(Im)mobility in Buenos Aires (1929-2023)

By Jo Crow.

I travelled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in November 2023 to research the First Conference of Latin American Communist Parties, a key transnational meeting that took place in 1929. I also presented my work at the Universidad de San Andrés, thanks to an invitation from the head of its History postgraduate programme Dr Eduardo Zimmermann, and met with Dr Gimena del Rio Riande, President of the Argentine Association of Digital Humanities, who has made critical contributions to global debates in this dynamic and burgeoning field.   

I thought a lot about mobility and movement (or lack of it) on this trip. Immigration at Buenos Aires Ezeiza International Airport was quick and easy for me. The immigration officer politely asked about the purpose of my trip and was intrigued by my interest in Argentine history. We spent longer talking about the latter than we did about where I was staying or how long my stay would be. I wondered if such a swift and friendly border-encounter was enabled by my whiteness, academic title and British passport. I tried to picture what the process was like for the international delegates arriving in Argentina (by land or sea) for the Conference of Latin American Communist Parties nearly a century earlier. They may well have experienced class- and race-based barriers. Their biggest problem, however, was probably party-political affiliation: many delegates represented illegal and persecuted Communist Parties and travelled to Buenos Aires incognito, crossing borders without Argentine and other state authorities knowing.

Statue of Nicolás Avellaneda, President of Argentina (1874-1880), in the main square of Avellaneda (author’s photograph, 2023)

The conference’s main discussion sessions took place in the premises of the Avellaneda district committee of the Communist Party of Argentina (PCA) (Jeifets and Jeifets, 2023). When I first started researching this transnational meeting, I imagined Avellaneda as a peripheral space, an industrial suburb on the remote outskirts of Buenos Aires. But, in fact, it is one of the most important municipalities of Buenos Aires Province – just as it was a hundred years ago. In the 1920s, it had not just one, but two major football stadiums. It was also home to the Central Produce Market, Argentina’s largest wholesaler, as well as major textile mills, meat-packing plants and grain-processing centres.

I walked from central Buenos Aires to Avellaneda to find the building of the PCA’s district committee. I also walked around central Buenos Aires, looking for the offices of La Correspondencia Sudamericana, the official mouthpiece of the South American Secretariat (SSA) of the Communist International, which organised the 1929 conference together with the PCA. The SSA was set up in 1925 with its headquarters in Buenos Aires, and the address of its magazine was printed on the front cover: first on Calle Estados Unidos, then, by the time of the conference, on Avenida Independencia (see images below). Both are major thoroughfares traversing this port city. Whilst many delegates at the conference represented Communist Parties (or SSA-affiliated parties) that were banned and operated underground elsewhere on the continent, the PCA and the SSA were functioning relatively openly. Being able to visit the offices where the SSA published its magazine in the 1920s and hearing the clamour of the space and watching people move through it helped me to appreciate how much the Communist Party was beginning to become part of everyday life in Buenos Aires in that period.

La Correspondencia Sudamericana No. 2, April 1926
La Correspondencia Sudamericana No. 16, August 1929

But the Argentina of 1929 was very different to the Argentina of today. In the early twentieth century, it ranked among the ten richest economies in the world (Scobie, 1971; Rock, 1993). In the twenty-first century, Argentina is routinely viewed as part of the ‘developing world’, ‘Third World’, or ‘Global South’ (Beattie, 2009). Its current inflation crisis and expanding recession – one in a succession of economic crises in modern Argentine history – have made headlines around the world. In the early twentieth century, by contrast, millions of people from Europe – especially from Italy and Spain – migrated to Argentina in search of a better life. The country was home to the largest number of immigrants after the United States. Now it is experiencing a wave of emigration to Europe and North America, as it did in in the early 2000s. This option is not available to all, however. More than 50% of the population are living in poverty (Calatrava, 2024) and don’t have the means to travel to the Global North.

The economic crisis is one of the reasons that right-wing libertarian Javier Milei won the presidential elections in November 2023; the election was the day I flew home from Buenos Aires. Since taking power, Milei has introduced ‘shock therapy’ reforms and issued a sweeping (and, according to some Argentine judges, unconstitutional) presidential decree deregulating vast swathes of the economy. This response to economic turmoil – standstill or, indeed, shrinking of the economy – impacts public cultural institutions, research institutes and universities enormously. Some recently appointed staff have been dismissed, many of those with job ‘security’ have seen their salaries suspended, and funding for doctoral scholarships has been slashed (see the recent article in Nature: ‘Despair’: Argentinian researchers protest as president begins dismantling science).

Just before leaving Argentina, I met with Gimena del Rio Riande, Researcher at CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas) and Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at the IIBICRIT (Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas y Crítica Textual). We spoke about the economic crisis and people feeling trapped. We also spoke about the state of the field of Digital Humanities – the huge potential for doing exciting research (for example, having on-line access to medieval texts and being able to read them as a full corpus in new ways) but also the limitations and problems, not least the emphasis on ‘thinking big’, which sometimes risks sidelining the concrete detail, the specifics of our primary source materials, or the focused questions (about people, places or texts) that interest us as individual researchers. Large-scale, multi-partner teams can move things on at a tremendous pace, but individual interventions and viewpoints can get lost, overlooked or stuck within these.

We also discussed the linguistic and social inequalities bound up in a field that continues to be dominated by the Anglophone world and often depends on expensive infrastructures. Dr del Rio Riande has published extensively in both English and Spanish on some of these issues (for example, Global Debates in the Digital Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and ¿En qué lengua citamos cuando escribimos sobre Humanidades Digitales?). We hope to welcome her here to the School of Modern Languages and MMB in the summer, to give a talk on Digital Humanities in Latin America and lead a workshop on open research practices.          

Jo Crow is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol and Associate Director (Research Development) of MMB. Her current research investigates the production of knowledge and circulation of ideas about race through four international congresses in twentieth-century Latin America. Her latest book is Itinerant Ideas: Race, Indigeneity and Cross-Border Intellectual Encounters in Latin America (1900-1950) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Read more about it in Jo’s previous MMB blogpost, ‘Roots and routes: debating indigenous rights in twentieth-century Latin America.’

Instead of separating thousands more families – rethink UK family migration policies

By Katharine Charsley and Helena Wray.

Last week, new immigration rules were laid before parliament that will force thousands of British citizens and settled residents to live apart from their partner and even their children. This is because the Minimum Income Requirement (MIR) to bring a non-British partner to the UK is going to rise to £29,000 in April, and to £38,700 in early 2025 (the staggering of the increase was announced only after a public outcry).

The MIR has been a source of anguish since it was introduced in 2012, replacing a simpler test of ‘adequate maintenance’. As it has not risen from the original £18,600, it is easy to see why the government would now consider an increase. However, the MIR has already caused family separation and hardship, and the increase will make things worse.

The MIR is inflexible, being concerned with only one question: the income of the UK partner on application. Changes to the household income after entry, regardless of the incoming spouse’s potential contribution, are irrelevant. As a result, a British parent who cares for children, who works part-time or is still in education or training may be unable to meet the MIR even if the family’s financial position would be transformed once their partner joins them. In addition, meeting the MIR is not just a matter of having the right income, but of having it for at least six months, often longer, before the application. People in casualised work, the self-employed or those returning from abroad often find this challenging if not impossible. Exceptions designed to meet the government’s human rights obligations exist, but they are often difficult to obtain and can require expensive legal advice and an appeal.

