Category: Justice/Race

‘El Carrusel’: digitising the US-Mexico border with(out) the CBP One app

Posted on by Emily

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

By Martin Rogard.

Many people had been waiting in Mexico for months to make their asylum claim legally in the US when, at midday on 20th January 2025, all CBP One appointments with the US Border Force were suddenly cancelled. The CBP One app, which was the only legal land asylum route for people arriving at the US’s southern border, was discontinued the moment Donald Trump’s inauguration began.  

The MAGA wing of the US Republican Party had long campaigned to shut down Biden’s controversial CBP One app, claiming it had become a back door facilitating undocumented immigration into the US. I spent two years researching this app – and the various claims made about it – for a chapter of my PhD thesis on the digitalisation of bordering practices, only to realise that it would be discontinued overnight. But how did this app compare to the COVID-era asylum ban that Trump has now effectively reinstated?

The US-Mexico border fence at Tijuana, 2021 (image: Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash)

Far from the open border policy its detractors portrayed it as, the CBP One app – which has previously been used to automate commercial travel processing – became a mandatory pre-registration step for all non-Mexican US asylum seekers arriving by land. This new protocol, which included a 5-year asylum ban penalty for non-compliance, made:

… people who traveled through a third country but failed to seek asylum or other protections in those countries ineligible for asylum in the United States… [except for those people who can reach central and northern Mexico and make an appointment]… through a DHS [Department of Homeland Security] scheduling system (AIC, 2023; see also Federal Register, 2023: 31399).

Since the app was the only such ‘scheduling system’, the protocol effectively forced asylum-seeking individuals and families to wait in Mexico for months by making their asylum eligibility contingent on securing an appointment through a glitchy, geofenced and data-harvesting lottery system.

CBP One has therefore been part of a shadowy binational bordering scheme colloquially known as ‘El Carrusel’ or ‘the merry-go-round’. The majority of people who made their long journeys to the restricted locations in Mexico where the app could function were swiftly targeted by the heavily militarised Mexican migration governance regime, which included parastatal security agencies such as the ‘grupo enlace’, which claims to enforce government contracts. Migrants report being forcibly bussed back down to Mexico’s border with Guatemala before they had a chance to pre-book or attend their CBP One appointments. Others who evaded ‘El Carrusel’ became highly visible targets for extortion, abduction, theft, exploitation and torture. As a Human Rights Watch report (2024: 4) states, ‘The more difficult it is for migrants to cross the US-Mexico border, the more money cartels make, whether from smuggling operations or from kidnapping and extortion.’

Migrants who did manage to attend their appointment on time after clearing the app’s highly data extractive preliminary security checks were subjected to a ‘credible-fear’ interview. Those deemed convincingly fearful of persecution were granted admission into the US under a temporary, criminalised and precarious status known as ‘humanitarian parole’ while they waited for their asylum decisions – the majority of which were denials, expeditiously followed by detention and eventual deportation.

The CBP One policy has recently been replaced with Trump’s renewed ‘Remain in Mexico’ asylum ban (an indiscriminate policy officially known as ‘Migrant Protection Protocols’ or MPP). In the US, as elsewhere, election cycles tend to be punctuated with big promises of ‘fixing’ the broken asylum system and/or finally ‘securing’ or ‘taking back control’ of national borders. Beneath the rhetoric, however, MPP, CBP One and Trump’s recent flurry of ‘emergency’ executive orders only maintain the status quo: they subject racialised people fleeing persecution and violence to further suffering and containment, failing to meet the standards of international law or provide truly accessible, safe and legal routes for asylum.

