Borders are walls that seek to block out a gross inequality between Africa and Europe constructed during colonialism and perpetuated by European economic and political policies today. Ultimately this violence is felt on the body, the border marking its scars across the flesh of people. It is felt in the torn skin of those who daily try to cross the fortified fences of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco. It is felt in the violated bodies of women raped and abused by smugglers and border guards. It is there in the many undiscovered skeletons in North African deserts and the Mediterranean Sea. (Buxton & Akkerman, 2018)
Borders construct imperialism, facilitating multiple regimes of accumulation, segregated geographically, socially and racially. Death of migrants when trying to cross to “safe” countries is not the result of misfortune or accidents. These tragedies are not natural, and neither they are the result of unfortunate accidents or violence between migrants or human trafficking gangs. Hardening the borders and focusing purely on security concerns don’t stop these deaths. They simply create more opportunities for the smugglers and more suffering for the migrants. Those immigrants, whose deaths are summarized as neat statistics, are not really living lives, but living in a condition of waiting between life and death.
“English Channel: Girl, 7, Dies After Boat Capsizes Near Dunkirk in France”, read the headline on 4 March (BBC, 2024). A 7-year-old girl died when a small boat attempting to reach the English Channel capsized. The boat was carrying 16 migrants when it sank off the coast of Dunkirk. The girl’s parents and her three siblings survived and were taken to a hospital in Dunkirk. According to local authority Préfet du Nord, the vessel was “probably stolen” and was too small to support the amount of people on board.
In the first three months of 2024, nine people drowned attempting the journey, compared with 12 for the whole of 2023. The total number of migrants who had crossed the Channel was 2,255.
The Home Office said the loss of life was “devastating”. We never learned the child’s name or those of her family members. In the official statement and by the media, we are often given numbers and neat statistics, without a name, individual or collective background story. They are deemed politically unimportant, rendering them invisible.
The majority of people crossing the Channel – illegally – in small boats are fleeing war-torn or oppressive countries. According to the Refugee Council, 8,692 children crossed the Channel in 2022, and 75% of people who made the crossing that year (an estimated 34,461 people) came from just seven countries: Albania, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Eritrea, and Sudan (Refugee Council, 2024). In 2022, there were 45,746 people who crossed the Channel in a small boat. Over 25,000 men, women and children – six out of ten of all those who made the crossing – would be recognized as refugees, if the UK government processed their asylum applications. As a significant number of people are ultimately recognized as refugees, the ultimate number is likely to be even higher.
Four in ten who crossed the Channel came from just five countries – Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Eritrea, and Sudan. All of those nationalities currently have asylum grant rates of 82% or higher. In particular, people from Afghanistan, Syria and Eritrea had an asylum grant rate of 98%, and those from Sudan and Iran had a grant rate of 86% and 82%, respectively (Table 1).
Asylum grant rates by country
| Nationality | Estimated arrivals via small boat in 2022 | Asylum grant rate |
|---|---|---|
| Albania | 15,569 | 16% |
| Afghanistan | 6,622 | 98% |
| Iran | 4,978 | 82% |
| Iraq | 4,258 | 53% |
| Syria | 3,035 | 98% |
| Eritrea | 2,090 | 98% |
| Sudan | 1,677 | 86% |
Two of those countries (Afghanistan and Iraq) were invaded and occupied by the UK in the 21st century, while a third (Syria) has been fighting a war in which the UK has also been involved.
“Gruesome tales of migrant deaths abound at the gates of the West”, wrote Ruben Andersson in 2014:
“illegal immigrants” crammed into unseaworthy boats, squeezed into rusty trucks trundling across the Sahara, walking through the distant deserts of Arizona, or clinging onto Mexican cargo trains. Thousands have perished on these grueling treks, with one incomplete tally listing almost 20 thousand deaths at the gates of “Fortress Europe” since 1988. Yet the misery does not end there for today’s migrant outcasts. The media, populist politicians, and zealous bureaucrats have seized upon the illegal immigrant as a bogeyman, a perennial outsider who in waves and floods invades Western countries. In their accounts, a global pariah is emerging: alternately an object of deep fascination and utter indifference, of horror and pity, he stalks the borders of the rich world, sowing panic, wrecking election campaigns, and generating headlines as he goes. (Andersson, 2014: 2–3)
These travelers, whether they succeed or fall short of their goals, end up collaborating in their own making as illegal immigrants on the infernal production line of the illegality industry.
