Author: Emily

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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Who’s in the fast lane? Will new border tech deliver seamless travel for all?

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

By Travis Van Isacker.

For the past year I have been attending border industry conferences to understand the future claims they are making as part of my research on digitised borders for the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures. Listening to their keynotes and speaking with industry professionals I have learned that the border crossing of the future is imagined as a ‘seamless’ one, devoid of gates, booths, even border officers. In their place will be ‘biometric corridors’ lined with cameras observing people as they move. Captured images will be fed back to computer systems matching facial biometrics ‘on the fly’ with those held in a database of expected arrivals. Passports will not be needed as travellers will digitally share all necessary information—biographical details, images of faces and fingerprints, travel permissions—with states and carriers before a trip. There will be no need to stop and question people at the border as they will have been vetted and pre-authorised before leaving their homes. Any people considered ‘risky’ will not even be able to book tickets. The goal: ‘good’ travellers won’t feel the cold gaze of the border’s scrutiny, nor be slowed down.

‘PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE: Seamless Traveller Journey’. World Travel & Tourism Council, April 2019 (image: original photograph cropped, from the World Travel & Tourism Council Flickr account)

This seamless vision is mostly shared by governments who do not want to give visitors a bad first impression and consider that most travellers do not pose any risk. However, there are still differing levels of enthusiasm for the seamless border depending upon, for example, a state’s economic dependence on tourism, or its concern about a terrorist attack. Curaçao recently launched its Express Pass to allow travellers to provide passport information and a selfie from home to then (hopefully) be quickly and automatically verified at the border. By contrast, the United States still does not use automated ePassport gates despite already biometrically verifying all travellers upon entry and exit.

‘Faster meets more secure’. Biometric Facial Comparison advertisement, Miami International Airport, June 2024 (image: author’s photograph)

There has long been a trade-off between speed and security at the border. Screening, searching and questioning people all take time, and that means disgruntled passengers, travel delays, economic loss and press headlines that can make a country less appealing for travel and investment. New digital border technologies promise to resolve this tension. Automated identification through biometrics claims to work with greater speed, accuracy and consistency than humans, allowing for increased security and expedited checks. Advanced data analytics makes a similar claim: knowing more about people earlier, and ‘risking’ them algorithmically, allows digital borders to automatically deflect those it considers undesirable at an earlier stage. By combining these systems, the border industry promises to reduce to seconds the time it takes average business travellers to clear immigration.

The seamless vision of the future border is sold to us all, but is it actually for everyone? A facial recognition system I observed for passengers to bypass showing their passports to a border officer when disembarking cruise ships in Miami failed to deliver for families with small children and people who did not have a passport. There were no suitable images of their faces in the government’s database to match against. Later, I explained to border experts my difficulties in getting airlines to allow me to board flights to the UK with my European identity card. I was told by the vice-president of a facial biometrics company that it sounded as if I was ‘trying to make a point’. Why didn’t I just always carry my passport to avail myself of the eGates? For him it wasn’t only illogical that I wasn’t always able to adopt the most ‘seamless’ path, it was suspicious.

Technologies claiming to offer a seamless border crossing for everyone in fact create a two-tiered system. True, some experience an accelerated border crossing, but those who, for whatever reason, cannot satisfy the tech’s requirements are held up, if allowed to cross at all. The fact that border professionals are all in the first group means they usually don’t experience their systems not working for them.

Edited photograph of the arrivals hall of the Miami Cruise Terminal, June 2024. To the left are exit lanes with facial recognition tablets. To the right is the long queue of people waiting to see an officer (image: author’s photograph)

At industry events there is limited recognition of the fact seamlessness is not necessarily what it claims to be. A senior manager for one of the world’s largest systems integrators (an IT and management consultancy contracted by states to implement border tech) admitted that, actually, a ‘frictionless’ border was not the end goal. Instead, the future border would be one that applies ‘variable friction’, easily speeding up or slowing down movement depending on who or what is crossing it.

