TCDS Shrinking of Democracy Series: Brexit and European Borders: What Matters Now?
On July 16 & 17, 2016, an amazing cohort of Europe’s leading scholars and intellectuals, many of whom are alumni of TCDS and The New School, converged at The New School summer campus in Wroclaw, Poland for a conference on “The Shrinking of Democracy,” which provided a much needed analysis of European democracy in these unsettling times. Below is the second publication in a series inspired by the conference that we are calling the “Shrinking of Democracy Series.” To see the video of the first conference panel click here, for the second panel click here.
Brexit and European Borders: What Matters Now?
By Karolina Follis
On a Friday morning in June I woke up in a country different from that in which I went to sleep the night before. On Thursday the 23rd, the citizens of Great Britain, by a majority of 52 to 48 percent, decided that Britain should leave the European Union. This vote, popularly known as Brexit, was cast under the banner of “taking back control.” For a large portion of these voters, nothing is seen as more in need of control as Britain’s borders. It is said that British borders are in “a shambles,” ; this being the reasoning behind the UK tabloids declarations that the country is being “overrun” with foreigners. In the more respectable segments of the British media, this sentiment is often expressed in a more civil, coded manner, in the form of complaints that in recent years, as immigrants settled in British towns and cities, “many communities have changed beyond recognition” and “people feel like strangers in their own home towns.” People are, in another veiled expression, “worried about immigration,” which, we are often reminded, “does not make them racist.” The feeling of “discomfort” expressed by “ordinary citizens is something that successive governments have been accused of disregarding or ignoring. Many voices in the British media sought to explain the Brexit vote as a protest of those who have come to see themselves as being discounted precisely because of this issue.
For the rest of this discussion I will consider the major implications of this paradox. Enacting highly restrictive migration policies coupled with rigid border enforcement, as the anti-immigrant popular vote appears to demand, is certainly morally and legally problematic as well as socially unjust. A great deal of scholarly work has been produced on these topics, putting forward vitally important arguments.[1] This, however, is not the critique I wish to focus on today. Instead, I want to draw attention to the fact that popular anti-immigrant demands are economically and administratively both unrealistic and impractical; fulfilling these proposed policies wholesale would be politically unsound. This is why the harshest border control scenarios proposed today, in Britain and elsewhere, are not likely to be actualized if put into practice. This does not mean, however, that we can rest easy. Once committed to securing borders and bringing down immigration, politicians must be recognized by their supporters as acting on their promises. They will enact these policies at the expense of those most vulnerable; refugees lacking all democratic representation whatsoever, who have been forced into a stateless existence in their efforts to escape conflict, poverty and hopelessness in their former war-torn, failing states. I will demonstrate this through the example of Britain before concluding with a few thoughts on how we might respond.
I have referenced the sense of alienation people have expressed in regards to their rapidly changing communities as a result of immigration. To put it bluntly, for many of those who have expressed identification with this narrative, Leave was not so much a campaign for liberation from the European Union, but rather a call for the immigrants to, well, leave. However, the notion that by taking back control of borders through the termination of the UK’s membership with the EU will somehow ease this estrangement is a fantasy.
To better understand why this is the case, let’s begin by looking at the EU’s principle of the right to freedom of movement. This principle stipulates that any citizen of any EU nation has the right to enter, reside and work in any other member state. This principle enabled the citizens of Western Europe to come to London in search of opportunity and adventure (see Favell 2008), while at the same time allowing the British pensioners to retire in Spain, for example. For a while, this was being treated as a welcoming perk to joining the Common Market. In 2004 eight post-socialist states of Eastern Europe joined the EU. These citizens did not automatically qualify for freedom of movement. Most other EU states imposed a transition period of seven years, but at the time the British government chose to open its borders to them immediately without any transition. This almost instantly resulted in a tenfold increase in the number of EU citizens coming to live and work in the UK, ranging from about 10,000 per year even up to 200,000 per year, eventually reaching the total number of just over three million in 2015, resulting in a total population of 64 million. It was this increase in numbers that altered attitudes towards the freedom of movement. One economic crisis later, what used to be seen as an opportunity came to be seen as an unwanted burden in the space of less than a decade. The already-deprived non-metropolitan communities, who suffered most as a result of the post-2008 downturn, were encouraged to believe that it was immigrants who were to be blamed as the source of their malaise, rather than the long-term trends of deindustrialization or lack of investment coupled with the more recent austerity policies.
