Category: Calais

Borderscapes: policing within

Posted on by Emily

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.

Time and (im)mobility in Calais’ borderlands

Posted on by Emily

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

By Juan Zhang.

At the Dover border crossing I sat in the backseat in silence waiting for questions from the immigration officer inspecting the four passports we handed over together as a group. While neighbouring lanes saw vehicles swiftly passing through with only a small pause, our officer meticulously examined my Chinese passport among three British ones. ‘He’s looking for my Schengen visa,’ I murmured to myself. I hoped he’d find it soon. On that passport, there were four expired Schengen visa stickers mixed with several other entry visas I had to obtain as a Chinese national. Determining the validity dates on these stickers required sharp eyes and patience. Finally, the officer raised his gaze from the documents and directed his attention to us – what work do you do, and what’s the purpose of your visit?

Waiting at the Dover border checkpoint (photo by Juan Zhang, 3 July 2023)

Border delays and extended examinations at checkpoints were no strangers to me, but I couldn’t shake the thought that my colleagues might have crossed faster without me. This interruption reminded me how borders could stretch or compress space-time unequally and regularise a particular kind of asynchronicity to justify delay and waiting, and smooth border-crossing should not be taken for granted (see Anderson 2020 on this point). My Chinese passport added an extra ten minutes to the journey – a minor inconvenience after all. But what if I did not possess a valid visa, or if I were not accompanied by my British colleagues who answered immigration queries, or in a more extreme scenario, without a passport or any form of identification? What could a non-EU, non-UK citizen expect at this crossing in that case?

During the week of our two-day visit to Calais, more than 1,300 migrants crossed the English Channel in small boats, setting a new record of unauthorised crossings in recent years and fuelling intense public debate on the UK and French governments’ failure to ‘stop the boats’. Most of the migrants lacked any documents or legal papers and had likely endured weeks or months of waiting in Calais before their risky attempts (Sandri 2018). If the border added a 10-minute delay for me, for migrants and many others on the move, the border could feel altogether impenetrable as no ‘safe passage’ was possible due to tightening British immigration control and bureaucratic red tape (King 2016). People on the move had been stopped and forced to camp out in Calais, where thousands were stuck in limbo in the so-called Jungle – makeshift campsites of deteriorating conditions outside the city of Calais between 2015 and 2016 – until they were forcibly evicted by the French authorities (Van Isacker 2022).

The Jungle may now be abandoned and appear empty, but this does not mean people have stopped coming or are no longer trapped. Calais-based activists explained to us how the French border police and CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, a reserve force of the French National Police in charge of riot control) enforce a ‘no fixation’ rule, preventing people from establishing any permanence or stable connection with volunteers, services and local residents. Evictions routinely take place every 48 hours when enforcers harass and push people around, destroying tents and seizing their belongings. In underpasses and public spaces, people make temporary sleeping arrangements in makeshift shelters. Unable to move forward safely or legally, and faced with harassment and eviction while remaining stuck, migrants in Calais are exposed not only to the harsh policing environment but also to the brutalities of abandonment and the structural violence inherent in the politics of bordering.

A temporary shelter amidst the boulders in an underpass (photo by Juan Zhang, 4 July 2023)

When we left Calais on a ‘big boat’ – a popular cross-Channel ferry with on-board duty free shopping to ‘keep everyone entertained as you sail’ – I wondered how many were planning or had already embarked on treacherous Channel crossings on small boats during our stay in Calais. Our return journey was rather uneventful, when going through immigration was simply a well-practiced sequence of queuing, passport checking, stamping and onward travel. For us, the border seemed to disappear into the larger urban infrastructure that made things ‘flow.’ Interruptions were seen as anomalies, and even boredom during the crossing was to be avoided for an overall pleasant experience. However, for thousands attempting to cross the same waters each year, the border extended out and hardened offshore, inflicting violence and insecurity on those without proper identification or considered undesirable to the UK government.

Calais border crossing (photo by Juan Zhang, 4 July 2023)

Calais’ borderlands serve as a constant reminder that distinct temporalities and subject-specific immobility are maintained for the purpose of producing illegality (Andersson 2014) and normalising politics of rejection. The overlapping processes of identification, surveillance, interrogation and waiting at the border are not therefore just ‘a by-product of state institutions and bureaucracies,’ as Roos Pijpers (2011) reminds us, but possibly tactics of management and integral parts of state control, where irregular bodies are systematically stopped and checked, captured or evicted.

Juan Zhang is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on transnational cultural politics in and out of China, and Chinese mobilities across different cultural and social spheres. She is the co-ordinator for the MMB Research Challenge ‘Bodies, Things, Capital.’

See our other posts in this series on Calais’ borderlands: ‘Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais‘ by Bridget Anderson and the video blogpost ‘Notes from a visit to Calais‘ by Nariman Massoumi.

Notes from a visit to Calais

Posted on by Emily

A video blogpost from our series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port city of Calais.

By Nariman Massoumi.

Nariman Massoumi is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol, and Co-ordinator of the MMB Research Challenge Representation, Belonging, Futures. His filmmaking practice and research centres on histories of colonialism and migration.

Previous blogpost in our series on border regimes in Calais: ‘Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais‘ by Bridget Anderson.

Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais

Posted on by Emily

The first of four MMB blogposts exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port city of Calais.

By Bridget Anderson.

