by Eiri Ohtani

Originally published on Silent Flags

Dear Friends,

From Cyprus all the way to Belgium, you contacted me to check if I am OK after the Brexit news greeted all of us last Friday.

Thank you everyone, and I am sorry I haven’t responded to you yet. I never thought I would come face to face with such a grave catastrophe that is likely to have an irrevocable repercussion for the entire world.

This Referendum meant different things to different people. It was more than just a question of whether the UK should remain a member of the European Union, which, among other things, guarantees freedom of movement within EU.  For some, it was also a question of identity; are we European or not?

On the night of the Referendum, I stayed up watching the news until 3:30am.  Anxiety meant I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to know the result before my partner woke up, so that I knew how to respond to him. His grandmother came to the UK from continental Europe when fascism last engulfed Europe. Being a polyglot in many European languages, he has never doubted his identity as European. Brexit, for him, has been like “being deported to the UK for no reason”.

I write this letter to you Sunday evening, two days after the referendum result has been announced. You all know that David Cameron, Prime Minister, said he would step down in October – but even he had no ideathat this would happen. Everything and everyone is still in a total muddle right now, perhaps apart from Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland. When, how or even whether the UK is actually going to quit European Union is unclear. Even those who were leaving Leave campaign do not seem to have a plan, and I am not joking. I apologise for so many links to different articles – but you get the gist; there is a panic in the UK, with more than 3 million people (as of Sunday 26 June) asking for the second referendum.

Maybe you think this is some sort of British humour.

I wish it was. But this is the reality of a divided nation that has been long time coming.

Remember nearly half (48%) of those who voted said they want the UK to remain as a member of the European Union. Some of my friends told me that they have been crying since the result came out. Others that I met on Friday were like ghosts – they looked pale, they were agitated, angry and didn’t know what to do with themselves. I think I was just stunned and I still am to be honest. How would you feel if your EU citizenship and identity has been annulled overnight?

Many of us have fellow EU citizens as our family members, partners, colleagues, neighbours, doctors, shopkeepers and fellow students. Can you imagine being told that these people, who make up our daily life, who make our life as European truly European, are no longer welcome here?

Apart from the collective confusion, Brexit has also unleashed a particularly virulent form of xenophobia and racism, with a direct impact on migrant communities. You will see some frightening examples here and here and I expect to encounter similar hostilities myself in the near future in the country which is now my home. But please don’t get me wrong.  Xenophobia, racism and anti-immigration feeling have always existed in the UK.  This is not new; I am just saying that Brexit is likely to make it much worse.

People must have voted for Leave for many different reasons and I think/hope not all of them are racists. However, one of the key messages of the Leave campaign was they want their country “back”, back from Brussels, back from the establishment, back from cosmopolitan elites. For some, this meant they want their country “back” from immigrants. The definition of immigrants in this case is very wide though; they could be EU citizens, third country nationals or anyone who looks foreign, including those who are not white, regardless of whether they are British or not. For some people, the outcome of the Referendum means that the entire country now agrees with them, that it is totally acceptable and correct that they should be telling us to pack our bags and go home.  Of course, for many immigrants, the UK is now home.

I am still watching this catastrophe unfold in front of my eyes. It’s like watching a slow disaster movie that somehow never ends. I am sure we will have more to discuss in the future but where does this leave me, at least for the moment?

I want to let you know that Brexit does not alter me. I intend to continue to consider myself European, British, Japanese and a migrant all at the same time, which reflects my journey and the reality of contemporary intersectional identity. I was born and grew up in Japan, spent my late teenage years in Germany and have lived in the UK for 25 years now.  Right now, my job regularly takes me to other European countries. I consider London in the UK, in Europe, to be my home. It could have been easily otherwise; depending on where I settled or moved through I could have thought of myself African, Asian, American.  Humans are incredible; we can carry multiple experiences and their significance in our life to feel we are who we are and we should be proud of our ability to connect with others while recognising our own individual uniqueness.

I am sure some will question my Europeaness and Britishness because I am a migrant, and probably more so when they see the colour of my skin. In defiance of racism and stereotypes, I am happy to continue to insist on my complicated and superficially contradictory identity born out of migration. I will also not apologise for my cosmopolitan identity, just as I will not apologise for my gender, sexuality, class, (a lack of) religious faith or ethnicity. I will not apologise for being who I am and for preferring to coexist with others than to create fences between myself and others.