Despite the hype around tech-enabled seamless crossings there is nothing to guarantee that the widespread adoption of new digital border tech will necessarily take us towards that future. Just recently, the UK Home Office took Jordan off its list of countries allowed to use its new Electronic Travel Authorisation (which uses an app to biometrically enrol people’s faces at home) due to an increase in the number of Jordanian nationals travelling to the UK to claim asylum, and for purposes other than what is permitted under visitor rules. Perhaps the clearest example is the European Union’s new Entry/Exit System (EES), which will require third country nationals to provide face and fingerprint biometrics against which to verify their entering and leaving the Schengen-bloc. This system promises to eventually allow for faster automated crossings but is primarily intended to identify overstayers and strengthen border checks, especially against criminal records databases which are centred on fingerprints. Despite state-of-the-art biometric enrolment kiosks and tablets, there have been nightmarish predictions for the disruption caused when suddenly everyone entering or leaving the EU has to stop to provide their biometrics at the border, especially at the Port of Dover. The fact that the implementation of EES has been delayed for years and was recently postponed again, without a new timeline for implementation, proves just how contingent the future border is.

Sign announcing works in the Port of Dover for Entry/Exit System’s enrolment zone, August 2024 (image: author’s photograph)

State initiatives to increase friction at the border often frustrate those working to develop and sell new border technologies. Some I spoke with believe quite wholeheartedly that everyone will soon be able to cross borders without even realising it, in large part thanks to their inventions. They like to think our modern, globalised world has moved on from the need for severe mobility restrictions and heavy-handed border controls and that we would all be more prosperous if everyone could travel more easily. Unfortunately, the opposite appears to be true. With anti-immigration rhetoric increasing in the world’s richer countries, the EU is currently facing the collapse of restriction-free travel within the Schengen area (itself enabled by immense databases of people considered risky and/or foreign built in the early 2000s). However, luckily for the borders’ builders, their products—originally developed for applications in defence, security and policing, and designed to better identify and surveil individuals—are just as suited to a future in which states are walled off from one another, and movement between them is heavily monitored and restricted. If and when this future vision becomes promoted instead of seamlessness largely depends upon the political moment and intended audience.

Travis Van Isacker is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol working in the Moving Domain of the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures. His research focuses on the transformation of border infrastructures through the application of new digital technologies. Travis has written previously for the MMB blog on ‘Environmental racism in the borderland: the case of Calais‘.

Find out more about the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures here.

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‘Slaves’, migrants and museums: the struggle for places of African memory in Brazil

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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 Julio D’Angelo Davies.

Brazil is built on slavery. It was the Americas’ largest importer of enslaved Africans, with Rio de Janeiro serving as the country’s main port of entry. Despite receiving nearly half of these five million enslaved people, Brazil’s former capital (1763-1960) did not have a single museum nor permanent exhibition on this key aspect of its transnational history until December 2021, when the Museum of History and Afro-Brazilian Culture (MUHCAB) was inaugurated in Rio’s Little Africa neighbourhood. The black presence that is a legacy of slavery has historically been neglected or erased in ideological storytelling about the nation (Lopes de Santos, 2023). Brazil’s widespread investment in museums and simultaneous negligence of places of Afro-Brazilian memory is indicative of how it still struggles to overcome centuries of racism and inequality. The federal government’s 2023 announcement of another African heritage museum near MUHCAB suggests that the city’s lack of memorialisation of the history of slavery is gradually being rectified.

Remnants of Valongo Wharf Heritage Site in Rio de Janeiro, January 2023 (image: author’s own)

Until the 1770s slave traders’ human cargo was off-loaded at Praia do Peixe docklands then sold at Rua Direita, the main street in colonial Rio de Janeiro. But in 1774, it was determined that the Peixe docks were not the ‘appropriate’ site to receive ‘Africans arriving full of diseases and wandering naked on Rua Direita’ (Ribeiro, 2020). With a view to ‘protecting Brazilians’ Cais do Valongo was established as an alternative port of entry for the enslaved Africans, receiving around 900,000 of them in total.

