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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

7. Border (Mis)Management, Ignorance and Denial

Author : Victoria Canning

Published in: Ignorance, Power and Harm

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The escalations in deaths at Europe’s border in 2015 brought international focus on the failure of European leaders to respond logistically and humanely to an otherwise-silenced human disaster. Greece, Italy and Turkey faced significant criticism, particularly from Northern European states, for their failure to either prevent people from entering Europe or to prevent the loss of life at sea.

Although geographic spatial positioning was an obvious facilitator for their unrequested roles as both transient and host states, the financial and legislative outsourcing of border controls has been a more invisible contributor to the catastrophes that unfolded across Southern and indeed Eastern Europe. This chapter develops such a focus by using the UK’s response to the so-called refugee crisis as a case study. I argue that the longer-term expansions of stringent border controls, particularly since the 1990s, have been deliberately developed so that Britain is shielded from the realities of refugee influx, border deaths or crisis. This ‘orchestrated invisibility’ facilitates a sense of ignorance towards human suffering, which in turn allows the UK a sense of unknowing, even when it has become impossible not to know.

Overall, this chapter traces relevant legislation to external borders and buffer zones (Carr 2012) and simultaneously maps the role the UK, and specifically Britain, has played in the creation of crisis. Its role in conflict, arms trade and economic destabilisation has placed it on the peripheries at best and centrally at worst to many of the nations that refugees are fleeing from. Nonetheless, by feigning ignorance and exercising collective denial (Cohen 2001) through socio-spatial distance, the UK has failed to respond humanely to a catastrophe, aspects of which it is, at least in part, responsible for.

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previous chapter Managing Ignorance About Māori Imprisonment

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This is with the exception of deaths within the British border, including deaths in immigration detention. For information on people who have died in such circumstances, see the Institute of Race Relations website: http://www.irr.org.uk/news/deaths-in-immigration-detention-1989-2017/.

I use the term ‘unaccountability’ here to emphasise the active measures (??) which the UK generally, and Britain specifically, is able to take. It should also be noted that not all parts of Britain have taken uniform stances to the so-called crisis. For example, the formal stance in Scotland in 2015 and 2016 was to ensure an increased intake of people seeking asylum—by 2016, it had relocated more than a third of the total number of people entering the UK on the Vulnerable Person’s resettlement Scheme (which itself is so far failing to reach the target of 20,000 Syrian resettlements by 2020—see Addley and Pidd 2016).

In line with a party political promise on the re-election of the Conservative Party, former Prime Minister David Cameron called a referendum to decide whether the UK would remain as part of the European Union. The referendum was held on 23 June 2016. Having backed the ‘Remain’ campaign, Cameron stepped down as PM when the ‘Leave’ (or ‘Brexit’) campaign won, with a 51.9% majority voting to take the UK out of the Union. Former Home Secretary Theresa May took up the role of Prime Minister. May had facilitated around 15,000 changes to legislation affecting immigration during her six years as Home Secretary.

This case has now expanded in the aftermath of Brexit to further include EU migrants, including economic migrants and European students.

This was after the UK withdrew support from the Mediterranean migrant rescue mission Mare Nostrum in October 2014 (Travis 2014).

The Jules Ferry day Centre is described by Samira Shackle: ‘Run from three military tents, this day centre hands out one hot meal per day and allows access to showers, toilets and electricity points for the thousands of people camped out in the sprawling tent city known as “the jungle”. It is heavily guarded and also contains beds for about 100 women and children’ (Asylum Aid 2015).

The objective here is not to represent the nuances of public or political knowledge and engagement as monolithic but argue that the more structural context of knowledge creation bolsters the dominant objectives of British border controls. The public response to the so-called Refugee crisis was not only heterogeneous but also incredibly positive in many areas. To paraphrase Frances Webber, events in 2015 onwards spurred what became the most publically visible and sustained pro-refugee movement in personal memory (Webber, in conversation, 2016).

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Title: Border (Mis)Management, Ignorance and Denial
Author: Victoria Canning
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Ignorance, Power and Harm
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97342-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-97343-2

Copyright Year: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97343-2_7