I know many of you through work; together we’ve been fighting for the rights and dignity of all migrants and all human beings. I will, of course, continue this line of work – well, as a migrant and a human being, it has always been very difficult to draw a line between this work and my own life. I would like to ask you to continue to work with me and give me courage while I do my bit in the UK; I have fewer colleagues here who are prepared to fight for and with all migrants.

Here in the UK, I have not been very successful in convincing my colleagues that talking just about refugees is not helpful, when Europe could be on the brink of the resurgence of fascism. I have not been successful in convincing others that talking just about “deserving” and “hardworking” migrants is indeed toxic and reducing migrants into mere economic, labour units is dehumanising. I have not been successful in letting others understand that it is important for migrants ourselves to speak up and act for ourselves, in solidarity with supportive groups and individuals; being offered endless cups of tea is nice but it’s not going to change the world. I don’t have many colleagues in the UK who understand that migration is a global phenomenon; it does not stop at the border, it connects places and people. This Brexit will make my work in the UK harder, and I need all the help I can get.

Lastly, I feel privileged to have you as my friends, colleagues and neighbours in Europe and I appreciate that you regard me in the same way.  See you soon.

Best wishes,

Eiri (@EiriOhtani)

by Emma Jackson

Picture from Right to Remain

On election night I always proudly watch as my hometown is first to declare. First to declare and always Labour, although the worrying UKIP proportion at the last election should have been a warning sign. In the referendum, though, Sunderland has taken on a different kind of symbolism. ‘Did you know it was Sunderland that threw the markets on Thursday night?’ my colleague tells me afterwards (61% Leave, 39% Remain). Later in the day I find myself in tears at a story about a neo-Nazi display at a school I used to walk past on the way to primary school, and that many of my friends attended. The story concerned an event that happened in October but it had a visceral impact on me. I think because seeing these displays on the streets where you grew up ‘hits home’ but also because over the last few weeks my hometown has become shorthand for stories of ‘the state of the nation’ in troubling ways. In short, Sunderland is being used as a marker of a narrative about Brexit as a protest vote by deindustrialised white working class people – who are then set in contrast to a metropolitan multicultured elite. The reality is that both Sunderland and white working class people are more complicated than that. And that by focusing in on Sunderland as representing this situation other stories are left out.

That Sunderland voted ‘Leave’ was not a surprise. There had been a flurry of pieces on Sunderland before the referendum. As Gary Younge has pointed out, journalists have headed into the North of England and ‘anthropologised the British working class as though they were a lesser evolved breed from distant parts, all too often portraying them as bigots who did not know what was good for them.’ If a simplistic story about a disenfranchised white working class is what you are looking for then you can find this in Sunderland. In a New York Times piece (yes, even the New York Times is sending journalists to Sunderland) a young man called John is interviewed:

“We’re segregated from the south, and the north is a barren wasteland,” he said, wearing a heavy black leather jacket with metal studs despite the summer heat. “It’s us against them.”

“The E.U. is a mystery to us,” he added. “We’ve never heard about it up here.”

‘This depressed northern city is like ground zero for the Brexit movement’ begins a piece in The Irish Times

Sunderland as location and representative of working class loss has also been explored in Grayson Perry’s programme ‘In the best possible taste’.

I do not want to trivialise the feelings of disconnect expressed through these accounts or the portrayals of post-industrial neglect that they point towards. Sunderland has been repeatedly clobbered, its shipyards and mines closed down and now it is part of one of the regions bearing the brunt of the Government cuts. If you live in a city that is a Labour stronghold (so you can’t vote the Conservatives out) and suffering from disinvestment, cuts and disillusionment with the council (see for example the wranglings over the use of the Vaux brewery site) then I can see how voting Leave does feel like exerting some kind of control or sending a message to those in power. And these are the kinds of stories that run through these newspaper accounts of Sunderland. But, and there is always a but, that is not the whole story.