(Image: Nenad Stojkovic on Flickr)

The benefits of the MIR are unclear. The government’s twin rationales have been to ensure families have financial resources for integration, and to ensure new entrants do not impose a burden on the welfare system. But those on family visas are already ineligible for public funds, and the costs of the 5-year partner visa process now exceed £11,000 – leaving some families struggling to meet basic needs. Indeed, by refusing so many partners, the MIR creates enforced single parents, so it only increases financial hardship and welfare reliance.

The rationale for the new figure is also unclear. The government has not consulted the Migration Advisory Committee (as it did in 2012), and the new MIR is not tied to the full-time National Living Wage (less than £24,000). The only explanation given is that the government wants to link the MIR to the minimum salary for skilled migrant workers. Leaving aside that even the skilled worker minimum has exceptions, this seems arbitrary.  Family migration policy concerns the minimum conditions for allowing citizens and residents to enjoy family life with a non-UK partner. Why should this depend on meeting a criterion set for an entirely different category: skilled migrants coming to the UK for work?

The MIR is discriminatory. The old minimum of £18,600 cannot be met by 20-25% of the UK’s working population, and has always particularly impacted those tending to earn less: women, young people, some ethnic minorities and those outside London and Southeast England. The increase exacerbates this injustice: 40-60% of the working population do not earn £29,000, and the vast majority will be excluded by the higher threshold of £38,700. The government estimates that between 10,000 and 30,000 people will be affected each year, but it could be much higher as UK-EU couples outside the settlement scheme now also come under the immigration rules.

The manner of the introduction of these changes has been cruel. British spouses make major life changes to meet the visa requirements: changing jobs, making difficult choices between caring obligations and working longer hours, or moving back to the UK alone to earn enough to be joined by their family. They make these changes months in advance, enduring prolonged family separation to find work, earn the MIR over six months and then wait for their application to be processed. Increasing the MIR in April, with less than six months’ notice, leaves those who had been assiduously working towards the visa requirements – often at great cost to their family lives – with their plans destroyed.

The UK’s family migration policies are among the most restrictive in the world – a House of Lords Committee found they ‘fail both families and society’. There are many reasons why families need to live together in the UK – which is after all the home of at least one partner – and there is a pile of evidence as to the deep unhappiness, financial stress and loneliness caused by the system, including to children. This will sadly increase once the new MIR applies.

Living in your home with your partner should not be a privilege only for the wealthy. It is time for a total rethink. We have written to the main opposition parties asking them to include a commitment to review the family migration rules in their election manifestos.  

Helena Wray is Professor of Migration Law at the University of Exeter where her research focuses on the regulation of families through immigration law. Her latest monograph, published by Hart in 2023, is Article 8 ECHR, Family Reunification and the UK’s Supreme Court: Family Matters? She is currently working on the ESRC funded Brexit Couples project looking at the impact of the immigration rules on UK-EU couples after Brexit.

Katharine Charsley is Professor of Migration 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.

To learn about the impact of the new Minimum Income Requirement on universities, read Eda Yazici’s recent MMB blogpost, ‘Debordering Higher Education’. And for a previous study on the impact of the UK immigration system on families see Katharine’s blogpost from 2020, ‘Kept apart – couples and families separated by the UK immigration system’.

Obstacles and aspirations: stories from young refugees in the UK education system

By Jáfia Naftali Câmara.

Refugee Stories: Education: Obstacles and Aspirations‘ draws on findings from my doctoral research project on young refugees’ educational experiences in the UK. The study investigated how young refugee people and their families have encountered the education system while considering the implications of living as refugees in England. Young refugee people’s right to education is enshrined in British law; however, the UK has no specific educational policy for them.

Invisibilizing practices add to the silence around their experiences and needs. ‘Refugee Stories’ tells young refugees’ and families’ stories to amplify their voices and shine a light on the social and material conditions they experience.

How ‘Refugee Stories’ was born

Cover of ‘Refugee Stories’ (illustration by ARC Studios in collaboration with participants and Jáfia Naftali Câmara)

I volunteered as an English as an Additional Language (EAL) tutor to young refugees at a secondary school in the South of England. I also volunteered at local organizations advocating for refugee people and fundraising to facilitate their access to phones and internet at home. Through volunteering, I built connections with three families who expressed interest in participating in my research. While most research tends to be school-based, I focused on working directly with families to understand how they encountered England’s education system. Particularly, I was interested in how policy meets lived experience. The mothers often asked me to help their children with their homework or to help them access technology to continue remote schooling. I maintained contact with families and provided support when they needed it throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns implemented in England.  

As part of my methodology, I enacted an ethics of care by trying to mitigate some of the challenges they endured. Refugee families, including asylum seekers, may have limited access to resources and technology at home. Therefore, remote schooling was very challenging for them because they did not have reliable access to computers, phones and internet, and they also struggled to pay for data for their cell phones. As part of my research and commitment to support them, I tried to highlight their hardships and amplify their voices, as in this article, I co-wrote with Maria, a mother seeking asylum who participated in the study.   

Creating ‘Refugee Stories’ with families to highlight their experiences and perspectives was essential to my methodology and ethics of care. My approach to critical ethnography was to go beyond simply observing and interviewing participants but also to try and address some of the hardships that families experienced. In addition to providing schoolwork and English language support, I facilitated one family’s access to a laptop and a phone, books and art supplies for all the young people, data for their phones and access to extra-curricular activities such as football lessons. I dedicated time weekly to helping one family use their new laptop and new software needed for their schooling, including MS Teams, sending emails, creating Word and PowerPoint files and attaching files to email messages. When their schooling shifted online, young people were expected to know how to do those tasks, but some had never done it before.  

Page from ‘Refugee Stories’ (illustrations by ARC Studio in collaboration with participants and Jáfia Naftali Câmara)

As a migrant from a working-class family from the so-called ‘global south’, I understood some of the challenges that the families lived through. We developed a connection of mutual care. The mothers often cooked meals and invited me to have lunch or dinner with them. One mother baked a cake for my birthday, and their children wrote me Christmas cards and ‘thank you’ notes. ‘Refugee Stories’ was part of my methodological approach to amplify young people’s and their families’ perspectives and experiences and communicate research findings beyond academia. It was an art-science collaboration to make research findings more accessible. For example, the young people chose their pseudonyms, the appearance of their characters and what they wanted to highlight to readers. ‘Refugee Stories’ was funded by the University of Bristol’s Temple Quarter Engagement Fund, allowing me to involve families in creating the zine and pay them an honorarium for their time. 

Using ‘Refugee Stories’ for teaching and learning  

I am interested in learning how educators and students may find the zine useful for their practices. I point to a few goals I have for how this zine may support learning in classrooms:  

I adopt anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives. The zine prompts us to consider how education can acknowledge the UK, EU and US colonial histories and imperialism that permeates today, including the militarization of borders and the criminalization of migration. Colonial histories and imperial violence need to be acknowledged in education systems. 

