Since late last year, I have been visiting people who are detained in Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre as a volunteer with Scottish Detainee Visitors. Every month, I make the two-hour car journey with other volunteers from Edinburgh to Dungavel, where we speak to people incarcerated by the state in a system riddled with failures and frustrations.
Some have lived in the UK for decades. They’ve established families here and raised children. Others have only been in the country a few months or years. They came because they have friends or family in the UK, they’re familiar with the language, and they hope to find work opportunities.
These are the same reasons why I, a migrant who travels easily because of my whiteness, wealth and European passport, came to the UK.
What unites their experiences, apart from their racialisation, is the incarceration they endure. It’s indefinite. They haven’t been granted the right to remain by the UK government, yet in most cases they cannot be deported. So they must wait for something to change, without any idea of how long that might take.
Immigration detention: a system designed to debilitate
The UK maintains the largest and most privatised immigration detention estate in Europe: last year, it incarcerated over 16,000 people (year ending March 2024). Many more were ‘processed’ at Manston detention centre in Kent, yet weren’t counted in official statistics. Beyond these formal detention centres, thousands more are forced to live in semi-carceral spaces, from barges to barracks.
People are made ill by detention. They are separated from their loved ones and communities, unable to eat well or exercise, and live under the enormous stress of being detained indefinitely
The violence and cruelty of the system is ever-present in the Dungavel visitors’ room. People are made ill by detention. They are separated from their loved ones and communities, unable to eat well or exercise, and live under the enormous stress of being detained indefinitely. Although most people are released from detention and many are within one month, those inside never know when that moment will come. In 2022, the longest-serving detainee had been held for three years and ten months.
No other country in Europe does this. Only the UK considers indefinite detention, and the enormous mental and physical toll it exacts on detainees, acceptable. In this way, the state steals people’s time, amounting to bits of their life, as they are suspended in limbo.
The struggle to prevent a world without sanctuary
In recent years, we have seen nation-states around the globe increasingly attack and erode the right to sanctuary and refuge, as well as the right to movement.
In the UK, the government has expanded detention powers and other carceral spaces, attempted to offshore detention to Rwanda, and sharpened the teeth of the hostile environment. A string of legislation, including the Nationality and Borders Act (2022), the Illegal Migration Act (2023), and the Safety of Rwanda Act (2024), has made more people detainable and removable.
On the cusp of a general election, I, like many others, have looked to the Labour Party (as the only viable alternative in this two-party system) to be a beacon of hope after 14 years of devastating Tory rule. Yet despite entitling their manifesto ‘Change’, Labour doesn’t sound very different from the Tories on migration.
You could be forgiven for forgetting which slogan – ‘Smash the Gangs’ and ‘Stop the Boats’ – was whose and what the actual difference is. During the leaders’ debate last Wednesday, Kier Starmer repeatedly referred to his record of fighting ‘terrorism’ when asked about migration, while Rishi Sunak warned voters not to ‘surrender British borders’ to Labour.
Both peddled fear and represented migration as wholly negative. They ignored long histories of migration to and from this country, just as they ignored the legacies of British imperialism that continue to shape migration today. And they neglected to mention the many ways people ‘not from here’ form part of our communities – as ‘essential workers’, as mothers and fathers, as friends, as neighbours.
The myth of deterrence
In their migration policies, both parties cling desperately to the myth of deterrence – a belief that fuels the national and international race to appear the ‘toughest’ and most cruel.
The only assured outcome of such deterrent policies is more violence and more death
Decades of research, contemporary migration patterns, and even the Home Office’s own leaked briefing make clear that deterrence doesn’t work. People will not stop coming to the UK because crossing the English Channel is dangerous, nor because they may be criminalised or forcibly removed to Rwanda.
The only assured outcome of such deterrent policies is more violence and more death. We see this in the Channel as much as in the Mediterranean, where my research has focused over the last 15 years. The only sure way to ‘smash the gangs’ or ‘stop the boats’ is to create safe and legal routes for people to arrive in the UK, as we do for others.
The failure of deterrence is central to the research project I currently lead at Edinburgh University on immigration detention in Australia, the UK, and the US. We know that people make decisions to move for a multitude of reasons, that their journeys transform as they move, and that ‘hostile environments’ – from detention to denying people medical treatment – do not stop people from arriving.
In Dungavel Removal Centre, it's clear the only lasting effect of such policies is the trauma it inflicts on people who once called this island home, or would like to.
Faced with little choice on migration from our two main parties, some may turn to smaller parties at the ballot box on Thursday. The Green Party, Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish Nationalist Party all have positions on migration that are more progressive, practical and humane.
However, in the continued absence of proportional representation, these parties are unlikely to wield great power. It is thus imperative that we continue our struggle against policies that divide our communities, disenfranchise, and erode the right to refuge, regardless of the outcome this week.
Every day, people with direct experience of borders and detention resist these systems, joined by allies acting in solidarity with them. From detention visitor programmes to the noisy presence of communities resisting deportation raids on the streets, people come together to imagine and enact a better world.
On migration, hope lies in that struggle, rather than in party manifestos and electoral politics.