Trafficked people arriving in Valongo were transferred to a quarantine hospital built by slave traders known as Lazaretto. The survivors were ‘fattened’ before being sold in commercial houses near Valongo. Those who did not survive were taken to the Cemetery of New Blacks. It is estimated that here, between 1772 and 1830, some 20,000 to 30,000 corpses were disposed of without proper burial or funeral, thrown one on top of the other and eventually incinerated. After the closure of Valongo in 1831, Brazilian businessmen continued to openly import trafficked Africans until the 1850s in remote coastal places despite the international prohibition of the slave trade.

Commercial slavery houses near Valongo, January 2023 (image: author’s own)

Today, the Institute of Research and Memory New Blacks (Instituto de Pesquisa e Memória Pretos Novos, IPN) stands above the site of the cemetery. It is one of only two places memorialising slavery in Rio and was founded in 2005 after an accidental discovery. As explained on a plaque at the museum entrance, IPN director Merced Guimarães originally bought an old house on the plot to renovate as a home for her family. On the first day of rebuilding the foundations, however, a large quantity of human remains was discovered and it was eventually concluded that this was a burial site for enslaved Africans. Dislodged from their residence, Merced’s family moved to the warehouse where their small business operated. They camped out here for four years waiting for support from municipal and federal governments to fully excavate the site and create a memorial. Tired of waiting, they returned to their plot of land. With the support of activists, researchers and friends, Merced’s family worked to create a memorial to the enslaved. Since its opening, IPN has survived with little state support and investment.

The second site of memory also derives from an accidental discovery (Andrade Lima, 2020). In the preparations to host the 2016 Olympics, the downtown streets of Rio de Janeiro were dug up to build a tram system and in 2011 construction workers uncovered the remnants of Cais do Valongo. This was designated by UNESCO in 2017 as a World Heritage Site in recognition of it being the remains of the most significant landing point of human trafficking in the Americas.

The excavations of this site, led by Brazilian archaeologist Tania Andrade Lima, found many personal objects such as charms, ornaments, small children’s rings and sacred objects from Congo, Angola and Mozambique: ‘These urban slaves did not have many belongings and everything of theirs was perishable, made of straw, of cloth. We found some elements of personal use and some objects related to children,’ Andrade Lima said in an interview to O Globo in 2014. However, these important and powerful finds still wait for a home in a permanent museum where they can be displayed to the public.

The two sites that now memorialise the lives and deaths of enslaved people arriving at Valongo are a powerful testimony to civil society and Black struggles for recognition as well as to official neglect. The fact that at the same moment as Andrade Lima’s archaeological findings were in the public eye Rio’s mayor funded the USD 100 million Museum of Tomorrow, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, suggests that this has been a matter of prioritisation rather than lack of funds (Freelon, 2017). The long wait for a museum to house Andrade Lima’s findings, the lack of investment in the IPN and the literal coverage of Valongo by landfill are testaments to the fact that Brazil’s history of slavery has been obscured by private and public actors.

Celebrating Brazil’s ethnic and racial diversity, São Paulo and Rio inaugurated immigration museums in 1993 and 2010, respectively. Both spaces were formerly quarantine hostels for European, Middle Eastern and Asian immigrants, inaugurated in 1883 in Rio and 1887 in São Paulo. But migration has been racialised as white in Brazil. Unlike ‘slaves’, migrants are typically imagined as European bearers of the culture at the centre of the country’s ‘melting pot’. In 2004 the Afro-Brazil Museum was founded in São Paulo thanks to the efforts of Emanoel Araújo, who explains: ‘this story could not be told from the official viewpoint, which insists on minimizing the African heritage as the matrix that forms a national identity, ignoring a saga of more than five centuries of history’ (Araújo, nd). Meanwhile, Salvador, the capital of Bahia, Brazil’s blackest state, only had its Museum of Afro-Brazilian National Culture inaugurated in 2009.