“The conceptual link between immigration and social vices such as crime, disease, and moral contamination has gripped the public mind long before the present era and continually shapes immigration policies and border control measures. Mobility is perceived as a suspicious activity especially when it relates to those without property” (Shamir, 2005: 201). The concept of “crimmigration” refers to the connection between crime control and immigration control. It represents the distinct laws and legal processes that states employ as a means of exerting control over a sector of our global society. As Juliet Stumpf (2013: 59) explains, the integration of immigration and criminal spheres “tends to generate more severe outcomes, limit procedural protections, and encourage enforcement and adjudication processes that segregate non-citizens”. Crimmigration law lays the foundations for the system. It is an umbrella term for the interweaving of administrative immigration law and criminal law, “under conditions of interchangeability and mutual reinforcement” (Aas, 2014: 525). This convergence produces an instrumental panoply of laws, geared toward the exclusion of undesirable non-citizens, from which immigration officials may “cherry-pick” at their wish, depending on their objectives and resources (Bowling, 2015: 11).
Since the start of the 21st century, terrorism, or the “War on Terror”, has become a priority for governments around the world, including the UK. This priority has involved a rhetoric of exclusion and fear of foreigners and has been combined with a political demand for intensifying control of the cross-border movement of people. In the UK, the securitization of migration that led to Brexit has cultivated an image of the migrant, the foreigner, as a threat to the nation – physical, economic, cultural, and political.
The rise in the number of refugees fleeing to Europe, particularly after the Syrian civil war, pushed migration high up the political agenda. For the UK governments, both previous Conservative and current Labour, the only solution is to build harsher borders, criminal justice for “unscrupulous” traffickers, and stop illegal migration altogether. What has been in practice since the early years of this century is “managed migration”, which is indeed setting up private detention centers where immigrants are treated worse than criminals.
The current level of migration, and the deaths associated with this, are no accident, but the direct result of global structures of capitalism and imperialism that marginalize, exclude, and exploit poor undocumented migrants and people of color, who are rendered exploitable or disposable.
Following the 2001 terror attacks in the US, immigration, particularly asylum, featured significantly in the political framing of the problem of terrorism. Abuse of the asylum system and removal of people from the national territory soon became key elements in the framing of the fight against terror. Terrorism was framed as being a problem of controlling foreigners entering British territory and those already living in the UK. In a debate on 4 October, Prime Minister Blair outlined the key elements of the legislation that would be introduced in the House of Commons:
In the next few weeks, the Home Secretary intends to introduce a package of legislation to supplement existing legal powers in a number of areas … It will cover the funding of terrorism. It will increase our ability to exclude and remove those whom we suspect of terrorism and who are seeking to abuse our asylum procedures. It will widen the law on incitement to include religious hatred. We will bring forward a Bill to modernize our extradition law. (House of Commons, 2001)
The link between immigration, otherness and terrorism was reinforced in discussions on the planned anti-terrorism measures. Immigration and asylum were two of the main issues around which the political debate on the nature of insecurity and the legitimacy of exceptional policies was taking place, leading up to the 2016 referendum on Brexit.
Connections between counter-terrorism and immigration and/or asylum were rooted in the assumption that the “danger” comes from foreigners.
The assumption that one is dealing with international terrorism strongly frames the security question in terms of cross-border movements and the presence of foreigners in the national territory. Because terrorism is international, the terrorists “must be foreign” – the threat is something which comes from migration and in order to secure the country, migration has to become an issue in the context of national security policy. (Huysmans & Buonfino, 2008: 15)
The border remains an essential instrument in security and migration policy. This idea of the border as a shield from foreign threats informed the opt-outs of the Europeanization of border control and policing, as well as aspects of migration and asylum policy, especially when the foreigner-migrants came from the Middle East and Africa. Slowly but surely, in the space of 15 years (2001–2016) insecurity (physical, economic, cultural, and political) was established as being synonymous with the presence of foreigners in the national territory. Exceptions, of course, were made for the super-rich, who were able to buy “golden visas”: foreign nationals who invested £2 million could be granted a visa, with more benefits the higher the investment and a path to achieving UK citizenship.