The zine could lead to discussions on what causes people to leave their homes, migration histories, how refugees are created, and the challenges they experience trying to find safety. For example, Muhammad, a young Iraqi man portrayed in the zine, often talked about the history of Iraq and the US invasion of his country. Muhammad also highlighted that his history classes mainly studied Europe and World War II. While interesting, he wanted more history about the world, including Mesopotamia. Muhammad’s reflections indicate the need to challenge the Eurocentric nature of curricula in Western countries – what knowledge(s) and histories are erased? Whose voices are silenced?   

The zine can provide resources that connect to students’ realities. I learned from my research that curriculum content is often disconnected from young people’s realities. A young man from Eritrea in secondary school discussed that he had to annotate Shakespeare’s poems while learning to write for the first time in his third language, English. His teacher was aware that he struggled but was not aware why he faced difficulties to follow her instructions. She had no idea about his previous experiences, including that he had never been taught how to write. Resources like this one can offer mirrors of students’ own experiences, while offering windows for other students into refugee students’ lives.  

The zine can support educators in understanding the knowledge refugee students bring to the classroom. Schools may view refugee learners through a deficit-based lens and focus on what they ‘lack’: insufficient English language proficiency, no ‘formal education’, limited schooling or viewing learners through a lens of ‘trauma’. Young refugee learners bring essential knowledge(s) and different ways of knowing, being and doing. They may still be learning English but often speak or understand various languages. As demonstrated in ‘Refugee Stories’, young people are resourceful and active agents in creating their networks, helping their parents learn the language and their new country’s systems, and studying independently. England is very institutionally monolingual. Talking to the young people who participated in the study, I learned that some educators might have deficit-based views of families who speak their first language at home rather than English, thinking that the young people may struggle to learn English because they speak other languages at home. In this study, some young people were influenced by that and often stopped using some of their languages to prioritize speaking in English more often. ‘Refugee Stories’ could be used to discuss various themes such as language and multilingualism, migration and colonialism. 

I welcome your thoughts on these issues and how you may use ‘Refugee Stories’ for teaching and learning. 

READ THE COMIC HERE

Jáfia Naftali Câmara is a Brazilian scholar and Research Fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She received her PhD from the University of Bristol with a thesis on ‘Refugee Youth and Education: Aspirations and Obstacles in England’. She is currently undertaking a study on education in emergencies focusing on Brazil and other Latin American countries. 

This blogpost was originally published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education REACH programme (Research, education and action for refugees around the world) under the title ‘Refugee Stories: Education: Obstacles and Aspirations.’

Debordering Higher Education

By Eda Yazici.

On 4th December 2023, the Home Secretary announced a series of policy changes with the aim of reducing net migration. Among the changes announced was an increase in the general salary threshold for the Skilled Worker Visa from £26,200 to £38,700 a year and an increase in the salary requirement for settled people and British citizens applying to bring their partners to the UK from £18,600 to £38,700. The new threshold, which is higher than the median full-time salary of £35,000, comes at a time of persistent wage stagnation and high inflation.

Salaries in Higher Education (HE) have fallen by 20% in real terms since 2009. For those at the beginning of their academic careers, starting salaries are typically around £37,000 and are often on precarious, short-term contracts. This means that from April – when the new policy is due to come into force – it may not be possible for migrant academic teaching and research staff to begin their careers in the UK. This may make even the unsure footing of a year-long contract a distant possibility.

(Image by Redd F on Unsplash)

Under the current visa regime, applicants for a Skilled Worker Visa must be paid the higher of the going-rate for their occupation code and the £26,200 salary threshold. For example, the current going-rates for a historian and physicist are £25,600 and £32,600 respectively. For PhD graduates, postdoctoral researchers and under 26s, there are discounts of up to 30% in place on the salary threshold or the going-rate (depending on which applies). Eight weeks since the new threshold was announced, however, there is still no clarity on whether these discounts will remain in place from April. It is possible that in-line with the removal of discounts for shortage occupations, discounts for postdoctoral positions will also come to an end. If the 30% discount continues to apply, future postdoctoral researchers and teaching associates will continue to be classed as Skilled Workers. If it does not, early career academics will either be unable to begin their careers in the UK, or, if they completed their PhD in the UK, will have to apply for other, often less secure visa routes, such as the Graduate Visa, which does not have a path to settlement and is also under review.

Whether exceptions are put in place remains to be seen, but what the proposed changes do reveal is the impacts of pernicious and increasingly restrictive immigration policy on Higher Education. It also shows how immigration policy intersects with low pay in the sector. This has implications for how academic workers fight to improve their pay and conditions; the experiences of migrant workers in HE generally; and the experiences of students. The changes above signal the worrying potential of a future of a sector that is increasingly closed to migrant workers and, if wage growth remains stagnant, where academic teaching and research is progressively deskilled and undervalued.

Funding HE

Linked to the changes in the Skilled Worker Visa route are changes that came into force for the Student Visa route in January this year. Also driven by a desire to reduce net migration, it is no longer possible for postgraduate taught students to bring dependents with them to the UK. It is now only possible for Student Visa holders to be accompanied by their dependents if they are on a postgraduate research course. Not only is this racialised – with the highest number of dependent study visas issued to Nigerian and Indian citizens – but also demonstrates the conflict between the government’s determination to reduce net migration at all costs while depending on international students to prop up the unsustainable funding model in HE.

In England, HE is funded in two main ways: through student fees and direct funding. Direct funding separates teaching and research. The 2021-2022 level of funding for teaching in HE was 78% less than it was in 2010 in real terms. Student fees are expected to fund the majority of HE teaching. For so-called ‘home students’, fees were raised to a maximum of £9,250 in 2012. For international students, fees for undergraduate courses are on average £22,000 a year. There is consequently both an incentive to recruit international students – many of whom face racism and inadequate support from their institutions – and a reliance on international students for funding. At present, international student fees make up 21% of British Universities’ total income. This means that if international student numbers were to fall in line with the government’s fixation on net migration, there would be severe consequences for the financial sustainability of HE institutions. Unless the funding model were to change, this would also likely exacerbate wage stagnation and job insecurity in the sector.

The conflicting policy objectives of cutting funding and reducing net migration is indicative of the follies of dogged ideological commitment to nationalism and a small state. The impact of these conflicting policy objectives is also evident in other sectors –  most particularly in health and social care. For academic workers, challenging unjust immigration policy goes hand in hand with improving funding, pay and conditions. This also involves confronting complicity in upholding the hostile environment in the sector.

The hostile environment in HE

The hostile environment suite of policies extends borders into many aspects of everyday life and affects everyone. It determines how people apply for jobs, open bank accounts and rent homes among many other things. The hostile environment increasingly regulates universities. This includes attendance monitoring of students, which puts international students at risk of losing their visas if they miss a certain number of classes; right-to-work checks for all workers including for one-off events; and reporting staff absence among visa holders to the Home Office. The financial dependence on international student fees also means that over-compliance is widespread in the sector because institutions fear losing their licence to sponsor international students. For migrant staff and students, the hostile environment creates a culture of fear that can dissuade people from advocating for change.

For academic workers, particularly those of us who are migration researchers, debordering our institutions is as much about challenging injustice as it is about securing the future of teaching and research. This raises the question of how the deeply interconnected problems of the hostile environment, unsustainable funding models and deteriorating pay and conditions are confronted. It also highlights the importance of not viewing migration as a policy arena in isolation, making it clear that every change to the visa regime affects us all.