Future museum overlooking Valongo, January 2023 (image: author’s own)

In March 2023, Brazil’s federal government finally announced a USD 3 million project to convert the warehouse facing Valongo into a museum, expected to be inaugurated in November 2026. The building was constructed in 1871 by Brazilian black engineer and abolitionist André Rebouças, who forbade the use of an enslaved labour force in the construction 17 years before the official Abolition of Slavery (1888). Activists and civil society refused to name it the Slavery Museum to avoid further stigmatising and dehumanising of the victims. The long wait for a museum to house Andrade Lima’s archaeological findings, the lack of investment in the IPN and the literal coverage of Valongo by landfill all highlight the fact that Brazil’s history of slavery has been sidelined by private and public actors in the epicentre of the Transatlantic slave trade. Thanks to civil society, activists and academics, the memorialisation of African heritage is gaining increasing attention in the 21st century.

Julio D’Angelo Davies is an anthropologist focussing on migrations, diasporas, gender and processes of nation-formation and racialisation. In 2022 he completed his PhD in Anthropology at Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil). Based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, his thesis discusses the formation of Lebanese diasporas in Montreal (Canada). He worked as Research Associate at the University of Bristol (2022-2024) on the project Modern Marronage?: the Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World led by Professor Julia O’Connell Davidson. 

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Footsore/footloose: mobile foot technologies

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Borderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover.

By Radhika Subramaniam.

It was the boots that first caught my eye. They sat there, two or three, on a large table, looking in good nick, creased into a visible sense of comfort. Whether they were on view as available options or whether they had been tried on earlier that day wasn’t clear. The afternoon meal and distribution were done and people had dispersed. All around the table were crates, each labelled by size, piled with pairs of shoes, their laces knotting them together.

The boots were in the ‘warehouse’. Everyone called it that in English, and it was hard to know what to expect as we drove through quiet Calais streets lined with rocks, the ubiquitous ‘borderscaping’ to which Victoria Hattam has drawn attention. But warehouse it really was, a cavernous shed located on a side street, impeccably organized with every kind of personal gear. Clothes and shoes, children’s toys, electrical gear as well as sleeping bags, blankets, tents and logs were stacked in well demarcated zones. The stated purpose of L’Auberge des Migrants, which operates the facility in partnership with several other migrant support initiatives, is to be a logistical and humanitarian platform for people in exile, providing material support and advocacy. The warehouse (‘entrepôt’ in French on their website) in Calais is both a distribution centre for materials as well as for tinned food, hot meals and conversation.

Walking boots in the L’Auberge des Migrants warehouse, Calais, April 2024 (photo: author’s own)

I have been thinking a lot about feet of late, how their agency and mobility have been sedentarized into weighty, leaden traces to which the metaphors of carbon footprints, digital footprints and building footprints testify. But feet are meant to wander, making shoes a quintessential mobile technology. Foot coverings not only make it possible to go farther and faster; their lack can substantially hinder movement, especially in a world unfriendly to the bare foot. Even as shod feet are a mark of urbanity and civilization, unshod feet can come to signify poverty, unworldliness, even mental illness. For those who want to be on the move, who must travel atop variable surfaces, in different seasons, there are few needs more important than footwear. Those on the road who come to the warehouse look for boots, sneakers or trainers, and shower slippers.

Emptied personal belongings have a powerful charge. Artists and anthropologists have explored personal and political issues through the material artifacts of forced and voluntary migration – as, for instance, Ai Wei Wei’s public installations with orange life jackets or anthropologist Jason De Leon’s collections of backpacks, water bottles and photographs as part of the Undocumented Migration Project. Piles of shoes are some of the most gripping memorials of the Holocaust exhibited in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, Berlin’s Jewish Museum and Auschwitz. Imprinted with the residue of the person, they are also a reminder of a life’s extinguishment. In the warehouse, although the boots had been worn, they still looked purposeful.