It is important to keep in mind that between 2004 and 2014, even with the high numbers of EU arrivals, EU citizens constituted the minority of foreign born residents in the UK. Although the proportion has been growing, roughly 50 percent of foreigners arriving today still come from outside the European Union (including from traditional immigration source countries like India and Pakistan whose ties to the UK are complex and run deep). Despite the presence of diverse communities of Asian, African and other peoples of non-European descent was not technically central to the EU referendum, the toxic tabloid discourse successfully collapsed all immigrants into one murky category, generating a permissive atmosphere for the racist outbursts following the Brexit vote. Overnight, it is as if open season has been declared on all ethnic difference. From Polish shopkeepers, to women in hijabs, to French academics, all have felt threatened and at risk of becoming the next targets of abuse.
Let us imagine further of what it would take to expel those who have entered without permission or have failed to secure the right to settle. In such contexts politicians like to mention deportation as a facet of “taking control,” though it is not so deceptively simple. While putting a person on a plane and sending them “home” may sound easy enough, in reality removal is a lengthy and expensive procedure involving many official agencies and private contractors. It begins with identity checks and ends with the country of destination agreeing to receive the deportee (and none of these steps are straightforward). More often than not, it involves the use of force. For these reasons only just over 12,000 enforced removals were carried out by the UK government in 2015, which stands out as a relatively small number when compared with the overall migration and border crossing figures.
In light of all this, what are we left with? We have a government facing a specific set of conflicting demands. On the one hand, the public expectation of taking back control of borders that has been elevated to unrealistic heights. On the other hand, there is the socioeconomic reality and external environment where the postulated “crackdown” simply would not work.
In these conditions what we are most likely to see is not the fundamental overhaul that the public appears to demand, but rather the persistent obstruction of movement through visas, permits, refusals of entry and other forms of generalized harassment of selected groups of migrants. The movement of people is pertinent to the functioning of the UK’s economy and radically undercutting it is difficult, costly and impractical. Who better to understand this than the new UK Prime Minister Theresa May? In her six years as Home Secretary she repeatedly had to admit that her attempts to restrict non-EU migration to the UK have largely failed.
But what Theresa May also knows is that physical borders are hardly the only site where foreigners can be made to feel unwelcome. Numbers, after all can be reduced not just through enforcement of restrictive laws but also through deterrence and hostility. This requires well-calibrated direct and indirect messages sent out to current and prospective migrants, letting them know that they are unwanted and that their lives, should they arrive, will be made difficult. May has a record of crafting such messages designed both for those already in the UK, and those who have yet to embark on the potentially deadly journey across the Mediterranean or Aegean Sea to enter Europe.
In 2013, for example, when the UK Parliament was passing the Immigration bill, May openly advocated creating what she called, a “hostile environment” for irregular migrants. Part of this strategy has been to encourage every upstanding British citizen to keep their eyes and ears open and to inform the UK Border Agency of neighbors who might be in the country illegally committing benefits fraud and other migration related offences (Dzenovska 2014). The duty to perform identity checks was imposed on bank clerks and private landlords, thus expanding the reach of the border force into the heart of everyday communities. May’s message to those already in the UK without requisite documents has been “go home or face arrest.” The posters with this text displayed on billboards were driven by Home Office vans through English towns in 2013. They were roundly criticized in the mainstream media and by the UK NGO sector. This form of communication was subsequently discontinued, but the message they got out was clear. While, in theory, the legal resident immigrants had nothing to fear (ostensibly only the “bad” undocumented ones were the targets) in such hostile environments everyone must breath their foul air.
This policy was dubbed the “let them drown” policy almost as soon as it was announced. Many critics came forward, in the Parliament, in the media, in academia and NGOs. A scathing editorial in the otherwise right-leaning Daily Telegraph summarized the government’s self-serving reasoning as follows:
We understand that by withdrawing this rescue cover we will be leaving innocent children, women and men to drown who we would otherwise have saved. But eventually word will get around the war-torn communities of Syria and Libya and the other unstable nations of the region that we are indeed leaving innocent children, women and men to drown. And when it does, they will think twice about making the journey. And so eventually, over time, more lives will be saved. (Hodges 2014).