Eda Yazici is a Research Associate on the PRIME Project at the University of Bristol. PRIME is an international project that analyses how institutions shape the conditions of migrant labour across Europe. Prior to joining the University of Bristol, she was a Research Fellow on the Open City Project at the University of Warwick, which looked at issues of race, migration and mobility in London. Eda’s PhD research focused on race, place and belonging in the British asylum system.

Reporting Sounds: the lived impact of UK Home Office reporting on the lives of asylum seekers

By Amanda Schmid-Scott.

Forty minutes into the bus journey that takes me from the bustling streets of Bristol’s city centre, through Bishopston and Horfield, and slowly along Gloucester Road, with its vibrant array of independent shops and cafes, we eventually head onto the busy dual carriage way. As we leave the shopfronts and people on foot behind, the bus eventually stops. At the side of the dual carriage way, I disembark and cars rush past at 60 mph. In order to cross to the other side of the road, I am forced to make a run for it when there is a gap in the traffic. I arrive at Patchway police station which, approximately seven miles from central Bristol, is the official immigration reporting centre for the city and the surrounding area. Immigration reporting, often referred to as ‘signing’, is a compulsory requirement for migrants without legal status, including asylum-seekers who are awaiting a decision on their asylum claim. Framed by the Home Office as an administrative procedure, migrants are required to present themselves regularly (usually once a week, or bi-weekly) to one of 13 reporting centres located throughout the UK as a condition of immigration bail.

Today is my first day volunteering with Bristol Signing Support, a group who regularly attends the reporting centre at Patchway to offer practical and emotional support to migrants in what can be a frightening and often isolating experience. This is due to the fact that the Home Office, as well as using reporting appointments as a means of keeping track of the whereabouts of migrants pending legal status, utilise these sites to target potential deportees. This means that each time an individual attends their reporting appointment, they face possible detainment and removal from the UK.

I volunteered with the Bristol Signing Support group for a year from May 2017, and as part of my doctoral research conducted interviews with asylum-seekers subjected to immigration reporting, as well as fellow volunteers and asylum support workers involved in various local community organisations. Over time, I recognised how, alongside the often extreme fear many migrants experience of being detained during their reporting appointments, these sites also impose more surreptitious, mundane forms of harm. Accounts of those subjected to reporting requirements reveals how these often hidden and hard-to-reach reporting sites enforce a continuum of violence, steering migrants towards subjugation, destitution and removal (Schmid-Scott, forthcoming).

Home Office reporting, interactive map (image: Reporting Sounds website)

With funding I obtained during a postdoctoral research fellowship at Newcastle University, I collated a selection of my research interviews to produce Reporting Sounds, an interactive website enabling users to explore the impact of immigration reporting on the lives of asylum-seekers living in the UK. Designed in the form of a map of Bristol, the website combines hand-drawn pen-and-ink illustrations with audio-recorded stories from my field research. These testimonies situate the various harms that are imposed on asylum-seekers in relation to their immigration reporting requirements, invoking the ways in which the impact of reporting affects their everyday lives. These experiences are focused around five individual stories, each indicative of the continuum of violence which constitutes the UK’s asylum process. By centring on their experiences of immigration reporting, these stories connect the administrative systems and sites of UK border control measures with everyday encounters with suffering.

At times, this suffering emerges through more surreptitious and mundane spatiotemporal harms, implicit in the obligation to travel repeatedly to these often remote, difficult-to-access sites, very often for years on end. Mohammed describes requesting to have his reporting schedule reduced – a request that was denied – and how he must pay for the bus to and from his appointments, which is a huge financial burden for those that are already living below the poverty line. Likewise, Hassan recounts not having enough money to pay for the bus fare, and tells the Home Office ‘you can arrest and detain me again’. The inclusion of each individuals’ journey times and travel costs, signalling the proportion of time and money these journeys necessitate, further illuminates the everyday burden regular reporting entails.

Elodie’s story of reporting (image: Reporting Sounds website)

At other times the harms that reporting imposes materialise through the more overt violence of arrest and detainment. Elodie’s experiences of being detained during her reporting appointment, where she suffered a panic attack, point to the danger these sites hold in repeatedly threatening asylum-seekers with potential arrest and detainment. For Mohammed, the fear of being detained affects his sleep prior to signing days; he describes how ‘you never know when you’re coming back’. Samuel also talks of being detained during his reporting appointment within the onsite holding cells and reflects on the shame he felt in being detained ‘as someone who committed a crime’. Bernadette’s account reveals how the threat of being detained is felt beyond the walls of the reporting centre, as she explains: ‘I’m still looking through my window all the time. Between six o’clock and eight o’clock in the morning, that’s what time they normally come.’ As these accounts show, the threat of a possible detainment and subsequent forced removal attempt is intimately felt by individuals, making it an extremely stressful process, and yet one which they must repeatedly engage in, often for years on end.

Samuel’s story of reporting (image: Reporting Sounds website)

Creating an archive

By creating an interactive, auditory web-archive of asylum-seekers’ testimonies, Reporting Sounds sheds light on the relatively unknown border control practice of immigration reporting and provides the opportunity for the public to explore its everyday impact on the lives of asylum-seekers in the UK. As Sara Ahmed’s work has identified, archives are tethered to the question of whose experiences are worth preserving (Ahmed 2006), and through my own attempt at creating an archive of asylum-seekers’ testimonies, this form of data gathering holds space for these otherwise little-known-about and hidden experiences. Using the form of a map to situate their testimonies, and drawing attention to their less-visible sites of impact (that is, the home, the body, the reporting office), imposes a form of ‘counter-mapping’ which, as Craig Dalton and Liz Mason-Deese argue, allows us to challenge and reimagine dominant spatial imaginaries and how certain populations move through these spaces (Dalton and Mason-Deese 2012). While each of these five stories is deeply personal to the individual’s experience of reporting, they are also reflective of the current, contemporary political moment, in which the UK government has placed hostility towards and the removal of asylum seekers at the front and centre of its politics. The last, sixth box is left open for individuals to share their own experiences of reporting.  

In May 2024, I will be hosting an event with Migrants Organise in London, to launch the website and to invite the public to learn more about immigration reporting and the lived experience of asylum. If you would like more information, please get in touch.

Amanda Schmid-Scott is a Lecturer in Criminology at Bristol University. Her research explores the intersections between bureaucracy and violence within border control sites and systems, engaging with feminist theories of violence and resistance to examine how the sites and practices which constitute asylum-seeking are made, negotiated and resisted. She recently completed an ESRC postdoctoral research fellowship at Newcastle University.

Invisible: domestic workers’ commutes in Latin America

By Valentina Montoya Robledo and Rachel Randall.

Read the Spanish version here.

Domestic workers make up one in every five working women in Latin America, totalling approximately 13 million individuals. In recent decades, a significant transformation has occurred as many domestic workers have shifted from living in their employers’ homes to commuting daily from their own residences due to rapid urbanization processes. Latin America became the most urbanized region in the world in 2014. By 2020, 83% of domestic workers in Colombia, for example, resided in their own homes. Their precarious earnings and the fact that more than 80% of them are informal workers, however, have forced them to live in city outskirts. Both their homes and the households where they work often lack proper connections to public transport as well as pavements for pedestrians, making their lengthy commutes both time consuming and expensive.