Boots and shoes stored in the L’Auberge des Migrants warehouse, Calais, April 2024 (photo: author’s own)

Provisioning is not the only way shoes insert themselves into the cross-currents of migration politics. In 2005, Argentinean artist Judi Werthein premiered a project called Brinco as part of inSite, an organization that produced collaborative artistic projects and public interventions in the San Diego–Tijuana region of the U.S. –Mexico borderlands. Werthein launched a pair of sneakers under the trademark Brinco (Jump) to expose the differential policies and contradictions that impact and control international borders, labour and migration. The sneakers were outfitted with a mini-compass, a flashlight, insoles that doubled as a map indicating the best crossing points and alerting people to treacherous terrain, the image of a saint of migrants and a pocket for money or painkillers. In Tijuana, Werthein distributed the sneakers for free to migrants intending to cross the border, while on the U.S. side they were sold in an exclusive boutique as a limited-edition art object. She had the sneakers manufactured in China to underscore how the transnational movement of cheap goods and commodities works in direct opposition to the regulations and barriers to the movement of people. The project sparked controversy and personal threats to the artist, opposed by those who felt she was aiding and abetting illegal immigration.

In June 2018, Oxfam released a briefing paper Nowhere But Out about the failure of the French and Italian authorities to help refugees and migrants stranded in the Italian town of Ventimiglia. France had re-established border controls in 2015, effectively suspending the free movement guaranteed between Schengen states. Many of those who crossed the border into France were being returned to Italy. The report accused the French border police of forms of callous violence, such as confiscating mobile phones and SIM cards and forcing people to return on foot. The report also quoted the Oxfam Open Europe project leader, Chiara Romagna, who said, ‘Some children even had the soles of their shoes cut off, before being sent back to Italy.’ Of course, evoking the child victim is a humanitarian trope that draws on what Miriam Ticktin identifies as the innocence they embody. Still, surely some children could be carried, shoes or not. Even as routine border violence goes, cutting off the soles of shoes is inept and strangely spiteful. Why target shoes?

These boots are made for walkin’, as the song goes. Tents and backpacks might be as snail shells, the homes we carry, but shoes are emphatically not houses for feet. To the footloose and footsore alike, they kick at the heels and in so doing, they seem to kick up enough dust to strike a political nerve. There is more symbolic heft knotted into those laced boots than we imagine – and a resolute and relentless drive to movement in every ordinary pair of feet.

Radhika Subramaniam is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design/The New School in New York City. With an interdisciplinary practice as curator and writer, she explores crises and surprises as they emerge in urban life, walking, art and human-nonhuman relationships. Her book, Footprint: Four Itineraries, is forthcoming in 2025.

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New questions for the UK’s seasonal worker scheme

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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 Lydia Medland.

The pen asks: ‘Need seasonal workers?’ It’s a freebie from a horticultural event aimed at fruit growers. The expected answer is, ‘yes’. On the other side of the pen is the name of an agency that sponsors workers to come to the UK. Where will the workers come from? Neither agent nor grower is expected to care. How will they be recruited? The agency is one of seven licensed operators (six of which recruit for horticulture) legally permitted to sponsor migrant workers for work in UK fields, polytunnels, glasshouses and packhouses.

Promotional pen from a horticultural trade show, 2023 (photo by Lydia Medland)

This Seasonal Worker Visa (SWV) is the post-Brexit scheme to fill the horticultural labour market shortage that occurred after many EU nationals stopped coming to the UK to pick fruit following Brexit. This had followed a period where no visa scheme was in place (2014-2018) when the UK relied entirely on EU nationals via EU Freedom of Movement. Nevertheless, an earlier scheme, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS), dated back, in mostly low numbers, to the post-war era.