Despite the recent termination of the CBP One app as an asylum tool, much of my research remains relevant because it speaks to broader patterns of border digitisation that are expanding states’ reach far beyond pre-existing democratic and legal limits (see also Albert Sanchez-Graells’ post on AI and MigTech in this series). CBP One was repurposed for asylum processing during the COVID-19 pandemic with little public attention. At the time, humanitarian shelter workers in Mexico were tasked with filling out questionnaires on the app on behalf of asylum seekers under a deceptive US government promise to expedite their claims; in reality the app was introduced alongside restrictive immigration policies ‘that sought to increase penalties for crossing the border unlawfully, even to request asylum, and greatly reduce the number of migrants eligible for asylum’ (Kocher, 2023: 6).

But the CBP One app was never just the efficacious ‘scheduling tool’ that the DHS claimed it to be. It was principally a mass-scale data-gathering experiment that exploited undocumented migrants in order to extract a large-scale, non-cooperative dataset featuring biographic, biometric and live-location information. These data were avowedly shared across an equivocal ‘law enforcement community’, likely to train risk-predictive policing algorithms (AIC, 2025: 6; Longo, 2017: 150-153).

As Matthew Longo explains in The Politics of Borders, contemporary ‘smart’ borders have become increasingly reliant on large risk-predictive algorithms in order to ensure that ‘the good [are] let in quickly, and only the risky are slowed down… a process that depends heavily on data’ (Longo, 2017: 141; see also Travis Van Isacker’s post in this series, ‘Who’s in the fast lane?’). These large algorithms are known as ‘convolutional neural networks’. They work by combining the users’ biometric data (facial recognition, iris scans, liveness checks) and biographical data (travel history, gender, age, recent contacts) to build adaptive and multi-layered ‘risk profiles’. The more data they are fed, the better these so-called neural networks allegedly become at predicting and flagging potential ‘criminals,’ ‘terrorists’ and ‘impostors’ prior to any crime, attack or threat having taken place.

Before the CBP One app, for legal and practical reasons, the US’s physical borders were its primary site of personal data accumulation and surveillance. There are restrictions around the private information states can uncooperatively capture from non-citizens outside their jurisdictions. By requiring prospective asylum seekers to book an appointment via a smartphone while they waited in Mexico, the US decentralised and expanded its surveillance capacity far beyond preexisting limits. Conveniently, the geofenced app – requiring live location and prohibiting VPNs – forced its users to remain in Mexico. Since CBP One users were outside its jurisdiction, the US could shed its accountability for the human rights abuses asylum seekers faced while waiting across the border.

The app required the latest phone technology, updated software and stable broadband, excluding anyone unable to meet these expensive requirements. Its limit of four language options also disempowered those who didn’t read English, Spanish, French or Haitian Creole as well as anyone without good literacy skills. Similarly, the app’s so-called ‘glitches’ and design choices, prevented its users from correcting mistakes, contacting support or speaking to a human. The app automatically deleted profiles flagged as spurious, disadvantaging families and/or people with similar names and/or facial features (see, for example, Kocher, 2023: 7-8).

While this ‘smart’ digitised asylum system promised efficiency, its black box design prevented accountability and transparency for the harms it caused. Furthermore, as Human Rights Watch (2024: 26) explains, the insufficient number of appointments available on the app was presented as being due to ‘limited capacity’. Yet, this limited capacity largely reflected the US government’s prioritising of removal proceedings and hyper-securitised bordering over humanely processing asylum seekers.

By amassing vast archives of personal data from non-citizens, which were then shared domestically and internationally without their informed consent, the CBP One app fuelled a new wave of discriminatory and abusive bordering practices. Sold as a ‘technological fix’ this digitisation only perpetuated cycles of violence and disempowerment while expanding the US’s imperial reach beyond existing democratic, physical and legal limits.

Martin Rogard is a doctoral candidate in political theory at the University of Bristol. His research explores how artefactually mediated practices of memory-making and forgetting constitute and unsettle (b)ordering processes in the North American borderlands.

After border externalisation: migration, race and labour in Mauritania

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New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Hassan Ould Moctar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Minjae Shin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

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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‘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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Moving as being: introducing the SPAIS Migration Group blog series

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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 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’.

Transnational borders: from containment to freedom

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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 Miriam Ticktin.