(Image: from Invisible)

This shift has led to extensive commuting times across Latin America, with domestic workers’ journeys reaching up to seven hours per day in Bogotásix hours in Lima, five hours in São Paulo (Montoya Robledo, forthcoming) and three and a half hours in smaller Colombian cities like Manizales. According to Bogotá’s 2015 Mobility Survey, domestic workers have the longest commutes among all urban occupations in Colombia. In many countries they also allocate a significant portion of their income to cover transport costs: 36% in Lima, for example, and 28% in Medellín. During these prolonged journeys, domestic workers often face racial discriminationgender-based violencecommon crime and road safety concerns.

These hardships not only risk domestic workers’ safety but also hinder their access to a range of opportunities from education to leisure to political participation. And yet, local governments in Latin America frequently overlook their situation. The Invisible Commutes project was set up in 2019 to shed light on this critical issue, starting with a documentary about domestic workers’ concerns, which was expanded into a transmedia project in 2020. Collaborating with musician and cultural manager Andres Gonzalez and filmmaker Daniel Gomez, the project aims to raise awareness not only among scholars but also the general public and mobility experts about domestic workers’ limited Right to the City in Latin America.

Invisible Commutes uses various media to depict domestic workers’ expensive, violent and lengthy commutes in order to advocate for their Right to the City. The project includes short audio segments featuring their testimonials, which focus on their experiences when commuting and their perspectives on mobility infrastructure projects. It includes a section on the maps that domestic workers have drawn of their commutes. The project also produces opinion pieces and journal papers, and engages in academic, civil society and local government discussions. Recognized in 2023 as a ‘Remarkable Feminist Voice in Transport’ by Tumi and Women Mobilize Women, Invisible Commutes is a comprehensive effort to address transportation injustice for millions of women.

Filming for the Invisible Commutes documentary, Invisible, has taken place over an extended period, beginning in 2019 with a focus on Reinalda Chaverra, a domestic worker based in Medellín. In 2022 filming continued in Bogotá with domestic worker Belén García. In 2023, Invisible Commutes was awarded funds by Migration Mobilities Bristol to complete the documentary short and hold a workshop with the Afro-Colombian Union of Domestic Workers (UTRASD) in Medellín.

The workshop explored how domestic workers themselves want to see their commutes represented on screen and enabled their voices to feed into the form and content of the final documentary. This was crucial for us because, despite a recent upsurge in Latin American films that focus on domestic worker protagonists, almost none depict the workers’ lengthy and challenging commutes. It is widely acknowledged that these films tend to be made by directors whose perspectives are more closely aligned with those of employers, rather than employees. They often dramatize the dynamics of employer-employee relationships within employers’ homes by taking live-in domestic workers as their protagonists, as is the case, for example, of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) and Anna Muylaert’s The Second Mother (2015). In reality, hourly paid roles are becoming more popular than live-in forms of domestic work, as this report focusing on Brazil also shows. When we talked about the lack of visual representations of domestic workers’ commutes at the workshop, one participant explained that it is not convenient for employers to acknowledge the long, challenging and costly journeys that their employees have to undertake because it raises the question of how these commutes should be compensated.

As a starting point for our discussion, we watched clips from the film Roma, which focuses on domestic worker Cleo. Set in the early 1970s in Mexico City, Cleo’s story is strongly inspired by the real experiences of Liboria Rodríguez who was employed by director Alfonso Cuarón’s family when he was a child. Although Roma risks reinforcing a narrative in which its protagonist is both celebrated as, and relegated to, the status of a surrogate member of her employer family, the way the film dwells on Cleo’s gruelling routine maintaining an extensive house and supporting her employers’ four children sparked strong affective responses among the workshop’s participants. Some addressed the negative implications this kind of workload has for managing to exercise or relax, while others reflected on the impact it has for workers’ relationships to their own loved ones, namely their children.

Many of the insights that fed into Invisible were, nonetheless, provoked by the participants’ reflections on the differences between their experiences commuting and those depicted in one of the only Latin American films that focuses on this topic. Rodrigo Moreno’s Réimon (2014) traces the lengthy journeys undertaken by its protagonist Ramona, an hourly-paid cleaner who commutes on public transport from her home on the outskirts of Buenos Aires to her employers’ upmarket apartments in its centre. Like Roma, Réimon also dwells on the details of Ramona’s work and routine. One workshop participant praised the grace and elegance that characterises Ramona’s portrayal: she is always nicely dressed and well presented. The importance of this became clear as multiple participants spoke about how the distance that they need to walk across difficult terrain to catch initial transport links means they are forced to arrive at work with unclean clothes, suffer rude comments from other commuters, or take a cloth with them to try and wipe off the dirt. The dignity of Ramona’s depiction resonated with UTRASD members who shared experiences of having been denigrated by others due to their occupation and discriminated against on the basis of their race.

One participant also noted that Ramona does not appear to feel afraid walking through the city in the dark of the early morning, while the participant herself has often feared being attacked. Ohers attested to how common it is to be sexually harassed or assaulted on public transport. Another participant observed that Ramona is shown getting a seat on the train, while the buses they catch are so full at peak times that they must always stand.  

In response to these challenges, Invisible concludes with the changes that UTRASD members themselves would make to improve domestic workers’ experiences commuting to their employers’ homes. These include: building more public bathrooms in stations and across the city; introducing women-only carriages; giving domestic workers preference in queues at peak times; and subsidising public transport for domestic workers or introducing forms of transport specifically for them. The final three proposals would likely require individuals to register formally as domestic workers, which would be a positive given the challenges that widespread informality brings across the sector.

We hope that the documentary encourages policy makers and urban planners to take up their proposals and continue hearing what they have to say.

Invisible (Valentina Montoya Robledo, Daniel Gómez Restrepo and Andres Gonzalez Robledo 2024) will have its UK premiere at the University of Bristol on 31 January 2024.

Valentina Montoya Robledo is a Senior Researcher in Gender and Mobility at the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) at the University of Oxford. She directs the transmedia project Invisible Commutes on domestic workers’ commuting experiences. Her most recent paper is ‘That is why users do not understand the maps we make for them’: Cartographic gaps between experts and domestic workers and the Right to the City.

Rachel Randall is Reader in Latin American Studies at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). Her book, Paid to Care: Domestic Workers in Contemporary Latin American Culture is published this month by the University of Texas Press. It explores the struggles of domestic workers in Latin America through an analysis of films, texts and digital media produced with them or inspired by their experiences. The book is available now with a 30% discount using the code UTXM30 by ordering online in the UK and Europe and in the US and Latin America

Further MMB blogposts about domestic workers in Latin America include Rachel’s post on ‘Domestic workers and COVID-19: Brazil’s legacy of slavery lives on,’ and ‘The dangers of staying home: lockdown deepens inequalities in Brazil,’ by Fernanda Mallak, Isabela Vianna Pinho and Thalles Vichiato Breda.

Migration and mobilities research: making connections for social justice

By Bridget Anderson.