Under the current scheme, seasonal workers are restricted to a six month stay in the UK. If workers are unhappy with the farm on which they are ‘placed’, they may request a transfer. Transfers are not guaranteed. When workers are dismissed for any reason (including for working slower than the firm considers normal) they risk being sent home early. The scheme does not permit workers access to public funds or to bring family members. The SWV ties workers to a single employer meaning that vulnerabilities to risks of labour exploitation, debt and other serious challenges are tangible.

One of the big differences between SWV and SAWS is that the new scheme has a global reach meaning seasonal workers are now very nationally diverse. This raises important questions that have not filtered through to public debate:

1. How can workers from a wide range of very different countries be supported?

According to Home Office statistics, in 2022, workers of 62 nationalities came to the UK on temporary visas to do seasonal agricultural work. Such a range of people from different contexts and backgrounds brings an expanding range of needs. Some growers are attempting to respond to needs by, for example, offering prayer rooms. However, other requirements such as linguistic diversity are more difficult to accommodate, particularly in isolated rural locations.

Crucially, lack of effective communication can make it difficult for people to know their labour rights. For example, the retailer-funded Just Good Work App aimed at seasonal workers conveys information about working rights in the UK. However, I found it defaulted to a choice of English or Russian after the registration pages. This is a signal that something as simple as an app is not enough to enable communication between workers, their employers (growers) and intermediaries. Workers often feel pressure from supervisors when they have their hands full with tasks; this is not a context where they can easily use translation apps without losing time and missing targets. The question of how to support the linguistic diversity of workers cannot then be reduced to a smartphone application.

2. Does the distance that seasonal workers travel matter?

The research around the debts accrued by seasonal workers to fund their travel and time in the UK has found distance has important consequences. Workers responsible for paying their own air fares incur high transport costs when they travel long distances. There is currently movement towards an employer pays principle, which would shift the cost of the workers’ visas and flights to the grower. But one of the reasons for the demand for seasonal migrant workers is that growers suffer from the low prices that they receive from retailers (mostly supermarkets). Shifting further costs onto growers may add to this problem. I would like to see the introduction of a retailer pays principle, where costs are carried by supermarkets who receive the highest added value from the fruit and veg they sell. Worker groups are now calling for this.

Moreover, in the context of climate change, we should consider the ecological impacts of a scheme which is global in reach and encourages regular short-term movement of people to the UK and home again. Short-termism is written into the scheme because there is no route to settlement for workers. The practice of recruitment of workers from within Europe not only meant that workers recruited had more rights within the labour market (before Brexit), making them less at risk of exploitation than current visa workers, but it led to a lower carbon footprint for the sector. Regularly flying workers around the world to produce ‘local fruit’ is a contradiction with an environmental cost.

3. Can recruiters be more aware and engaged with contexts of origin?

The SWV has had some early problems. These included the discovery by policy makers, thanks to NGO and journalist research, that many workers from Nepal and Indonesia were paying brokers large sums of money in order to gain access to the scheme, and subsequently accruing large debts to work. The UK government responded to this by revoking a license from one of the scheme operators, and suspending another. In the wake of reports documenting worker indebtedness and labour exploitation, the UK’s Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, arranged bilateral meetings and a signing of agreements on information-sharing and worker protection with the governments of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in May 2023, two major countries of origin for SWV workers.

These responses to problems are reactive, framed as exceptions to a norm. The system is designed for prospective workers anywhere in the world to apply with an email. While on the face of it this is ‘open access’, for those with no English or prior knowledge of the UK or its government, using an intermediary is a logical thing to do. It is therefore no surprise that workers use brokers, especially in countries (for example, Indonesia) where the use of brokers is common and well-documented in academic research. These events are part of a context-blindness in which few efforts are made to understand the situations of prospective workers approaching the system from outside the UK labour market. In aiming to reach workers ‘globally’, the SWV system obliges potential migrantised workers to do all the cultural and linguistic work, and face all the risks of having their contexts, languages and needs little understood.