This proved too much for the majority of people, who saw the blatant refusal to provide rescue missions as a dereliction of British values. Ultimately, like with the “go home” vans, the government backpedalled. David Cameron ended up sending a military vessel to the Mediterranean, but not before obtaining assurance that no persons rescued by the Royal Navy would be permitted application for asylum in the UK. They would be delivered to the nearest Italian port, to be dealt with by their government rather than that of Great Britain. The “let them drown” policy was not about preventing loss of life, but was a harsh, preemptive effort at border control.
To conclude: what I spoke about was the paradox of shrinking democracy and border control. The vote in the UK to leave the European Union, while in many ways falling short of a democratic process based on informed deliberation, is said to have delivered a strong mandate for the government to limit immigration and strengthen border control. This, as I have explained, still remains difficult. However, the powers currently leading Britain have a track record of policies of border control by other means. One of them is the creation of a hostile environment for migrants. The other being the “let them drown” policy which rested upon the fundamental unwillingness to engage in areas of border crisis or to participate in international humanitarian efforts. These efforts, flawed and insufficient as they are, marred by deficiencies of European solidarity, have nonetheless saved thousands of lives in recent years. As the UK withdraws from the European Union, its politicians will no longer have to concoct perverse arguments for why they do not want to participate in joint search and rescue operations. They will simply wash their hands of the many crises beyond their immediate borders.
So what matters now? This is far from just an issue for the UK. Brexit has made the already appalling situation at Europe’s Southern edges significantly worse. The vote appears to legitimize a politics based on “taking control of borders” which, in practice, entails the targeting of the most vulnerable peoples; migrants on the move, refugees with no place to go and no concrete form of legal representation (the EU migrants, inconvenienced as they may be, after all have their own governments to stand up for them in the upcoming Brexit negotiations). Whether intimidating them through communal hostility or indeed leaving them to drown, these tactics represent what I would call a post-humanitarian approach to human movement. As I have argued elsewhere (Follis 2016), the suspicion that the humanitarian impulse only attracts an undeserving mob of undesirable migrants has been firmly planted and will continue to attract supporters to the anti-humanitarian model of border control in Europe and beyond. Based on the hostilities culminating around Brexit it appears that opposing, resisting and challenging this anti-humanitarianism will require an unprecedented mobilization of all migrants’ rights advocates, regardless of their specific ideological and activist orientations. This must be an imperative in the wake of Brexit, which is nothing else but the “let them drown” policy writ large.
References:
Albahari, Maurizio (2015) Crimes of Peace. Mediterranean Migrations and the World’s Deadliest Border, Philadelphia: Penn Press.
Dzenovska, Dace (2014) ‘We Want to Hear from You’: How Informing Works in a Liberal Democracy, in Migration: A COMPAS Anthology, edited by B. Anderson and M. Keith, COMPAS, Oxford available at http://compasanthology.co.uk/
Favell, Adrian (2008) Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Movement and Mobility in an Integrating Europe. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell
Follis, Karolina (2016) ‘Ethnography up the stream: the UK ‘let them drown’ policy and the politics of bordering Europe’, in Externalizing Migration Management: Europe, North America and the spread of ‘remote control’ practices, edited by R. Zaiotti, London: Routledge, 72-88.
Hodges, Dan (2014) ‘Drown an immigrant to save an immigrant: why is the Government borrowing policy from the BNP?’ The Telegraph 28 October, available at: <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11192208/Drown-an-immigrant-to save-animmigrant-why-is-the-Government-borrowing-policy-from-the-BNP.html>
Zaiotti, Ruben, ed. (2016) Externalizing Migration Management: Europe, North America and the spread of ‘remote control’ practices, London: Routledge.
[1] For a compelling recent account of the deadly dynamics of the Southern borders of Europe on the Mediterranean see Albahari 2015.
Karolina Follis teaches in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University in the UK. She has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research in New York and has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the National University of Ireland Maynooth. She works on borders, citizenship, security and human rights. These themes run through her current research projects which concern maritime migration across the Mediterranean, accounting for human rights breaches in Europe, and digital rebordering and cybersecurity. She is the author of Building Fortress Europe. The Polish-Ukrainian Frontier, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