As we walked around Calais, one of the group remarked ‘It’s just like The City & the City!’ She was spot on. In his novel The City & the City (2009), China Miéville describes a murder investigation that takes place in what, from the outside, looks like one city, but is for its residents two, Besźel/Ul Qoma, which occupy the same space. From childhood, citizens of one are taught to ‘unsee’ the residents, buildings and events of the other. Ignoring or accidentally forgetting this separation is called ‘breaching’, a crime worse than murder. Calais is a manifestation of this hallucinatory dystopia. It is both seaside town and bidonville, both tourist trap and migrant hub. The seaside town markets itself with a certain irony (maybe particularly appreciated by a British sensibility) as ‘Calaisfornia’. In the shopping mall that borders Calais’ Channel Tunnel terminal there is an escape room called the Prison Island adventure game. The escape room backs onto the border police station and an immigration detention centre. To comfortably inhabit Calais(fornia) it is necessary to see past exclusion and violence, and to accept brutal immigration enforcement as a minor inconvenience.

The escape room, Prison Island adventure game, backing onto the border police station by the Eurotunnel (image: Emma Newcombe)

In July 2023, the MMB team, Challenge leads and Leverhulme Visiting Professor Victoria Hattam, of the New School for Social Research, visited Calais. We were guided by a long-term activist and researcher who has been working in the town for over ten years. It was his knowledge and experience that enabled us to commit a ‘breaching’ and see the gaps between the cities. Calais(fornia) is crosshatched (Miéville fans will catch the analogy) with fences and barbed wire. For Calais(fornia) visitors, they enclose random spaces: running along both sides of a long, thin strip of disused yard; closing off a space under a bridge; enclosing a small piece of land in front of some residential flats. Indeed, the randomness helps invisibilise the practice: there is nothing of note here, nothing exciting or dangerous that is guarded by these fences, just concrete and grass. But breaching enabled us to see these spaces were once hubs where people on the move gathered, hosting community kitchens, they were meeting and distribution points, places where people could sleep. In January 2015, when people were forcibly evicted from the centre of Calais and pushed to the outskirts of the city, the spaces they vacated were enclosed to ensure that they could not be used again. The fences can be read as maps of struggles against deportation and eviction.

An area where migrants once camped is now fenced in for ‘wilding’ and conservation with all access prohibited (image: Nariman Massoumi)

These evictions were the origin of the so-called Jungle* as people were pushed to a piece of land that had been a neglected dump for city rubbish, toxic waste and dredgings from the port expansion (Van Isacker 2022). This became the gathering point for people attempting to cross from France to the UK and was a constant source of dispute for the two governments. In October 2016, the French Government destroyed the encampment completely and declared the area subject to ‘ecological restoration’ and ‘landscape reconquest’. It was converted into a nature reserve, with the UK Home Office a key investment partner. The topography was changed to make it attractive to waterfowl but impossible for humans to camp on, and anti-intrusion features made it difficult for humans to traverse. ‘Fort Vert’ was transformed into a reserve where the citizens of Calais could ‘reconnect’ with nature and where the endangered native species Liparis Loeselii fen orchid could flourish. This would mean the space could achieve designated status in France’s ‘National Restoration Plan’. The then UK Immigration Minister was delighted, describing the project as facilitating a ‘return to nature’ and as preventing the return of migrants to the area (Rullman 2020). This eerily silent space is a different form of enclosure. But it is haunted by its recent past: the police access road, the fences around the motorway, the graffiti under the bypass declaring ‘No Border No Nation’ and, in a nod to Calais(fornia), ‘Maybe this whole situation will just sort itself out…’. People on the move today are banished largely to the inhospitable territory of the outskirts, with no easy access to basic necessities like water, food or shops.

Graffiti under the bypass (image: Emma Newcombe)

Calais(fornia) is curiously manicured and carefully landscaped. Flowers and grasses abound, but bushes have been uprooted as they provide shelter. We roamed freely around Calais(fornia), and about halfway through our walk we arrived at the town hall, a striking red brick and stone building constructed in the early twentieth century and surrounded by well-tended flower beds and grass. One of the group took a photograph of us as we sat down and opened our map to decide next steps. To sit freely should not be taken for granted. After the eviction of 2016 the authorities announced a policy of ‘zero point de fixation’, moving people on within hours to ensure that there is no possibility of informal settlements, destroying tents and goods in processes known as ‘cleaning’. As part of this policy green spaces which could be potential resting spaces are littered with boulders to prevent people from lying down or gathering. As we walked past one such space, I wondered what purposes future archaeologists might attribute to these out-of-place rocks that must have taken such efforts to move and that make public spaces so horribly ugly and unusable. A form of worship? A collective project that builds community? Will such cruelty and racism be imaginable?

Boulders by the canal prevent groups from resting on the grass there (image: Nariman Massoumi)

We, the breachers, both sat and moved freely. The thousands of people on the move who attempt to breach the national border that separates Britain and France enjoy no such possibility. To be able to inhabit Calais(fornia) and to see Calais is indeed a privileged position. But I left feeling the importance of not being paralysed or silenced by that acknowledgment of privilege. Rather, having seen, we now have a responsibility to speak.

* There are in fact many ‘jungles’ around Calais, but this site is the one most strongly associated with the word.

Bridget Anderson is the 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.

Other MMB blogs and projects connected to this post include the (de)Bordering plot, a space for exploring the politics of immigration and the environment through planting, which contains a Hearth modelled on shelters in the Calais ‘Jungle’. See also Travis Van Isacker’s post on ‘Environmental racism in the borderland: the case of Calais’ analysing how the French and UK governments have created a hostile environment for migrants trying to cross the Channel from Calais.