Borders as infrastructure

As I looked out the car window in Calais at the enormous white mesh razor-wire lined fences, the surveillance towers and the starkness of the militarized landscape, I felt an eerie sense that I had been there before. I looked back at my photos from my trip to the border zone at Ceuta, between Morocco and Spain: the same mesh border fence structure, barbed wire and militarized landscape, and people and cars being funnelled towards guard booths. I had the same sense of foreboding, the same disorientation. The space felt at once uninhabited, and yet it seemed that eyes were everywhere. The local birds nesting in the Calais barbed wire were the main differentiating feature.

This visit to Calais with MMB last April made it very clear to me that national borders are transnational creations. Even though border walls purport to be the materialization of national sovereignty – deriving from and protecting an essential, inner national identity – they are created by transnational, border-crossing technologies, designs and networks. They are recognizable transnational types; indeed, there is very little that is nationally unique. Calais and Ceuta felt similar because they are constituted by the same designs and infrastructures, possibly even built by the same companies. Such border walls and zones could not exist without the transnational circulation of commodities and architectures.

Figure 1. Calais border zone, 2024 (photo: Miriam Ticktin)
Figure 2. Border crossing from Morocco into Ceuta, Spain, 2016 (photo: Miriam Ticktin)

To aid in this process, there are annual global Border Security Expo’s, which draw tech companies and government officials from around the world in the name of fighting transnational organized crime and terrorism. I attended one of these in 2018 in San Antonio, Texas, with the Multiple Mobilities Collective. Israeli companies lead the way, profiting from the fact that Gaza ‘is a great laboratory’ (Miller and Schivone 2015), creating what some have dubbed the laboratory of ‘the Palestine-Mexico border’ (Miller 2019) where technologies are tried out and data is shared.

Humanitarian infrastructures are also part of this transnational border complex; various types of migrant and refugee camps can be found alongside border walls to simultaneously rescue, contain and incarcerate people on the move. I saw these in Ceuta and on the Moroccan side of the border crossing. In Calais, the container camp that eventually replaced the so-called Jungle – photos of which were displayed at the Fort Vert bird blind, overlooking the now destroyed and remade area of the Jungle – was one such infrastructure (Figures 3 and 4). While the Jungle had complex beginnings, including a mix of organized state abandonment and autonomous organizing (Van Isacker 2020), it ended up being run by humanitarians, who replaced the informal housing and living spaces with shipping containers they could control and surveil (Ticktin 2016). Humanitarian structures such as refugee camps have their own architectures, meant to demonstrate temporariness while anchored in hard, material realities. They are at once ephemeral and carceral (Siddiqui 2024).

Figure 3. Official representation of the history of the ‘Jungle,’ Fort Vert, April 2024 (photo: Miriam Ticktin)
Figure 4. The ‘Jungle’ beside the replacement humanitarian container camp (photo: Léopold Lampert)

These various transnational technologies and designs circulate in the name of national closure. As they travel, they produce and reproduce a political imagination of what a border looks like, what it means to be a secure nation-state, and even what it means to rescue people without compromising borders. Such transnational technologies and infrastructures both produce and justify exclusion and carcerality, rendering racism legitimate.

Borders as people

The transnational nature of borders is also created, marked and made by the people who travel to counter them, to unmake them; that is, by the activists, organizers and academics (like myself!) who work to document, undo, undermine or subvert borders. In other words, many of the movements that challenge borders are also, unsurprisingly, transnational. They are predictably found at many border zones, part of the infrastructure even as they work to undo them. I want to focus on the people-part of the infrastructure (Simone 2004), and the making of the border by way of complexly layered forms of antagonism and cooperation.

