Immigration detention: a failed project
Guest blog: against the backdrop of the election of a new UK Government, Cetta Mainwaring, senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, discusses the research project she leads and her experience as a visitor with SDV.
The votes have been counted. Labour’s Keir Starmer is our new Prime Minister, bringing an end to 14 years of Tory rule, 14 years where the country has seen more hunger, debt, and misery. Many are celebrating this victory and looking to the Labour Party for change. However, on the issue of migration, it is with trepidation that we wait for Labour to reverse some of the devastating policies that the Tories have ushered in over the last few years – from the Nationality and Borders Act (2022) to the Illegal Migration Act (2023) and the Safety of Rwanda Act (2024) – policy moves that have signalled the ‘death of asylum’, created more division and hierarchies of deservingness, and led to more suffering.
Although the Labour Party has now scrappped the Rwanda plan, like the Tories, they too peddled a politics of fear around migration in last week’s election, as they have done before. Indeed, the hostile environment ‘logic’ can be seen in legislation and policies enacted under Tony Blair from 1997, including a significant expansion of the detention estate. From ‘stop the boats’ to ‘smash the gangs’, today, both parties continue to cling desperately to a myth of deterrence. The message is clear: if we are ‘tough’ enough, cruel enough, people will not come. Even when policymakers admit policy failures, as James Cleverly’s top aide did recently when he described the Rwanda plan as ‘crap’, they still are adamant that deterrence works.
Yet, research demonstrates again and again that such policies do not deter (see, for example, here and here), a conclusion even echoed in the Home Office’s own leaked briefing. People tell us that their decisions about migration are shaped by a multitude of factors: language, kinship and friendship networks, and perceived opportunities for work and education. People’s journeys follow paths carved out by empires and shift en route in response to new opportunities and barriers. People make these journeys, across the Channel or the Mediterranean despite and because of the fortified borders they encounter.
I currently lead a research project at the University of Edinburgh on immigration detention in the UK, the US and Australia. In this project, I am joined by brilliant researchers: Andonea Dickson, Saskia Smellie, and Thom Tyerman. Our starting point is that immigration detention is a failed project. It causes harm, doesn’t do what policymakers say it will do (that is to deter future migrants), and costs a lot of money. Nevertheless, across these countries – countries which maintain the biggest, most privatised detention estates in the world – we see the persistence of detention, and the ideas that underpin it, like deterrence.
Why does this happen? In our work, we analyse the international webs that incentivise detention as a ‘solution’, from the lobbying of private companies to the movement of political advisors across these three countries, and the colonial and imperial histories that underpin the contemporary incarceration and forced deportations of racialised and classed people. These practices rely on particular racial imaginaries. In all three countries, hegemonic notions of a white national identity are both deeply embedded in justifications for immigration detention and also perpetuated by detention systems.
These detention policies persist despite the evidence of the harm caused by them. Detention makes people ill and separates them from their loved ones and communities. Substandard conditions and cultures of abuse are endemic. In his 2016 review of detention, Stephen Shaw concluded that: ‘it is not possible to distinguish the fact of detention from the consequences for welfare and vulnerability’. Irina Verhülsdonk and her colleagues (2021) put it more bluntly, “The only efficient way to improve the detainees’ mental health is to release them from detention.” Despite this, governments look to the practices of other states that create the worst conditions, like Australia’s offshoring of detention to Manus Island and Nauru, as ‘models’ to emulate.
In our research, we are also interested in how people resist detention, from those incarcerated to their allies. We are thus partnering with organisations in all three countries: Scottish Detainee Visitors and Right to Remain the UK, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre in Australia, Detention Watch Network in the US, and the International Detention Coalition as our international partner. These invaluable partnerships are teaching us how people build movements against detention and other migration controls and the critical role of people with lived experience of detention within these movements.
I joined SDV as a visitor late last year. This experience has been critical to my understanding of detention, and the research I am doing. The two-hour drive from Edinburgh to Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre immediately makes very concrete abstract notions of detention centres being placed in remote locations. During visits, the worry of forced removal to Rwanda has been palpable, reflecting the intentional creation of fear by the state. In recent months, the drab visiting room has been coloured by new sofas: plastic, wipeable and marked by the jarring purple hue recognisable as the branded colour of Mitie, the private company that runs and makes enormous profit from many of the UK’s detention centres. As I sit with people on these purple sofas, what is plain is that the principal effect of such policies is the trauma it inflicts on people.
Visiting people in detention is not without its frustrations, as the limits of our role are abundantly clear to us and the people we visit, and not without ethical questions around complicity in the system. Yet, the strength and value of SDV and other visitor groups lie, I believe, in the quiet creation of space to exchange and build relationships with people incarcerated in a system so riddled with failures and frustrations. In this way, visitor groups work to connect people in a system that is designed to separate and isolate. Even with a new party and government in power in the UK, the work of people resisting detention, border controls, and the hostile environment, in small and big ways, will continue to be critical.