Happy New Year all. Let’s hope that 2024 brings more peace and justice than 2023. We need it. It is difficult to be hopeful in the face of the ongoing Gaza horror, more needless (and nameless) deaths in the Mediterranean and Channel, the fall out from the Illegal Migration Act, and the anticipated Rwanda legislation. All these speak to the concerns of many MMB members. Not only migration and asylum policy, but state violence, exclusion, citizenship, nationalism, mobility and immobility, leaving and staying put and, related to all of these, the protean nature of racism.

Many of us believe that it is our academic responsibility to speak truth to power and leverage our analysis to affect transformation. But in reality the transformation has been travelling in the opposite direction to the one demanded by evidence and analysis. Over the past 20 years there has been a proliferation of migration research, Masters’ courses, conferences, journals, centres and networks, particularly in the rich world. Our understanding of human movement and the tools we use to analyse it have undoubtedly improved hugely. So why is it that law and policy are so determinedly taking us in the opposite direction, and we seem to be marching away, not only from justice, but from simple common sense? Anyone who is interested in this kind of question would do well to read Christina Boswell’s work. In her book The Political Uses of Expert Knowledge: Immigration Policy and Social Research (Cambridge 2009) she explains that the usual explanations for the disconnection between policy and research (political pressure; institutional incapacity/lack of resources on the part of government and other research users; abstraction/irrelevance on the part of research producers) are correct but insufficient. She argues that research and expertise also lend credibility, meaning that they serve two important functions for government policymakers. The first is a legitimizing function, creating confidence that decisions are well founded. The second is a substantiating function, supporting already existing policy choices and preferences.

Importantly, the legitimizing and substantiating functions of research are powerful but are not helpful if we seek a significant change in policy direction. To be transformative, scholarly research requires partnership with non-academic actors and to contribute to pressures for change these actors are exerting on state policymakers. MMB members are working with others to rise to this challenge. We have many examples, but just to pick two. Katharine Charsley and Helena Wray’s research UK-EU couples after Brexit works with key campaigning and support organisations to intervene in policy debates on the issues in the family migration regime. Ann Singleton, MMB Policy Strategic Lead, has been working with ACH to use expertise from refugees’ lived and learned experience to develop new small businesses, and models for support that facilitate integration. MMB also co-organises seminars with ACH, bringing together practitioners, policymakers and academics. The most recent seminar took education as its theme, and participants included Rob Sharples from the School of Education discussing his research on post-16 education and the Bristol Plan for Migrant Learners. Do let us know if you want support finding community partners, developing funding ideas with them or featuring collaborations on the MMB website.

Importantly, research does not have to have an immediate impact to make a difference. MMB’s tagline is ‘new thinking on people and movement’ and this also requires ‘slow science’. Longer term, research can build different understandings of migration – for example, through connecting it with movement of the more-than-human, including goods, data, animals and plants; through putting it into a richer historical context that sees how movement shapes our worlds; and through analysing and making accessible the power of representation. All of this requires multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches whose ‘pathways to impact’ are not necessarily easily traceable, but which help us to think differently and hone tools for the future. We are very pleased that Bristol University Press will be publishing a volume with us that advances this kind of thinking and are planning to develop this work in the coming years.

Thinking differently also needs international partnerships, and this is particularly true for thinking differently about movement. MMB research often is not only shaped by international borders but stretches across them. We have already learned much from the initial visit by Victoria Hattam from the New School for Social Research who joined us as a Visiting Leverhulme Professor for two months in 2023. Her second, longer visit will start in February 2024. Do come to the MMB welcome drinks on 6th February to learn more about our plans with her, which include public lectures, a workshop on visual representation, seminars on race and mobility, political economy and cross-border production, and a PGR discussion group.

Developing and nurturing these partnerships is a priority for MMB in the next two years. We are delighted that Jo Crow, Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, has joined us as Associate Director (Research Development) to take the lead in developing this aspect of MMB’s work. We are particularly interested to learn about the research agendas of potential partnerships to facilitate long-term collaboration, funded and unfunded, so do let us know if you have any ideas. We are keen to support project and network development, big or small. Partnerships, within and outside the university, local, national and international, lend new perspectives, energy and creativity. Let’s harness that to build a more just world in 2024.

Bridget Anderson is Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

Looking for the ‘state’ in statelessness research

By Natalie Brinham.

Eight months after Myanmar’s genocidal violence in 2017, which saw more than a million Rohingyas driven into Bangladesh, 55-year-old Rafique (not his real name) welcomed me into his shelter in a busy section of the refugee camp. He served me tea and asked me to wait – he wanted to show me something important that would explain ‘everything I wanted to know’ about Rohingya statelessness in Myanmar.

After some time, he emerged from behind the blanket that had been hung as a make-shift wall. He placed a metal cash box on the bamboo floor. Opening it with a key, he revealed a stack of papers, cards and photos – tattered ones, faded ones and plastic covered ones. Very carefully, he unfolded and displayed the contents across the length of the floor in front of me and my young Rohingya ‘fixer’. Methodically, he placed them in date order with the oldest closest to him. There were ID cards from his parents, grandparents, uncles, aunties and children – fraying blue and pink ones from the 1950s, white ones for the 1990s and one new turquoise one; registration documents listing every family member from the 1970s to the 2010s complete with crossings out, alterations and comments added by officials; joint-mugshots of the family holding a board with their registration number; repatriation documents from the 1970s and 1990s; and piles of land registration papers going back to the early years of independence in the 1950s.

‘But Uncle,’ said my fixer in amazement, ‘This must be one of the most complete collections in the whole camp! How on earth did you manage to keep hold of all these documents?’

Other Rohingya refugees had told us how their documents had been confiscated, seized, destroyed and burnt by state officials. Rafique explained how he would wrap the papers and cards in plastic, secure them in a metal box and bury them deep underground. Each year for almost 30 years, he would dig them up, rewrap them and bury them somewhere else. His brother was well connected; when authorities demanded he relinquish old ID cards, he would say they were lost and offered bribes of food, farm produce, favours or money.

The word ‘Rohingya’ is pointed out on a household registration list from Myanmar, saved in the camps of Bangladesh for proof of Rohingya identity (image: Natalie Brinham, 2019)

Pointing to the documents in turn, Rafique explained – over three hours – how successive regimes in Myanmar had slowly destroyed Rohingya identity as a group belonging to the Rakhine region of the country. He kept the papers, he said, to evidence Rohingya history in Myanmar. He re-told the stories of belonging of his relatives; three mass expulsions and forced repatriations since independence; slow denationalisation; violent encounters with state authorities. Finally, he talked about his determination to resist the current state ID scheme, which ‘makes Rohingya into foreigners’. Group resistance, he reasoned, was intricately connected to the mass violence, killings and expulsions that had landed him in this refugee camp in 2017. Myanmar, he said, would not be a safe place to return to until Rohingyas were ‘given back’ their citizenship.

Invisible people or invisible states?

At a global level, citizenship has been compared to a giant filing system. Each individual human is assigned at least one nationality and filed ‘according to their return address’ or where they can be deported to. From a statist point of view, stateless people – or people without any legal citizenship – are an aberration in that filing system. They have no return address, so cannot be formally deported or expelled.

