With The Rwanda Deportation Plan British Asylum Policy Moves Firmly On To The Terrain Of The Far Right

Guest post by Lucy Mayblin, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Sheffield. Lucy is on Twitter @LucyMayblin.

With the Nationality and Borders Bill making its way through parliament, the UK government is already pushing ahead with its post-Brexit asylum policy. This is an agenda which primarily seeks to spirit away refugees as though they don’t have rights under international law. Britain, of course, is a country with a long history of sending unwanted people to lands far away, where their rights may or may not be respected, and with a new agreement with Rwanda it seems that those old worldviews live on.

The plan is to send men who arrive via small boat Channel crossings to Rwanda where the British government hopes they will settle. Their applications for asylum will not be assessed in the UK, irrespective of their countries of origin or their claims to persecution. It is hoped they will start new lives in Rwanda, and in return the Rwandan government will receive £120million.

Ostensibly, a key driving force behind the policy agenda is preventing loss of life at sea. Will deporting men who arrive in small boats to Rwanda achieve this goal? No. Is it a sustainable solution to the realities of 21^st Century refugee migration? No. All of the research evidence suggests that people board unsafe vessels to cross the English Channel and other bodies of water because no safe or legal routes are available. The more controls that are introduced, the more dangerous journeys are made. There is no evidence to suggest that doing horrible things to people deters others from doing the same. For example, Australia’s policy of deporting people who arrived in boats seeking asylum to an island detention camp indefinitely without access to adequate medical treatment, asylum adjudication, and beyond the reach of human rights observers, had no impact on the numbers of boat arrivals there. Nor has the EU policy of placing people in overcrowded camps on Greek Islands stopped others crossing the Mediterranean. Finally, when Israel started deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda and abandoning them, their asylum application numbers were unaffected. In short, all the evidence suggests that the policy will not have a deterrent effect.

What effect can we then expect? Having fled their countries of origin on long and traumatic journeys with the ambition of reuniting with family or friends, perhaps going to university, getting a job, and starting their life in the UK, deportees -a mix of nationalities- will find themselves unexpectedly in Rwanda. They are unlikely to speak Kinyarwanda. As with other groups who are deported to unfamiliar countries, it seems plausible that this forced relocation will have a devastating impact on these individuals and that some will be highly vulnerable to destitution and exploitation. It also seems plausible that some will leave, and new smuggling routes will open. What is clear is that this is a spectacularly cruel thing to do to people.

What, then, makes this kind of policy thinkable in the first place? It seems to depend on an assumption that men who make irregular Channel crossings are not only not real refugees, but that they are not fully human. I say not fully human in the sense that they do not seem to be seen by the British government as people deserving of equal respect, dignity, and access to human rights. The policy is literally dehumanising. People arriving in small boats are to be treated like pesky animals causing a nuisance who need to be removed. Such dehumanisation is dependent on racialised ideas about who is worthy of rights, and who is ultimately disposable. It is utterly unthinkable that such a policy would be implemented for Ukrainians, even though the situation in Syria is not dissimilar to that in Ukraine. This is because a racial logic underpins the spectacular cruelty of deportation. And it is that racial logic which drives these kinds of policy proposals.

Colombian sociologists Aurora Vergara Figueroa writes of how some people seem always to be uprooted from the land, to be ‘uprootable’, with little regard for their purported rights or claims to be there. This argument aptly captures the logics of human hierarchy which run through British asylum policy. Some people also seem always to be deemed detainable, deportable, deserving of cruelty for taking journeys and claiming rights which the British state views as ultimately for someone else, someone more worthy. These men are not being deported in order that we can help them, to give them a better life, to stop illegal migration, to prevent abuse of the asylum system, to curb Channel crossings, or to prevent loss of life at sea. They are being deported because they are seen as unworthy of rights and dignity, as not really people at all.

Since the policy is in violation of the Refugee Convention, there will be legal challenges, and it seems unlikely that this is a long term solution to small boat Channel crossings, but what it does do is move British asylum policy genuinely onto the terrain of the far right. We cannot understand what is happening without recognising the racist worldview underpinning it. The only alternatives, then, must be based in anti-racist work and activism. It’s time to get busy.

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Mayblin, L. (2022) With The Rwanda Deportation Plan British Asylum Policy Moves Firmly On To The Terrain Of The Far Right. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2022/04/rwanda [date]