Not all seasonal migration programmes work this way. Canada, France and Spain use bilateral agreements that give both states of origin and destination responsibilities to temporary seasonal workers. Canada’s scheme is open to citizens of 12 countries (from Mexico and the Caribbean). Spain and France are subject to the EU Seasonal Workers Directive and have bilateral agreements to govern specific relationships. Spain’s system involves seven countries; France’s relevant bilateral agreements cover 19 countries. The UK’s open market approach is subcontracted through labour agents so bilateral arrangements including safeguards for workers rarely occur.

My pen keeps asking its question: ‘Need seasonal workers?’ The world does need seasonal workers. Harvests are seasonal, our food is seasonal, and we need our food. However, do seasonal workers need to be pro-actively recruited from a global rural labour force? I am not sure. Reports continue to emphasise needs for reform, particularly removing the tied nature of visas and allowing workers to access public services. Is this enough? Building a workforce requires continuity, reliability, exchange, connection, understanding and the development of skills. A better way of building such connections needed in the SWV could also include better linguistic support, verified intermediaries who are not sponsors, and a systematic role for trade unions to facilitate freedom of association as one of the core labour standards, so easily overlooked in the market-orientated UK context.

Lydia Medland is a Research Fellow in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She is currently the Principal Investigator of the British-Academy funded project Working for 5 a Day: Research on risk and resilience in the changing food system, which explores work in the horticultural sector in England.

In a previous MMB blogpost Lydia has asked ‘Does it matter that the UK relies on migrant workers to harvest food?‘

Read the introduction to this special blog series from the SPAIS Migration Research Group here.

Moving as being: introducing the SPAIS Migration Group blog series

Posted on by Emily

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

By Samuel Okyere.

Welcome to the MMB special series by the SPAIS Migration Group, a collective of researchers in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol who are engaged in researching and teaching topics related to migration and mobilities. Many members of the group are themselves migrants with first-hand knowledge of the vagaries of border controls and other experiences associated with the migrant status. Since its establishment in October 2023 the group has worked hard to establish a community for migration researchers in SPAIS as part of its remit to develop migration research and teaching within our School, University and beyond. This has been achieved through seminars, peer-support for draft scholarly publications and grant applications, and mentorship for early career scholars among other efforts. This blog series showcases some of the remarkable migration research and scholarship by our members and in so doing expresses our group’s unique identity. 

(Image by Karen Lau on Unsplash)

The phenomena of migration and the movement of people have always been inherent to the human experience. Contrary to the narrative that portrays these as recent occurrences, for centuries many groups and individuals across the world have migrated temporarily or permanently across geographic, cultural and socioeconomic borders for purposes such as education, marriage, exploration, avoiding socio-political conflicts, responding to climatic events and humanitarian emergencies, and seeking better life opportunities. The difference is that the politics, practices and attitudes towards the phenomenon of continued global migration in this era have become extremely polarised as shown by the dramatic surge in far-right parties and groups in Europe on the back of anti-immigrant sentiments and the ongoing anti-migrant riots in parts of the UK at the time of writing this post. Tensions can arise from concerns about strain on public services and infrastructure. However, the polarisation and growing antagonism towards migrants as characterised by the ‘us’ and ‘them’ sentiment is majorly underpinned by exclusion, race and racism, nationalism, islamophobia and other kinds of religious intolerance. 

The SPAIS Migration Group’s MMB blog series examines these themes and other complexities surrounding the fundamental human right and need to move. The series is timely for several reasons. Firstly, it draws on findings from recent, extensive research conducted by the group’s members in various regions including Europe, Southeast and East Asia, South America and Sub-Saharan Africa to show the globally significant nature of the issues under discussion. The contributions collectively reveal that the portrayal of migration as a crisis and the resulting moral panic are deliberate tactics aimed at limiting migrants and their rights, rather than supporting them. The series brings into sharp relief some of the anti-migrant systems that have emerged as an outcome of the portrayal of migration as a crisis.