Human rights advocates take a different view. Those un-filed people are an ‘anomaly’ in an international rights system that is supposed to apply universally to all humans. It’s impossible for people to realise their rights if no state is responsible for protecting or providing for them. As such, stateless people are often described as legally and administratively ‘invisible’. They struggle to access legal protections, education, healthcare, work and financial services. Further, they are unable to benefit from international development and aid interventions.

Though statist concerns over deportability and human rights concerns over rightlessness seem to be ideologically opposed to one another, proposed solutions to the problems of statelessness often align. Administrative invisibility is generally tackled by proposing more state registration, more documentation, more efficiency, more digitisation and more biometrics. Sustainable Development Goal 16.9, which commits to providing a ‘legal identity for all’ by 2030, has become a rallying cry for international development organisations, refugee and migration management agencies, multinational tech companies and NGOs alike.

Yet, these approaches to statelessness by-pass fundamental issues relating to state abuses of power. State authorities consolidate their power through identification technologies and ID schemes, and can misuse these powers to exclude and expel. Few people in the world are actually completely undocumented. More people lack the right documents to be able to live legally in their homes, move freely within their own country, find regulated work or use banking systems. Other people are wrongly documented/registered by state authorities as foreign. The wrong kinds of registration can make things worse.

Despite being hailed as the harbingers of social inclusion, digital ID schemes can harden the boundaries of citizenship, excluding minorities and making it more difficult for people of uncertain citizenship to function in society. As Rafique’s account shows, the implementation of ID systems can be intricately linked to citizenship stripping and mass atrocities. Analysis of how power functions (differently) in particular states and societies, and how it functions through citizenship regimes and ID systems, is absent in ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches to delivering ‘legal identities for all’. ID schemes are often misconceived as neutral processes in which sets of biological and/or biographical facts about individuals are recorded. In fact, they are imbued with power and profoundly impact social relations.

In initiatives to lift ‘stateless people’ out of a state of invisibility – to count them and document them – we fail to look properly at the perpetrating states. States are not identical containers that will function once filled up with international policy recommendations, capacity development and technical advice. Rafique’s oral history, which covered a period of 30 years of UN presence in his homelands, tells a story not of the invisibility of stateless Rohingya, but of how international actors have failed to look at the criminal intent of the state relating to their ID schemes and registration processes.

Statelessness studies often grapple with how to research ‘invisible’ populations. It’s equally important to grapple with how and why state violence has been invisibilised in anti-statelessness work. The very best starting point is to listen properly to survivors of state violence. Rafique’s account is just one of many. Rohingyas and many other stateless people are not really ‘invisible’. It’s just that if we look for them through state-tinted lenses, we tend to look right through the structures that were built to incarcerate them.

Natalie Brinham is an ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Bristol, working with MMB and the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies. Her research project is titled ‘IDs for Rohingyas: Pathways to Citizenship or Instruments of Genocide?’ She was previously a Senior Programme Lead at the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion.

Bad cases make bad law: the unintended consequences of denaturalising bad guys

By Colin Yeo.

The power to denaturalise a British subject on the basis of their behaviour was first introduced by legislation in 1918. With some adjustments, the power remained broadly the same until as late as 2002. Essentially, only a person who had naturalised as British could be stripped of their citizenship and the main grounds for doing so involved disloyalty or disaffection to the Crown, assisting an enemy or proven criminal conduct. These powers were exercised against some German and allied nationals who had naturalised as British but fell into abeyance. The last denaturalisation under this legal regime occurred in 1973.

After 80 years of legal continuity, a period which included a second world war, the Cold War and The Troubles, amongst other external-internal existential security threats, a series of fundamental changes to the law on denaturalisation began in 2002. Why?

The evolution over the last twenty years of British law on denaturalisation — or citizenship stripping — is a case study in bad cases making bad law. The law was changed repeatedly between 2002 and 2006 specifically to enable the government to strip the citizenship of particular high profile individuals.[1] Relatively restrained use was initially made of these new powers, with only those high profile individuals targeted for denaturalisation. A change in government in 2010 introduced changed attitudes to the value and meaning of citizenship. The new government found itself in possession of very considerable discretionary powers and set about making extensive use of them.

The governments and ministers that introduced the initial changes to the law between 2002 and 2006 were relatively restrained in making use of them. The numbers of denaturalisations remained very low until 2010, when there was a change of government and a change of approach. For the incoming government, citizenship was a privilege not a right.

The problem is that when very low legal thresholds for draconian actions are introduced, ministers and civil servants are handed huge freedom of action. Particularly in the field of immigration and asylum law, they are subject to huge political and media pressures. It should be no surprise if they are inconsistent in their use of the very considerable powers with which they have been entrusted by an earlier parliament. It should also be no surprise that unconscious bias asserts itself in these circumstances.

Behaviour-based denaturalisations peaked in 2017 at around the time that the territorial area in Iraq and Syria controlled by the ISIS or Islamic State group was collapsing. British citizens who had associated with the group were looking to escape and return home. The Home Secretary at the time was Amber Rudd, but it is her successor, Sajid Javid, who has provided the most detailed public justification for denaturalisation action.

Speaking on breakfast television about Shamima Begum in 2021, several years after his time as Home Secretary, he claimed that ‘[i]f you did know what I knew, as I say because you are sensible, responsible people, you would have made exactly the same decision, of that I have no doubt.’ Javid retrospectively framed the decision as one involving risk to the British public, essentially.

He has also, however, stated a very different justification for denaturalisation. At a party conference speech in 2018, when he was still Home Secretary, he boasted of expanding use of citizenship deprivation powers to ‘those who are convicted of the most grave criminal offences. This applies to some of the despicable men involved in gang-based child sexual exploitation.’ There is a clear moral dimension to this statement.

A few months later, also in 2018, he discussed the denaturalisation of a group of dual national Pakistani-British men convicted of sexual offences. Pressed on the risk to citizens of Pakistan once they were removed there, Javid he reverted to suggesting it was all a matter of risk, albeit only of risk to the British public: ‘[m]y job is to protect the British public and to do what I think is right to protect the British public.’

More recently, lawyers have reported that denaturalisation action is now being pursued against individuals convicted of human trafficking offences. It is hard to see how removing a person to a country from which they have previously trafficked others reduces risk to either the citizens of that country or the United Kingdom.

The expansion in the use of denaturalisation powers from threats to national security to very serious crimes would have been impossible without the reforms to citizenship deprivation law enacted in 2006 in response to the case of David Hicks. It is not realistically possible to argue that serious sexual offences or human trafficking amount to acts seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom. It clearly is possible successfully to argue that such conduct is sufficient for the Home Secretary to be satisfied that denaturalisation is conducive to the public good. After all, the Rochdale sex offenders lost their legal challenge: Aziz & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 1884.

The fact that every known case of behaviour-based denaturalisation involves a Muslim has not gone without comment. There has undoubtedly been a serious threat to public safety from some individuals who are Muslim but it would be entirely unrealistic to suggest that the threat is uniquely posed by Muslims. Denaturalisation has never been pursued against Irish nationalists, adherents of right-wing terror groups, anarchists or other dual foreign nationals representing a threat to national security. It is possible that no such individuals were identified who held dual citizenship and were thus eligible for denaturalisation but this seems inherently unlikely.