Borders are not marked on a map. They are a method. A way of distinguishing between those who can and those who cannot, not always killing, often just hurting. They prevent people from passing through or mark forever those who cross them. (Redazione Mediterranea, 2023)
While the government of a liberal democracy is keen to share high asylum-granting rates, those unfortunates still have to risk their lives in small boats, moving illegally from country to country, in poverty and homelessness, vulnerable to diseases, physical and sexual assaults, and exploitation. And while the death of the little girl who drowned crossing the Channel on 4 March was sad – devastating even – it was not sad enough to try to enable the safe travel of certain foreigners, it was not sad enough to grant her the dignity of naming her, and it was not sad enough the populate the daily press. Deaths that were tragic enough to keep the press and readers busy reporting and absorbing the devastating loss were those resulting from the sinking of the luxury “superyacht” Bayesian in the Mediterranean, on 19 August 2024, when “luxury turned to terror”.
It all happened in a 16-minute window of disaster, chaos and torment, which catapulted a sleepy Sicilian fishing port to the center of world news. All but seven of the 22 passengers of the Bayesian had scrambled into a life raft as the yacht began to capsize. The others never made it out. Charlotte Golunski, a British woman, was thrown into the water with her 1-year-old daughter, Sophie. She told of clutching her baby in the air with all her strength to keep her from drowning. (Lowen 2024)
This time we learned the names of all survivors, and we learned the names of the seven who drowned, also far away from home: the president of the investment bank Morgan Stanley, Jonathan Bloomer, and his wife Judy; Mr. Lynch’s lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda; the yacht’s chef, Recaldo Thomas; finally, Mike Lynch, one of the UK’s top tech entrepreneurs, dubbed “Britain’s Bill Gates” and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, who was due to begin studying at the University of Oxford. Mr. Lynch had brought together family, friends and colleagues for an idyllic holiday on his luxury boat: a sumptuous 56-meter (184ft) sailing yacht that had won design awards. These were not families risking their lives in small boats. The Lynch family released a statement talking of their “unspeakable grief”. “Last Sunday night, we saw the end of the world in Porticello”, said resident Maria Vizzo. “We’ve never seen something like this. Everyone here is shocked – and everyone is crying” (Lowen, 2024).
It was not over when all the bodies were recovered. The investigation into the disaster was only starting, as questions were being raised:
Was the keel up? And if so, why?
What measures did the crew take?
How did the boat sink so quickly?
Did the weather cause the freak accident?
“It will be a long time before we get answers as to exactly how the UK-flagged Bayesian yacht sank off the coast of Sicily” (Bennett, 2024).
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Missing Migrants Project, the annual number of migrant deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean jumped from 2,048 in 2021, to 2,411 in 2022, and to 3,041 by the end of 2023 (IOM, 2024). These deaths do not remain in the headlines for very long, yet they too died in waters far away from home. They overwhelmingly remain anonymous.
In 1891, in the midst of the European carve-up of Africa, the French economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu defended European colonialism in Africa, saying:
This state of the world implies for the civilized people a right of intervention … in the affairs of [barbarian tribes or savages] … Imperialism is thus the systematic action of an organized people upon another people whose organization is defective; and it presupposes that it is the state itself, and not only some individuals, which is responsible for the mission. (Leroy-Beaulieu, 1891)
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Garro’s article examines the concept of “home” by exploring the relationship between nostalgia, homesickness and transnational interests of migrants in the UK. Dales, Ward and Hamourtziadou adopt a human security approach to loss of life, addressing the importance of recording the civilian casualties of armed conflicts, in ways that the victims become more than numbers and more than statistics. Garebo evaluates the feasibility of fostering social cohesion in war-torn northwest Syria, unearthing a myriad of challenges and roadblocks impeding the attainment of social cohesion. Fieldhouse notes the need for new skills in a changing 21st century warfare, by looking at the recruitment of people with additional needs by the British Army. Travers, in her report, queries the future of justice for ISIL’s survivors in Iraq, stressing the international community’s ongoing responsibility to uphold justice and human rights, and arguing for a survivor-centered approach to justice. The final article in this issue is by Jack Houghton on the global shift, the changing architecture of power in the 21st century, with a particular focus on a middle-size regional power, Turkey.