Kuba Jablonowski.

The UK immigration status is going online. Tangible documents issued by the Home Office are set to expire at midnight on 31st December 2024 as the department has been short-dating them for years. From 1st January 2025, status holders will transact through a set of websites called View and Prove to access their status, which is now called an eVisa, and to evidence it to others using share codes. Status checkers will transact through Home Office websites too, verifying people’s right to work or right to rent online as part of the British government’s ‘hostile environment’ policy. Carriers, such as airlines, will rely on automated status checks as part of their check-in procedures. Should these fail, they can resort to View and Prove as well. This unassuming portal warns users it is in the beta phase: feature-complete but not bug-free. And yet, it controls access to a vast network of casework systems and data stores holding information that is used to generate an immigration subject and their immigration status.

Screenshot from the UK Government’s View and Prove website (accessed by the author on 5th November 2024)

Borders, once firmly on the ground and often imagined as cliffs and rivers, walls and fences, are about to be governed entirely through online computing. It is hard to overstate the significance of this seemingly technical change. It does not just transform who enacts borders and how. It also transforms the way the subject of immigration control is administratively constructed by the border bureaucracy.

Immigration status was traditionally inscribed into a token that would represent the person as a subject of immigration control: a visa sticker, a biometric residence permit, a permanent residence card, and so on. What makes these into tokens is not the material quality but the inscribing of multiple types of information such as biographic, biometric, and immigration records into a single and stable medium. This medium then remains in the hands of the person who holds the immigration status inscribed into it. There are also digital tokens of status, such as machine-readable codes used in boarding passes and vaccine passports. They give their holder a similar level of autonomy as residence cards or visa stickers. They can be downloaded onto a personal device or printed on a physical medium, and they grant access as long as they remain valid.

The online system designed by the Home Office replaces such stable tokens with online transactions. Each time the holders want to check or evidence their status, they must transact through the View and Prove portal. They first log on with the document they used to create their online account. They are then sent a verification code to the email address or phone number held for that account. Once logged on, users have the option to view their status or generate a share code. This code, which is valid for 90 days but which can glitch for a number of reasons, then needs to be shared with the status checker – the landlord, the employer, the airline, and so on – who in turn enters it into the relevant status checking website along with their own details to verify the holder’s right to work, rent, travel, and so on. Status holders and checkers use different portals but they are all hosted on the gov.uk domain.

Screenshot from the UK Government’s View and Prove website (accessed by the author on 5th November 2024)

However, the View and Prove portal is merely the front end of a complex network of upstream services that store and compute data at the back end. This network includes legacy services and novel systems developed incrementally as part of the Immigration Platform Technologies programme since 2014, at the cost of around GBP 500 million to date. In total, there are more than 90 different casework systems that feed data into this network. Two central components amongst them are the Person Centric Data Platform, which holds historic records from legacy systems and live records from new applications, and the Immigration and Asylum Biometric System, which holds the facial image and finger scans.

As we show in a paper recently published with my colleague Monique Hawkins in the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law, this design proved to be prone to glitching when originally rolled out for the European Union Settlement Scheme. Our paper argues that glitching, albeit marginal in the sense that it affects the minority of users, is nonetheless systemic because it results from the design and configuration of digital status services. This argument is built on hundreds of cases reported by status holders and legal representatives to the3million, a civil society organisation and a strategic research partner on the Algorithmic Politics and Administrative Justice project.

Based on that evidence, we outline a typology of glitches. They include problems with service availability or user login, as well as errors with profile maintenance or status sharing. In the most serious cases user profiles can become entangled with each other due to problems with data linking. When viewing or sharing status after login, such users see someone else’s photo, name or visa in their own profile. A whistleblower report earlier this year suggested this type of glitch, which the Home Office refers to as a merged identity, was affecting more than 76,000 people in early 2024. The Home Office later disclosed that it had identified around 46,000 ‘records with an identity issue’ and managed to fix some of them, but not others. And that was earlier this year, before the estimated four million users with expiring biometric residence permits were added to the millions of those who have to rely on digital services to prove their status.

Fundamentally, these problems stem from the specific design of digital status services. The Home Office insists the system must reflect the current immigration status of the status holder. In 2023 the department reaffirmed its commitment ‘to a digital system of real-time checks’ and said it ‘will not compromise on this principle’. This necessitates ongoing computation of identity and immigration data processed on different systems that handle immigration transactions: applications for grants and upgrades of status, reviews and appeals of caseworker decisions, updates of images and documents linked to the user’s account, and so on. There is always a risk this computation will go wrong – and that if it does, the holder is locked out of their status as they are trying to evidence it.

This is why View and Prove should not be seen as a digital immigration document. Rather, it is the online interface of a transactional system set to replace immigration documents. This system does not swap tangible tokens of status – residence cards or visa stickers – for digital tokens. Instead, it mandates online checks of immigration status in real time. This system does not come with any document that can be stored on a personal device or reproduced on a physical medium. The proof of immigration status is produced on the screen in the moment of the check – and it vanishes into the cloud of Home Office servers as soon as the check is done.

Kuba Jablonowski (he/him) is a Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. His research investigates the design and operation of digital identity systems in the context of governance, and he approaches the border as a site of identity production rather than a device of mobility control. To generate and disseminate research findings, Kuba collaborates with civil society, the civil service, private actors and the media.

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The problem of promoting legal identities for all in anti-trafficking work

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Natalie Brinham.