Notably, the post by Nicole Hoellerer and Katharine Charsley underlines how bi-national couples are increasingly being pressured into marriage by the UK’s restrictive spouse and partner immigration regulations. Hoellerer and Charsley demonstrate that although the British government claims to oppose ‘forced marriage’, the timing and choice of partner for migrants are not ‘free’ but instead largely influenced by migration policies designed to address the migrant ‘crises’ or control the number of immigrants. The same systemic challenges are created by the UK’s seasonal worker visa (SWV) as Lydia Medland’s blog shows. The SWV scheme, created to fill the horticultural labour market shortage after a lack of EU nationals coming to the UK to pick fruit following Brexit, ties workers to a single employer. As widely documented with other ‘tied’ work visas, the SWV scheme, which is also aimed at preventing migrants from settling in the UK, has similarly exposed migrant workers to severe labour exploitation, worker abuse and debt. 

Secondly, this blog series provides valuable insights into how attitudes to migrants and the associated notion of who belongs or not to the nation state and under what terms are underwritten by racism and ethnic discrimination. This is revealed in Minjae Shin’s post, which discusses how debates around military service in South Korea are closely intertwined with the notion of race, ethnicity and masculinity. Popular rhetoric casts Korean nationals with dual heritage as being ineligible for the country’s mandatory military service, a way of rejecting their equality with ethnically ‘pure’ Koreans and hence their right to equal citizenship. In Brazil, Julio D’Angelo Davies’ shows that notions of ‘race’ and ‘belonging’ are implicitly inscribed through the omission of the country’s African heritage from official nation-building narratives. Migration to Brazil and the founding of the state is presented as an activity that involved white Europeans despite the evidence of the country’s multi-racial make up. The racial politics of migration in Brazil is further exemplified by Maeli Farias’ blog on the Bolsonaro administration’s approach to Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers in that country.

Meanwhile, Magda Mogilnicka’s assessment of attitudes towards racial minorities among Polish and Ukrainian migrants in the UK offers further lessons on the inextricable links between racial or ethnic discrimination, migration and belonging. Her blog shows that some Eastern Europeans hold crude racist and Islamophobic stereotypes. However, Mogilnicka cautions against rhetoric that casts East Europeans as racists, struggling to fit into a multicultural Britian. This is not just because racism and Islamophobia remain rife in Britain itself, but also because many East Europeans eventually embrace cultural diversity and make efforts to either live in diverse neighbourhoods or make friendships with those they perceive as racially or ethnically other. 

The blogs in this series also underline how migrants in the different regions and cultures where contributors conducted their research are seeking to navigate the systems of exclusion and fundamental human rights violations that have become a normalised part of their experience. Here, our contributors interdisciplinary research and case studies reveal the ways in which experiences of migration and attitudes towards migrants are strongly linked to factors such as racial and ethnic discrimination, homophobia, Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination that construct some migrant groups as a threat and systematically exclude them from access to welfare, rights and justice. Maite Ibáñez Bollerhoff’s blog on the experiences of Muslim refugee women in Germany shows how these barriers occur at the intersection of gender, religion and refugee status. This theme is also the focus of Natalie Brinham’s post on how Rohingya refugees seek to make life liveable in a context where they have been issued ID cards that make a mockery of the principles of ‘freedom’ and ‘protection’, which the cards are supposed to offer.  

 This blog series above all underlines the SPAIS Migration Group’s identity as:  

  1. a group of scholars committed to collaboratively expanding the current theoretical, methodological and empirical boundaries for studying and understanding the lived experiences of migrants; and
  2. a group of migration scholars committed to exposing the creation and value of borders as an affront to the right to move and the wider experience of being human. 

Samuel Okyere is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bristol where he leads the Migration Research Group in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS). His research interests include child labour and child work, migration, trafficking, ‘modern slavery’ and contemporary abolitionism. He is currently Co-I on the five-year European Research Council funded project Modern Marronage: The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World.

Samuel has written previously on the MMB blog about ‘Migrant deaths and the impact on those left behind’.