No-borders activists, for instance, share knowledge about how to enact sea rescues; they track migrant boats to help when they land; they support people on the move in preparation for their journeys, from providing ziplock bags to keep cell phones dry, to giving informal legal advice. Some call this a version of the ‘underground railroad’, referring to the network of safehouses for those who were enslaved in the United States during the early to mid-19th century, to escape into free states and Canada. Yet while visiting Dover and Calais, it became clear that not only do the knowledge and strategies travel, there is a transnational circuit of people who embody this knowledge, and who circulate too. There were people who had cut their teeth on organizing around the Mediterranean, from Lesbos to Lampedusa, and by fighting border regimes like Frontex. Calais was another stop on this circuit, where people came to help with small boat crossings from Calais to Dover.

The same groups also regularly work with people on the move to occupy abandoned buildings and set up collective living spaces or squats. Informed by scholarship on the topic, they are artists, anarchists, academics and lawyers. I became keenly aware that I, too, am part of these circuits: I have traveled to many border zones, to research and act against them. We embody knowledge to challenge border regimes, attempting to enact unpartitioned visions of the world. Perhaps paradoxically, this layering of political movements and the movement of people working for and against borders helps to create the transnational border and render it recognizable across national contexts.

Borders for whom?

If national borders are created by transnational movement and movements, how about the people they are designed to catch, stop, protect or enable? Even as there is a commensurability between the infrastructures of borders and no-borders, perhaps counter-intuitively, it is harder to name those that we are there to either work with or against; they are the least recognizable as transnational ‘types.’ To be sure, there are social and political movements that have created migrant collective subjects. As I wrote in my first book (Ticktin 2011), the ‘sans papiers’ movement both created and was created by a different collective political subject, the sans papiers themselves, who worked against criminalization by changing their name. Yet, those who move across borders today are perhaps not as easily named or recognized. In part, this is because of the transnational nature of the border: these are not just national struggles, but transnational ones. People move for all kinds of reasons, in all kinds of ways.

‘People on the move’ is a name that migrants and no-borders activists have used to get away from legal categories like refugee or economic migrant, which are built on hierarchy and exclusion. And yet, there was no consensus when talking to activists in Calais about what term to use in French: each had a lack. While the term ‘sans papiers’ was still used, it was not ideal, because not all people on the move are without papers; some have temporary papers, some have the wrong papers. They suggested that some use the phrase, ‘personnes exilées’ (people in exile, or exiled people); and yet it is not clear that all people on the move feel to be in exile, not least because there is not always a consistent place from which to be exiled. They mentioned ‘personnes bloquées à la frontière’ or those stopped at the border, but some are stopped in national interiors, and some stop for other reasons. There was the concept of ‘personnes en transit’ – people in transit or transitory people – but the activists pointed out that this has been appropriated by the right, to suggest that people should NOT stay, that France and other places should be transit zones and not permanent residences.

New scholarship is starting to explore the different concepts used to name people on the move, each of which have their own political histories and ontologies: from ‘harraga’, or those who burn borders, in the Tunisian context (M’Charek 2020) to ‘touduke’, or those who steal across borders, from the Chinese context (Chen 2023).

Even as many of us try to create alternative political imaginations of the world to enable everyone to move, to stay and to flourish – politics is, after all, a battle over imagination (Dunne and Raby 2018; Ticktin 2022), where the imagination can help us maintain pre-existing realities or denaturalize the ‘real’ – the inability to ‘capture’, name or fully know those who move suggests that they will remain elusive, their desires and reasons opaque. While borders have an increasingly material, transnational presence, this unknowable Otherness continues to exist, and rather than trying to overcome it, we should respect it as a basic source of freedom.

Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center and Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics (CPCP). She publishes widely on topics such as migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care. Her latest book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World, is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press (2025).

Listen to Miriam’s Insights and Sounds interview with MMB Director Bridget Anderson on ‘Invasive Others: Plants? People? Pathogens?’.

The racist politics of ‘mindless thuggery’

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By Dan Godshaw, Ann Singleton and Bridget Anderson.

We pay respect to the memory of the children killed and to those injured in Southport as well as their families.

