Go home?

The politics of immigration controversies

Hannah Jones, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Gargi Bhattacharyya, William Davies

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781526113214
• eBook ISBN: 9781526113238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Emigración e inmigración

In July 2013, the UK government arranged for a van to drive through parts of London carrying the message 'In the UK illegally? GO HOME or face arrest.' This book tells the story of what happened next. The vans were short-lived, but they were part of an ongoing trend in government-sponsored communication designed to demonstrate toughness on immigration. The authors set out to explore the effects of such performances: on policy, on public debate, on pro-migrant and anti-racist activism, and on the everyday lives of people in Britain. This book presents their findings, and provides insights into the practice of conducting research on such a charged and sensitive topic.

1
Introduction

To say good-bye is to submit to the will of heaven.

John Berger and Jean Mohr (2010/1975: 36)

‘It's extreme, scary’, said a woman from Senegal. She was looking at an image of a van carrying a government billboard with the words ‘In the UK illegally? GO HOME OR FACE ARREST’.

Hannah had asked this group of asylum seekers and refugees in Bradford what came to mind when they saw the photograph of the van and its huge billboards (see Figure 1). For the next person to speak, it was the broken promises between a husband and wife. Imagine this, Sara¹ said: in their country he had made her many promises, now she's alone here, she doesn't know anything. She does not know about the rules. In this new world her husband is everything. Imagine that her husband beats her and kicks her out. She tries to ask her family for help but they will not let her come back: ‘Where will she live? Where will she go?’

Figure 1: Go Home van

Lucee, a refugee from Sierra Leone, worried that the van would create ‘racial tension’. All foreigners could be stigmatised. In the area where she lived, ‘there had been a few racist things going on … these are people who obviously don't care whether I've got my stay or not … every time they've seen me they've always told me to go back to my country. So imagine if they saw this they'd probably call them [the Home Office], pick me up [laughs], do you know?’

The van had got Abas thinking about why he had fled Afghanistan to come to England, rather than seeking refuge elsewhere. In his mind's eye, England was a place where he might be able to continue his education or even get a good job; there was the BBC, and the best newspapers!

That a single image of a government immigration policing campaign can bring up such thoughts and feelings begins to suggest something of the emotional, existential and political textures of contemporary immigration control – the ‘submitting to the will of heaven’ – of which the crossing of national borders and citizenship rights is just one part. For those like Lucee, the Go Home campaign is frightening because it might inflame the hostility and racism that she has already faced in her local community. Sara's stream of consciousness is deeply gendered; the figures of an aggressive and volatile husband and a host country are almost interchangeable (see also Gunaratnam and Patel, 2015). The questions Sara asked in imagining a homeless and abused wife – ‘Where will she live? Where will she go?’ – when transposed into the contemporary political vocabulary of the nation state can be read as: Who belongs? Who can move and how easily? Who can stay? For how long? And on what terms?

It was questions like this that troubled us when we came together as activist researchers to counter the 2013 Home Office immigration publicity campaign ‘Operation Vaken’, of which the vans discussed in the Bradford focus group were a part. Five months later, and in partnership with civil society organisations in six different areas in England, Scotland and Wales, our funded project, ‘Mapping Immigration Controversy’ (MIC) began. We used multiple methods (ethnographic observation, focus groups, qualitative interviews and a survey) to research Vaken-related policy and media narratives and associated initiatives. We were especially keen to investigate Vaken's aftermath in local communities.

The moment of the Go Home van seemed to us to be a turning point in the climate of immigration debates – a ratcheting up of anti-migrant feeling to the point where it was possible for a government-sponsored advertisement to use the same hate speech and rhetoric as far-right racists. Sadly, as we finish writing this book in the immediate aftermath of the UK's June 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union, it seems as if the process has gone full circle. In the days immediately following the narrow vote to ‘Leave’ the EU, after a campaign largely focused on the ‘problem’ of immigration control, there have been many reports of physical and verbal abuse of migrants and racially minoritised people, linked directly to the Leave vote and to the violating language of the Go Home van. Shazia Awan, a Muslim businesswoman from Caerphilly in Wales and a Remain campaigner in the referendum, was told on Twitter the day after the referendum result ‘Great news … you can pack your bags, you're going home … BYE THEN’ (Staufenberg, 2016). Signs saying ‘Leave the EU, No more Polish vermin’ were left outside homes and schools in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire (BBC News, 2016). Countless other reports of people – mostly nationals of other EU countries, and British Muslims – being threatened and told they must ‘go home now’ began to circulate in press and social media reports (Agerholm, 2016; Lyons, 2016; York, 2016).