Recently, there has been an increased interest in how a lack of legal identities, or state-issued documents, is connected to the risks of trafficking and modern slavery. As someone who has worked in human rights organisations on the statelessness of Rohingyas and others, I have been approached multiple times over the past year by NGOs and researchers looking to provide analysis and recommendations to donors and policy makers relating to this nexus.

Having advocated for the issue of statelessness to be better incorporated into other human rights agendas, I welcomed such interventions. Yet, in approaching these conversations I also felt a nagging sense of trepidation. It has been difficult to locate the source of my concern. After all, it is true that if the stateless people I have worked with had travel documents and/or citizenship they would not suffer the same forms of exploitation. So, if the anti-trafficking sector promotes legal identities as part of their strategies, that is a good thing, isn’t it?

A Rohingya passport from 1955 kept by a Rohingya refugee family in India (photo: Natalie Brinham)

Being identified and documented by a state is most often associated with rights and freedoms – we all have a ‘right’ to a legal identity, so we are told. The push for ‘legal identities for all’ is a core component of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which strive to ‘Leave No One Behind’ in delivering inclusive and just development globally. Those who lack a legal identity are sometimes stateless – meaning they are not recognised as citizens in any state. The rationale behind the global campaign is two-fold: legal identities will deliver both rights and development to people who are undocumented or unregistered by any state.

From an international development perspective, people without a legal identity are not accounted for within national and international development plans and are therefore left out as beneficiaries. From a rights perspective, people who have no proof of residence or citizenship are often, in practice, unable to access a whole range of basic rights and services including education and healthcare. They are often unable to work in the formal economy, access judicial procedures or travel using ‘legal’ routes. Within these paradigms, the logical way to ensure access to rights and services is to provide unregistered and undocumented people with a legal identity, freeing them from their state of invisibility and irregularity. The lack of a legal identity can compound the risks of being exploited in the workplace or while crossing internal checkpoints and international borders. As such, work from within the anti-trafficking sector explores this key nexus between trafficking and legal identities/statelessness.

The situation for Rohingyas is often used as an example of the worst consequences of being deprived of a legal identity and being trafficked. Stripped of citizenship in their home country, Myanmar, they have been contained in the conditions of apartheid and subjected to genocidal violence and deportations. Those who have left the country live across Asia and beyond in situations of protracted displacement, inter-generational statelessness and labour exploitation, struggling to access safety, security and basic services. Images abound in the media of Rohingya stranded at sea in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman sea, prevented from landing by hostile state authorities, or beaten, raped, extorted and exploited by smugglers, state actors and members of ethnic armed groups. According to the ‘legal identities for all’ paradigm, trafficked and stateless Rohingya need states to provide registration and documents. From there state protections and rights can follow. 

But an important body of research reveals how anti-trafficking legislation and action plans can sometimes do more harm than good. For example, some approaches can criminalise people working in unregulated sectors of the economy, or they can shift the focus of initiatives from state policies and practices to criminal individuals and networks. Anti-trafficking discourses can be drawn on to legitimise hard borders and draconian immigration policies. What is perhaps given less attention is that the promotion of legal identities as a core component of international development policy can also do harm as well as good.

The ‘legal identities for all’ agenda has been accompanied by global growth in ID’ing technologies, which along with other border tech has consolidated the symbiotic relationships between state authorities and private tech companies that are largely unaccountable to anyone – both citizen and noncitizen. Development funding is increasingly premised and contingent on modernising ID systems. There is no evidence to suggest that these schemes reduce statelessness. Meanwhile, digitised and centralised ID systems have profoundly changed experiences of statelessness and other forms of noncitizenship. They can ‘lock in’ an irregular status. They can become a single access point for all services including health, education, banking, internet and mobile phones, and work licenses. As such, people without IDs become locked out the economic, social and political spheres.

With increasing requirements for documentation in all spheres, strategies for coping through informal economies are reduced. Further when used in conjunction with other border tech, ID systems can be misused against stateless or other groups as part of violent systems of surveillance, securitisation and apartheid. Digital ID systems, then, consolidate the power of states to both include and exclude. They can help states to move bordering practices from the physical infrastructure at border crossings to the everyday, less visible spaces. 

So, there is a source for my trepidation in these conversations about the nexus between legal identities and trafficking. Both anti-trafficking and legal identity discourses and agendas can be coopted to harden borders, illegalise economic activity and legitimise authoritarian state practices that exclude and segregate. But locating the source throws up many broader questions and dilemmas. With digitisation and centralisation of national and international ID and bordering schemes, states are not the only powerful actors governing through citizenship regimes. Instead, oligopolies – states in conjunction with tech companies and international financial institutions – control both movement and identification practices. How, then, in advocating for rights and social justice, do we move beyond supporting more individuals to access documents and anti-trafficking services, to holding these oligopolies of identity providers to account for exclusions and bureaucratic violence?

Natalie Brinham is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2024-2027) at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol where she is working on her research project ‘Countering citizenship stripping in times of war: IDs and autonomy’. Her new book, Genocide and Citizenship Cards: IDs, Statelessness and Rohingya Resistance (Routledge 2024), is available via open access here.

Natalie has written previously about statelessness on the MMB blog in her post ‘Looking for the “state” in statelessness research’. Other MMB posts on Rohingyas include ‘Myanmar’s discriminatory citizenship law: are Rohingyas the only victims? – Migration Mobilities Bristol’ by Ali Johar.

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