Thinking Solidarity Through Immigration Detention Visiting

Guest post by Tom Kemp. Tom is an organiser with Abolitionist Futures, SOAS Detainee Support and the collective that facilitates detainedvoices.com. He is also a researcher at Nottingham Law School writing on the law and politics of border enforcement. This post is part of a collaboration between Border Criminologies, Theoretical Criminology and Sage Journals that seeks to promote open access platforms. As part of this initiative the full article, on which this piece is based, will be free to access here for the next three months. 

How can those who oppose the carceral institutions of border control engage in solidarity with those held within them, without colluding with the systems that confine them? This question, I argued in a recent article, sits persistently at the heart of activist projects including those which organise immigration detention visits in the UK. This article was drawn from research that involved participation in visiting with two detention visiting groups and interviews with visitors and workers from detention visiting groups in England.

Detention visiting is a curious form of political activism. It is comprised of three roles that are frequently in tension. In part, visiting is an offer of company and friendship which can break up the detention routine and provide emotional support. Groups also offer 'casework', a service which involves the provision of non-legal support such as finding and chasing lawyers, and making referrals to appropriate NGOs for expert support. The final part is resistance: the defiant attempt to occupy spaces that the state does not want people to see, and to form bonds with people marked for estrangement and deportation.

Visiting is facilitated by local groups that have diverse sets of political motivations and framings for their work. However, in interviews with individuals from a range of groups, I found similar ethical and political questions being worked through.

A critical take on hospitality

In making sense of detention visiting as a form of activism, I drew on Derridean notions of hospitality. Hospitality is seen as a practice which manages relationships across difference. In the process of welcome, however, hospitality also constructs and asserts that difference: visitors are expected to adhere to the implicit and explicit rules of the host. Hosts are therefore imbued with social and spatial power to set the terms of welcome, meaning that even the most generous acts of hospitality involve a contradictory entwinement of openness and welcome with closure and hostility.

This critical idea of hospitality neatly conceptualises the ways that public campaigns for a more welcoming refugee policy accept conditions on who is deserving of safety from violence, including state violence. Pro-refugee rhetoric often extends only to those deemed vulnerable, credible, innocent and worthy, and does not question the 'host' state's sovereign right to exclude.

As I argue in the article, the concept of hospitality helps illuminate the ways that detention visitors experiment with the roles of host and guest. Unlike, host-guest relations in traditional settings, the host-guest roles in detainee-visitor relationships are not fixed. They shift according to the play and strategy of visitors and those whom they visit.

Visitors as hosts

On the one hand, visitors’ relationships with people in detention often replicate dominant patterns in which the citizen is host and the migrant is a guest. Visitors sometimes see themselves as representatives of a more welcoming side of Britain, others use their familiarity with the legal and institutional space of detention to 'signpost' or guide those in detention toward routes out.

As one visitor, Jane, said about her motivations to volunteer: ‘I think that a lot of people in Brook House feel that everyone in the UK hates them, and that they aren’t welcome full stop’. Others described their attempts to be kind, smiling, and helpful as attempts to be ‘welcoming’ and as part of the struggle to make the country a more hospitable place.

Becoming a part of the detention landscape, visiting groups often use posters and workshops to attract detainees to use their service. Such access is secured through agreements with the detention centre’s management. Concerned with the sustainability of their projects, visiting groups place limits on how visitors interact with those in detention by sometimes forbidding them from sharing their telephone number with the person they visit or attending anti-detention protests.

Visitors as guests

On the other hand, visitors also interact with those in detention in the role of guests. They enter into relationships with people inside detention tentatively and without predetermined ideas about the purpose or role they are supposed to play. Some groups visit without any formal agreements with the centre management. Rather than becoming a fixture of the detention centre they sustain a more ambivalent relation to visiting as one possible engagement with the space of detention and the people within it. One experienced visitor in London said in interview that:

“Visiting is the backbone – visiting for me has driven a lot of my political engagement. Going to a demonstration outside a detention centre is very different if you’re visiting than if you’re not.”

Visitors adopt a ‘guest’ role primarily because of their concerns about the way 'hosting' interventions might aid institutional spaces like immigration that mobilise care to legitimise custody.

Conclusion

Shifting between different hospitality roles is one way that visitors navigate the power relations of carceral institutions. The offer of hospitality as a host more assertively adopts a care dynamic that uses expertise to support and guide people through a scary and uncertain situation. Yet visitors worry that this approach can stabilise and pacify the people they visit and that they risk becoming another person that is determining whether a detainee’s story is true and deserving of support. As Laura, a visitor to a person held in Harmondsworth IRC, said:

           "One of the things visiting does is perpetuate the situation by propping up people who are in that place who might like act otherwise if there wasn't someone regularly visiting them and being regularly supportive. It walks the line of charity."

By offering hospitality as a guest, detention visitors learn to navigate immigration detention as a space of ‘hostipitality’, a view that recognises the ways in which both care and exclusion are constitutive of detention itself. The dilemmas of complicity that visitors face might prompt us to problematise campaigning approaches that focus on addressing the state as a benevolent host. And by enacting hospitality from the position of a guest, visitors develop novel framings through which citizen-activists can take part as collaborators in anti-border movements.

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Kemp, T. (2021). Thinking Solidarity Through Immigration Detention Visiting. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2021/06/thinking [date]