Before the referendum votes were cast, in the midst of the campaign, the Labour Member of Parliament and pro-refugee campaigner Jo Cox was murdered in a horrifyingly brutal attack. Witnesses reported that Cox's assailant had shouted ‘this is for Britain’ and ‘keep Britain independent’ (Boffey and Slawson, 2016). Far from being random statements, these were slogans used by Britain First, a far-right fascist group, which claims to share most of the goals of the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party (Britain First, n.d.). There are parallels here with how fear of UKIP's popularity was seen by many commentators as the inspiration for the Operation Vaken vans in 2013 (e.g. Merrick, 2013; Syal, 2013). As several of our research participants feared (see especially Chapters 4 and 5), use of increasingly hostile anti-migrant rhetoric in government and mainstream political debate seems to both authorise and fuel such hate-filled outpourings, verbal and physical.

When we began the research for this book we did not know the significance of Operation Vaken, of course. But we were disturbed by the vitriol of government rhetoric and an intensifying public mood of besiegement (Hage, 2016). These worries were shared by the community organisations with whom we developed and did the research. This way of doing research, collaboratively and with local community partners, developing ‘working knowledges together’ and ‘partially shared imaginaries’ (Suchman, 2012: 52), has helped us to include a variety of perspectives and stories of immigration enforcement, and to explore how ‘the object of study is ultimately mobile and multiply situated’ (Marcus, 1995:102). It has also challenged us to think more critically about the politics of immigration research and knowledge production. How are we contributing to the manner in which immigration is imagined and lived? What part does research play in the circulation and meanings of categories such as the ‘immigrant’, ‘asylum seeker, ‘refugee’ and ‘British citizen’? How might we produce an anti-racist and feminist ‘situated knowledge’ (Haraway, 1988) in a way that does not reinscribe our research participants into dominant, dehumanising discourses (see Bhavnani, 1993)?

In this chapter we will:

1 contextualise the immigration regimes and debates within which our study took place

2 describe and discuss the Go Home van and related government communications in relation to broader immigration regimes and practices

3 summarise briefly our key findings from the research, which will be developed and elaborated on throughout the book

4 outline the approach that we took in the project as activist researchers

5 provide an overview of what is in the book.

The problem of immigration

Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate.

(Warsan Shire, 2011: 25)

Discussions of immigration and immigration control, securitisation and illegality have become more voluble throughout the research and writing for this book. According to the United Nations Population Fund, in 2015, 244 million people, or 3.3 per cent of the world's population, lived outside their country of origin, with increasing numbers of people being forcibly displaced as a result of conflict, violence and human rights violations (UNPF, 2016). As we worked on this manuscript in April 2016, harrowing scenes of what has become known as the Mediterranean ‘refugee’ or ‘migrant crisis’ played out in the media almost daily, as more people fleeing war, violence and poverty in Africa and the Middle East tried to find safety in Europe. Sometimes, these lives have faded from our screens and pages as another spectacle has caught journalistic and public attention, but these dangerous journeys and the trauma and deaths, ‘bodies broken and desperate’, that they entail continue. So far (June 2016), there have been 215,380 ‘arrivals’ to the EU by sea in 2016; 2,868 people were reported as dead or missing on their journey to the EU in the first half of 2016 (UNHCR, 2016a). Others lost at sea go unreported. Of the nearly five million Syrians registered by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, just over 50 per cent were women (UNHCR, 2016b). This new era of migration, which includes more women and children, is characterised for the most vulnerable by ‘necropolitics’. This term was coined by the African philosopher Achille Mbembe (2003) to describe ‘death worlds’, where ‘vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (p. 40).

The growth of harsh new border regimes or what activist Harsha Walia (2013) calls ‘border imperialism’ has been a midwife to the birthing of these death worlds in Europe, not only in the Mediterranean but in planes, lorries and detention camps and centres across...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Notes on authors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on terminology
• 1 Introduction
• Living Research One: Why are we doing this? Public sociology and public life
• 2 Permeable borders, performative politics and public mistrust
• Living Research Two: Emotions and research
• 3 Immigration and the limits of statistical government
• Living Research Three: Migration research and the media
• 4 Spaces and places of governance and resistance
• Living Research Four: Ethics in uncomfortable research situations
• 5 Un/deserving migrants and resisting dehumanisation
• Living Research Five: Public anger in research (and social media)
• 6 Conclusion: ‘Ordinary’ people and immigration politics
• Living Research Six: Collaborations
• Afterword
• Appendix: Further details on research methods
• Index