In early August 2024 the UK experienced a wave of fascist violence and organised hate of the kind not witnessed since the 1980s. Far right activists ignited unrest throughout the country (largely England and Northern Ireland). Bricks, bats, boots and fists rained down on Black and brown people. Asylum hotels were attacked, set on fire and daubed with racist graffiti. Mosques, advice centres and immigration lawyers were threatened. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer described this hateful violence as the ‘mindless’ actions of ‘thugs’, but this wilfully ignores the politics of these events, stripping them of their economic and political meaning and potential remedy. The violence is racist violence, an assertion of white supremacy. A criminal justice crackdown is not enough. Counter demonstrations and chants – ‘we are many, you are few’ and ‘migrants are welcome here’ – show the strength of solidarity and opposition to racism, but they too are not enough. These are responses to symptoms, not to the underlying problems.

Anti-racist protestors in Manchester, UK, August 2024 (image: Mylo Kaye on Unsplash)

Analysing the symptoms is critical to understanding what led to this violence. The original pretext for the unrest was the false claim that the young man (at 17 years old, legally a child) arrested for the murder of three children in Southport had arrived in the UK on a small boat as an asylum seeker. He was, in fact, born and brought up in Cardiff and Lancashire but he was later unnecessarily identified as a ‘child of immigrants’. Those targeted for attack have been ‘non-whites’, asylum seekers and Muslims: ‘Get them out’, ‘Stop the boats’, ‘We want our country back’, ‘England,’ the rioters shouted. Resistance by allies of those targeted has been met with chants of ‘You’re not British anymore’. White Britishness is being used to rally ‘pro-British’ mobs. This mix of hostility to migration, racism and Britishness matters. Because while racism is not acceptable in polite society, hostility to migrants is too often represented and made respectable by the framing of ‘legitimate grievances’. In a statement later denounced by other Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) one of the country’s most senior police officers, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight PCC and chair of the Association of PCCs, put it like this:

The government must acknowledge what is causing this civil unrest in order to prevent it. Arresting people, or creating violent disorder units, is treating the symptom and not the cause. The questions these people want answering; what is the government’s solution to mass uncontrolled immigration? How are the new Labour government going to uphold and build on British values? This is the biggest challenge facing Sir Keir Starmer’s government.

Hostility to immigration and asylum has been drip-fed into political consciousness for more than a century, emerging from a long history of colonial racism. But in recent years the demonisation of asylum seekers has held a central place in British institutional politics. ‘Stop the boats’ is a slogan made ‘respectable’ by both former Conservative and current Labour ministers. Migrant numbers have been represented as an external, existential threat by successive Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries. Asylum was effectively outlawed by the Conservative’s 2023 Illegal Migration Act, but it was under the 1997 New Labour Government that the term ‘asylum seeker’ moved from a description of a legal status to a form of abuse. Their term saw policies become fixated on reducing asylum numbers, the withdrawal of asylum seekers’ permission to work and the dramatic expansion of the privately run immigration detention estate. This has for decades inflicted foreseeable and preventable harm on people held in what Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor recently described as ‘truly shocking’ conditions, purely because of their immigration status.

The same New Labour Government introduced dispersal policies that housed asylum seekers away from support networks into cheap housing run by unaccountable private providers, often in areas where long-term residents were experiencing severe economic hardship and lack of investment. All these policies contributed to further division and toxifying of asylum politics, ‘othering’ asylum seekers and migrants. Racism is roundly decried, and rightly so, but migration ‘concerns’ are actively legitimised and cited as justification for more restrictive policies.

