How to Deal With Policy ‘Failure’ and Cost-Ineffectiveness: Insights from Immigration Detention in the United Kingdom

by Federica Infantino

International migration management can be about predicting and shaping migration futures. Several organizations focus their activities on forecasting the future, assessing and managing ‘risks’, and preempting and/or responding to potential behaviors (such as migratory decisions) before they surface. For example, organizations like the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (usually referred to as Frontex) or the European Asylum Agency carry out analyses to predict the direction of migratory movements and asylum applications. In the case of administrative detention in the view of the removal of undocumented foreigners or foreigners who have committed specific types of crimes, assessments of the future are means to cope with policy ‘failure’ and cost-ineffectiveness.

Detention in the view of removal is a coercive practice, which has not lost its centrality, although it falls short of its stated objective. Just as in other European countries, the number of expulsions in the United Kingdom does not follow the number of orders to leave (Silverman, Stephanie, Melanie Griffiths, and Peter William Walsh. 2022. Immigration detention in the UK. Oxford: The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.) and, in fact, has declined over the past years. While some people can be held in detention for years, the majority stay in detention for up to 28 days and might go in and out multiple times. The staff in detention centers tend to agree on the fact that 50% of detainees are released rather than deported. However, administrative detention uses considerable public resources. Costs include detention itself, missed flights, and compensation payments for unlawful detention.

Following pioneer ethnographic work in Immigration Removal Centers in the United Kingdom, I have conducted interviews and observations of the Home Office staff in the two largest British Immigration Removal Centers, namely Colnbrook and Brook House. I am interested in these workers because they are tasked with the most difficult job: They need to bridge the gap between the political fantasy of cost-effectiveness – migrants putting themselves on the planes rapidly to save costs – and the reality of legal and corporal resistance to pending deportations. As a result, the Home Office staff focus their activities on forecasting the future, to anticipate, counter, and shape any form of resistance, whether imagined or not.

To do so, it is key to collect information about detainees, mostly through face-to-face interactions, when paperwork is served. Information allows for categorizing detainees as compliant and non-compliant. This means that they will follow the expulsion order, or they will fight for their case, either with legal procedures or with self-harm, resisting the corporal act of removal, and even by hiding in the center when the escort comes to take detainees to the airport.

Implementing personnel describe the recourse to legal assistance and the appeal procedures against expulsion orders as illicit although lawful. They use the term “legal challenges”. Instead of defenders of the rule of law, attorneys are described as bad-faith citizens in search of profit and business opportunities. While in detention, some questions asked to detainees aim at assessing the ‘risk’ of applying for asylum and at finding elements that could be used in an asylum procedure, to eventually prove the lack of grounds for asylum in terms of persecution. These questions are “Do you fear return?”, “You are saying you fear for your health and for your money. Anything else?” Other questions aim at assessing the existence of any “blockage” either administrative or behavioral, such as “Do you have a valid passport?”, “Do you wish to return?”, “In a couple of words, why don’t you want to return?”, “Are you going to walk?”

From the perspective of those who put policy into practice, legal procedures and various forms of resistance matter because they slow down the ideal (harried) pace of day-to-day implementation while increasing costs. In effect, implementing personnel is particularly concerned with detainees who “sit back and don’t do anything”. These detainees put organizations on hold. They reverse the power imbalances in their favor, although that comes at a high price. Migrants’ agency, or their ‘imagined agency’ that is projected actions ascribed to migrants by implementing personnel, shape day-to-day practices. Implementing personnel tend to consider migrants’ actions and those of people who support them as responsible for ‘failure’ and cost-ineffectiveness that characterize detention and removal. That is a way to make sense of their work.

Article Details
Shaping Borders: Migrants’ Agency, Time Commodification, and Anticipatory Detention Strategies
Federica Infantino
First published June 11, 2024 Research article
DOI: 10.1177/00027162241250232
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

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