Speaking at the INTERPOL General Assembly on the 4th November, Keir Starmer likened people-smuggling to a “security threat similar to terrorism”.
At first glance, this statement may not seem shocking considering our frequent exposure to this sort of crisis language, commonly used by both politicians and the media on migration: we have already heard Suella Braverman describe migration as an “invasion” in 2022 and seen countless newspaper headlines that echo this toxic sentiment. However, this is exactly why this should be a cause for alarm since the language we choose to discuss migration has real and dangerous consequences.
Crisis language carries implicit yet harmful meanings and their consequences tends to go unchecked. It permits policy extending beyond just targeting people-smugglers to include refugees as well. For example, by framing people-smuggling as a threat to national security it suggests that those entering the state in this way are inherently threatening too. This vocabulary of crisis therefore legitimises the increasing criminalisation of asylum-seekers and, as a result, enables even more extreme government responses. The logic being that if something represents such a significant “threat” to our existence it should be treated accordingly.
We have already seen how the criminalisation of refugees enables their harsher treatment in the administrative systems of refugee processing, through holding them in detention centres whist their asylum claims wait to be accepted or rejected. Although rationalised as a purely administrative procedure it appears strikingly similar to a punitive measure, with conditions in many ways resembling a prison. In an interview with a detainee published in the Guardian, the parallels are made clear as he describes his “two-bunk cell” with a toilet with “no curtain” that is the only option when the cell is locked. One migrant talked of the flashbacks of hearing the “keys of the guards rattling as they walk around”, another of the “hopelessness … etched on to every face” as people are kept in limbo with no certainty of how long they will be held here as they wait to be processed. For some this can take years, which is arguably a sentence in itself.
The criminalisation of refugees has also legitimised an increase in policing and surveillance measures in other parts of immigration policy. It was under then home-secretary Theresa May that we saw the construction of the hostile environment in 2012. A policy founded on the aim to make life impossibly hard for ‘illegal immigrants’ sometimes leading to their deportation. A barrage of checks was placed at every point of entry into accessing fundamental services such as NHS support, acting as a barrier to vital healthcare support for many. Landlords, doctors, teachers, the latter two supposedly providing caring and supportive roles, sometimes even to vulnerable groups such as children, became an extension of the policing body, checking immigration status before being allowed to offer their services and help.
Evidently, Starmer’s speech, announcing his polices, at the INTERPOL General Assembly showed no significant departure from a hostile culture towards refugees.
He declared that the Government’s coordinated approach to ‘illegal immigration’ would aim to negotiate deportation agreements with ‘safe countries of origin’ (which are not always safe in reality) as well as the doubling of funding for his border security command to total £150m. He further called for a Europe-wide approach to ‘tackling’ immigration by pooling resources and intelligence, exemplified by his seeking to access Eurodac which stores the fingerprints of asylum seekers who have entered into European countries.
These new policies are a further infringement onto people’s freedoms in their suggestion of increased surveillance of the population. This is not only damaging to the safety and rights of refugees but also to the greater UK public as it means the increasing surveillance and encroachment into the privacy of all. As well as this, the focus on dissembling the criminal networks of people-smugglers, ignores the need to address the lack of safe routes that forces migrants into pursuing ‘illegal’ and oftentimes deadly routes in the first place.
One might assume that Labour’s migration policy has been in some ways a step forward from the previous Conservative government’s ‘Stop the Boats’ approach that explicitly criminalised refugees. However, as we have explored, Keir Starmer's use of crisis language continues to enables the criminalisation of refugees in more subtle but equally pertinent ways, and his increased funding for their surveillance and policing only cements this.
A truly just and compassionate government response to asylum seeking would require a different kind of thinking that we are yet to see, one that treats refugees with dignity and humanity and doesn’t seek to criminalise them and push the problem elsewhere.
This Blog Post was written by Lucy Graham.
Edited by Lisa Bennett
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