Across the world, human mobility is increasingly presented as a threat to citizens, with border deterrents a way to manage populations defined as surplus to the needs of capital. By framing migration as an invasion and drawing sharp lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, wealthy nation states  pursue a war on migration. Supported by a growing border industry, in which profits are made by corporations subcontracted to prevent, detect and deter unauthorised movement, states enact what activists and scholars have termed ‘border violence’, resulting in death and injury. Violent borders such as razor-wire topped fences maim and trap people in ‘death zones’ between states; these borders are internalised within bureaucracies, universities, hospital and schools; they exceed territoriality through boat and land pushbacks and offshore detention sites. The failure of national and European policies has fatal consequences. But rather than facing and responding to these failures, politicians blame the illegal and extortionate markets they themselves have created for human smuggling, claiming these are the sole cause of untold numbers of deaths during migration.

According to the narrative pushed by Starmer and others about the rioters, it is ‘thugs’ who get confused between migrants and the mosque-attending ‘multi-cultural’ public, or between asylum seekers and the social care worker going about her business. Yet the Windrush scandal demonstrates, if demonstration were needed, that creating a ‘really hostile environment for illegal migration’ also means creating a really hostile environment for Black and brown people whatever their citizenship. As the poorly trained general population is increasingly drawn into immigration enforcement, often anxious to err on the side of the law they rely on race and/or ethnicity as a marker of national difference, thereby exposing how ideas of Britishness are in practice bound up with whiteness. As A. Sivanandan, former director of the Institute of Race Relations, observed many years ago ‘We all carry our passports on our faces’.

The phrase ‘mindless thuggery’ mobilises a slur used in the UK and the US against economically marginalised people who are also racialised. Austerity-driven economic policies have produced social and economic conditions that have pitched impoverished communities racialised as white against those racialised as Black and ‘other’. Migration policies focused on reducing people to the essentialised identity of ‘migrant’ have created legitimacy for these attacks. What is needed, alongside incisive placards, demonstrations and counter chants, is a political ground shift. Migration, as a fundamental dimension of human life, must be normalised and accounted for across all areas of public policy. The hostile environment must be dismantled. Politicians must stop scapegoating ‘migrants’ for the social harms of neoliberalism. Instead, they must address elite power and inequality, and invest in housing and public services. We have had enough of decades of state and corporate-driven violence at the border and elsewhere. With anything less than a fundamental shift in political discourse, racist violence on the street, whether random or organised, will not go away.

Dan Godshaw is a Lecturer in Criminology in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. He specialises in migration, with a particular focus on state violence, immigration detention and the intersectional dimensions of border harms.

Ann Singleton is Reader in Migration Policy in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, and MMB Policy Strategic Lead. She is a leading expert in the production and use of international migration data in policy development.

Bridget Anderson is Director of MMB and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at the University of Bristol. She is currently co-PI on the research project Protecting Irregular Migrants in Europe (PRIME).

Across the waters: Caribbean mobilities, itineraries, histories

Posted on by Emily

By Orlando Deavila Pertuz and Bethan Fisk.

What stories are told about the Caribbean? What do these narratives exclude? How can we broaden the story? And how can we teach a wider vision of the Caribbean to students of all ages and wider publics?

Orlando Deavila Pertuz from the Instituto Internacional de Estudios del Caribe at the Universidad de Cartagena, Colombia, joined us at the University of Bristol in November 2023 to share his work on internal migration in Caribbean Colombia and take part in a workshop centred on how we tell stories about the Caribbean. Orlando’s perspective demonstrates the importance of including Latin American and mainland Caribbean mobilities, histories and cultural production to how we think about the region.

Orlando Deavila Pertuz shared his research on rural to urban migration from the former maroon community of Palenque, in Caribbean Colombia, to the city of Cartagena. Palenqueros, who speak their own creole language, experienced a profound racialisation with lack of access to employment and housing, and created enclaves and endogamous communities apart from the mainstream society, leading to the creation of what Deavila Pertuz calls the ‘first racial-based movements in Cartagena during the 1980s’. His work details the place of race in the production of urban space and how race guided the life experience of the rural migrants that flocked the city’s peripheries during the twentieth century.