The discrimination becomes even more stark when the case of the Rochdale sex offenders is considered. The men who were denaturalised were all Muslim men of Pakistani origin. It seems highly likely there have been many, many other dual nationals who committed sexual and other offences of similar or worse gravity — where seriousness is measured by the length of sentence rather than media judgment — who were never considered for denaturalisation.

The changes made to denaturalisation powers in the 2000s were naive. The government of the day may have intended only judicious, sparing use of citizenship stripping. If so, the scope of those intentions was not reflected in the very wide powers the government conferred on itself and, importantly, on its successors. Subsequent governments have made ever more extensive use of the powers that were conferred on the Home Secretary.

In the process, two tiers of British citizenship have emerged. Those with no foreign parentage are relatively secure in their status because they would be rendered stateless if they lost their British citizenship, meaning the power cannot be exercised against them. But for those who have naturalised or have foreign parentage, British citizenship is now little more than a readily revocable form of immigration status.

Colin Yeo is a barrister, writer, campaigner and consultant specialising in immigration law. He founded and edits the Free Movement immigration law blog and is an Honorary Researcher at the University of Bristol with MMB. His latest books are Welcome to Britain: Fixing our Broken Immigration System (2020) and Refugee Law (2022). This post follows a previous one by Colin on ‘Imperial denaturalisation: towards an end to empire.

A longer version of this post was originally published by freemovement.org on 6th February 2023.

Footnote:


[1] See the original, full version of this blogpost on freemovement.org, which includes details of the cases of these high profile individuals, namely Abu Hamza, David Hicks and Hilal Al-Jedda.

Borderscapes: policing within

The fourth in our series of blogposts exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port city of Calais.

By Victoria Hattam.

Governments around the globe have been building border walls for decades: Calais is no exception. At least since the Touquet Treaty, the UK government has helped fund the securitization of the Port of Calais through a variety of construction projects. Cement walls, white-mesh-razor-wire fencing, and landscaping are being used to restrict undocumented migrants from crossing from Calais to Dover. Bordering is an expensive business: the House of Commons Research Briefing puts the UK financial commitment to France between 2014 and the 2022/23 financial year at slightly more than GBP 232 million (Gower, 2023). And even this figure, Gower notes, underestimates the total cost as supplemental payments can be found in most years. In 2018, for example, the supplemental payment for Calais bordering was an additional GBP 45.5 million in addition the initial allocation.

Calais white-mesh-razor-wire wall (image: Victoria Hattam, July 2023)

I was fortunate to be able to join an MMB trip to Calais last summer and found even my short trip revealing. I began to see the slippage from walls to landscaping. Intense as border walls, razor wire, and surveillance technologies are, it is the landscape design that has stuck with me. Long after one leaves the border proper, bordering continues. 

Bouldering mobility

Hundreds of large boulders have been placed throughout Calais, packed close together, filling a variety of once open spaces. Small parks, spaces underneath bridges, and even small median strips alongside roadways and city intersections now are occupied by rocks rather than people. The materials of choice are decorative boulders: large rocks, generally 3-5 feet in diameter, irregularly shaped, placed in irregular patterns as if in a natural setting. At times, the boulders are accompanied by an array of ornamental grasses: tall, textured, different shades of pale yellow, browns and greens – a touch of Russian Sage for brighter color. The grasses sway in the breeze contrasting with the immovable boulders. It’s a look. Hardscaping, as landscape designers often refer to it, can be found throughout the city.

Boulders filling public space in Calais
(images: Victoria Hattam, July 2023)

Fixation points, the French government argues, are being unfixed by making it impossible for people on the move to congregate (Pascual et al., 2023: Van Isacker, 2020). One can sit on the boulders, one might even be able to lie down between them, but they are placed tightly together making congregation and encampment difficult. The so called ‘Jungle’ of Calais is not to be repeated. Landscape design is a new frontier of border policing.

After a day of walking the city, it is difficult to distinguish public beautification projects from border policing. Ponds, parks, flowerbeds all make the city greener, but these very same elements are designed to make Calais less hospitable to the undocumented by removing vegetive cover. 

Boulders and walls control movement differently. The recently constructed white-mesh-razor-wire fences are designed to stop undocumented migrants from crossing over to the UK. For walls, movement is the problem. Boulders carry with them a different politics: move along now, do not gather here. For boulder landscaping, it’s the stopping that is threatening. Walls and boulders create a double opposition in which neither moving nor staying in place are permitted. Migrants, as Nandita Sharma (2020) has argued, are those deemed out of place.

Border creep

The turn to landscaping materializes the ways in which border policing is never simply a matter of securing territorial perimeters. Border security bleeds into internal policing (Ngai, 2004). In Calais, and many other cities, a variety of bordering devices can be found within the city limits. Temporary steel fence sections sit on street corners standing at the ready, waiting to be called to action. Heavy metal poles also have been inserted into the middle of the sidewalk diverting and obstructing movement. The poles are not placed alongside footpaths but are inserted right where one might usually walk. Obstruction is everywhere.

The border creeps from territorial edge into the city proper
(images: Victoria Hattam, July 2023)

Aesthetics and politics: what politics do boulders carry?

Living and working in New York City, I am accustomed to highly securitized spaces.  Sidewalks, roads, and buildings are often blocked off, supposedly protected by the deployment of anti-bombing barricades. But New York barricades have a different aesthetic. Rather than natural, irregular, softer boulders, New York City barricades present as manufactured objects: straight lines and crisp edges, often stamped with the New York Police Department initials (NYPD) making clear that this is an official barrier. There is no mistaking NY barricades for landscape features. The barricade of choice is the Jersey Barrier that is materialized both in cement and heavy-duty plastic. Few flowers and grasses are included to soften the look. Security is front and centre.

Jersey Barricades near the United Nations, New York City
(images: Victoria Hattam, October 2023)
Westside Highway, Manhattan, New York City (image: Victoria Hattam, October 2023)

At times, there is a grunge counter aesthetic in New York in which garbage mingles alongside security barriers.

Jersey Barriers were introduced in the 1940s and 50s through Departments of Transportation as devices for minimizing incidental damage during traffic accidents. Over the last 50 years, the barriers have been used in a wide array of policy domains, including deployment by the Department of Homeland Security at the US-Mexico border and by the Department of Defense in Iraq. Traffic management devises have morphed into security objects (Copp, 2018; U.S. Department of Defense, 2006).

The shift from walls to boulders does not diminish hostility towards migrantized people. On the contrary, it extends that hostility inwards. Consider the street alongside Little Island, the newly constructed park that sits just off Manhattan on the Hudson River. Little Island aspires to be a ‘magical place’, but as one enters and exits, there is a sign in big bold letters stipulating that this is an ‘enforcement zone’. Parking and bordering merge. I can no longer easily distinguish one from the other.

Victoria Hattam is Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research, New York. Her current research focuses on US-Mexico border politics and the global political economy. Victoria is currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol, hosted by MMB. During 2023-24 she is giving numerous workshops, seminars and public lectures at Bristol – read more about her events here.

Other blogposts in our series on Calais include ‘Time and (im)mobility in Calais’ borderlands‘ by Juan Zhang, ‘Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais‘ by Bridget Anderson and ‘Notes from a visit to Calais‘, a video blogpost by Nariman Massoumi.