Old city walls, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia (image: Justin Sovich on flickr)

Bridging the gap: stories from the Greater Caribbean

The Colombian Caribbean shares a common history with the islands and continental territories of the Caribbean basin. This is a history marked, mostly, by processes including colonialism, transatlantic slavery, the presence of imperial powers, the permanent flow and exchange of people, cultures, capital and goods, and, more recently, the contradictory effects of tourism development. Cartagena (or Cartagena de Indias) is a key site for understanding African diasporic and Caribbean history. The city was the centre of the Spanish American slave trade for two centuries, the colony’s most important port, home to the Inquisition with jurisdiction over the whole region, and a major place of afrodescendiente political mobilisation in Colombia’s nineteenth-century revolutionaries wars, independence and beyond. Black mobilities during and after slavery have long connected the long northern coast of South America to the islands of the Caribbean archipelago. Indeed, the Caribbean was fundamental to Colombia’s independence. When Spanish royalists defeated Simon Bolívar during the early years of the war of independence, he found asylum in the British colony of Jamaica and later in Haiti. The Republic offered ships and weapons to Bolívar so he might resume the struggle for independence. However, by the twentieth century, Colombian elites had turned their back on the Caribbean.

While nineteenth-century architects of the nation sought to de-Caribbeanise the newly named ‘Atlantic’ coast, it continued to be shaped by movements and cultural flows from and between the islands throughout the twentieth century, through labour migration—most notably West Indian workers for the United Fruit Company including Marcus Garvey—to the popularity of baseball and boxing. Deavila Pertuz asks, how do we make a history of Colombia as part of the Greater Caribbean? How do we bridge the gap that Colombian elites created since the nineteenth century?

Caribbean stories across borders

The Instituto Internacional de Estudios del Caribe, founded in 1993, has been at the forefront of the academic endeavour of reintegrating the northern coast of South America into conceptions of and studies of the Caribbean. One of the key reasons for meeting was a workshop to collectively think through how we can have broader stories about the Caribbean across borders, whether those be boundaries of empire, language or discipline, and within academia, educational institutions and beyond.

With an eye to thinking about how we can broaden understandings of the Caribbean in diverse educational settings, Deavila Pertuz traced the pioneering work of the Instituto in the creation of teaching materials. Materials included school primers entitled ‘Afrodescendants in Cartagena: A Story To Be Told’ (2011) matched with archival documents from the Centro de Documentación para la Historia y la Cultura de los Afrodescendientes en el Caribe Colombiano (CEDACC) (the Centre for Documentation of the History and Culture of the Afrodescendants in the Colombian Caribbean). Its purpose is to facilitate access for local researchers, teachers and students to archival sources held in the General Archive of the Nation in Bogotá and the General Archive of the Indies in Seville. Once established, CEDACC facilitated the creation of new knowledge, not only about the city’s history but also about these historical processes, such as the slavery, independence and colonialism that the northern coast of Colombia shared with the Greater Caribbean. In order to make this content accessible to a wider audience, the Instituto produced a CD collection with key sources of transcribed archival documents. In 2013, it also launched a short documentary series called ‘Cartagena: piel de cimarrones’, exploring histories of slavery, independence, cultural production and the experiences of Afro-Colombian women.

Towards broader Caribbean stories

The workshop in Bristol was concluded with an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion from colleagues in Anthropology, Education, English and HiPLA (Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies), along with local teachers and some brilliant year nine students. Some crucial collaborations emerged which form the basis of a future project that will bring together community groups, schools and teachers to co-produce resources for teaching a multilingual, multi-imperial and multi-ethnic history of the early modern Caribbean.

Bethan Fisk is Lecturer in Colonial Latin American History in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on slavery, cultural geographies and the production of knowledge by people of African and indigenous descent in Colombia and the African diaspora.

Orlando Deavila Pertuz is Assistant Professor at the Instituto Internacional de Estudios del Caribe at the Universidad de Cartagena, Colombia. As a social and urban historian his work focuses on the history of the development of tourism, the informal city and the construction of race and ethnicity in modern-day Colombia.