Firstly, this tight focus on the deindustrialised white working class (lumped all together as a group without considering how whiteness is constructed and groups incorporated and excluded over time, see also Satnam Virdee’s excellent book) as the Brexit story misses state, elite and middle class forms of racism which may be institutionalised, more polite, or less visible. It focuses on vocal expressions of xenophobia without probing what Paul Gilroy calls ‘post-colonial melancholia’, a longing for the glory days of prosperity and ship-building that are tied up with histories of empire. It reaffirms a key argument of the Leave campaign, which as Akwugo Emejulu has argued, was the promotion of a story of ‘white victimhood’ rather than interrogate the logic and effects of austerity:

‘a key argument of the campaign was that the ‘working class’ (who were unquestionably assumed to be white) were suffering under the burden of mass immigration, which transformed the culture of their neighbourhoods and put undue strain on public services.’

Furthermore, it misses complex stories of racism and resistance that exist in places like Sunderland. The far right has tried many times to gain ground in Sunderland, and the North East more widely. Attempting to capitalise on the dispersal of asylum seekers to Sunderland and in the wake of the murder of Peyman Bahmani in 2003, an asylum seeker living in the city, the BNP tried to whip up support and contested every ward in the city that year – but failed to win any seats. And much earlier than this in the 1990s, and on a more anecdotal level of resistance, I remember my friend’s mam not only telling a BNP canvasser where to go, but chasing him down the garden path. At this time, I was part of an anti-racist youth group that used to go and demonstrate against the BNP across the North East. In 2012, a spate of demos by the EDL et al were held in Millfield, the area I grew up in, against a mosque being built – and were met with fierce resistance.

I heard more everyday and recent accounts of racism and resistance in Sunderland described by Anoop Nayak in a recent talk – if you are interested in the inter-relationships of race and class in the North East of England then read his work because this is based on years of research in the region. Racism is a real and continuing problem in the city and Anoop’s most recent work focuses on young Bengali people in Sunderland (and another coastal area in the North East). There is a small but well-established Bengali community in Sunderland whose experiences I have not seen included in these discussions of Sunderland as the epitome of ‘Leave’. The expansion of the University has also impacted on the ethnic make-up of Sunderland. The city is putting forward a City of Culture bid and has a lively music and arts scene (with many key figures coming from the ‘white working class’), best represented by the Pop Recs shop/gig space/almost community centre. I suppose what I am saying is that Sunderland is more complex, or that there are other Sunderlands. There are other predominantly working class cities too, that do not mirror these voting patterns: Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow.

In our project ‘Mapping Immigration Controversies’ we examined how anti-immigration campaigns intervened in specific places. For example, in Glasgow, in the run-up to the independence referendum, the ‘Go Home’ campaigns were interpreted as an English/Westminster intervention in a more caring Scotland. Alongside encounters with racism and xenophobia we heard of resistance and support. If we are trying to understand the voting patterns across the UK, and if we are to challenge new iterations of old racisms, then it is crucial to examine the different kinds of spatial and social histories in which the referendum intervened. The metropolitan elite/regional whiteworkingclass division is just too simplistic to help us do that work. Meanwhile, I suspect journalists looking for a post-referendum state of the nation snapshot will continue to visit Sunderland’s tattoo parlours and hair salons. What effect will this have on the city, I wonder? And what effect on our understandings of racism and class?

Hannah Jones, University of Warwick

Something is changing in Europe. Desperate people are still arriving on its borders and on its shores, as they have been for months and years. But something is changing in the way they’re being received.

The tone of the public reaction is shifting fast. We’re starting to hear less about the threat posed by these people and more about the “unbearable” sight of a three-year-old boy washed up, dead, on the shore of Turkey, and everything it implies.

European leaders continue to say that taking in more refugees will not solve this crisis, and that the rules of the Schengen zone “must be respected”. But they appear to be out of step with changing public feeling.

Increasing numbers of people across Europe are offering support to displaced people in large and small ways. They are signing online petitions, sending money, visiting the camps in Calais, joining protests, and even offering shelter in their own homes.

Going too far

Two years ago, Britain’s coalition government ramped up its attempts to talk “tough” on migration. As part of a group of researchers, I have been working since then to identify the effects of this tough rhetoric on public opinion and on people’s lives.

Government advisers told us that the British public simply will not listen to facts and figures on immigration; that the public is worried that immigration is a threat, and the government has to be seen to be acting on that threat.

But what our research found is that rhetoric about ever-tougher measures to control migration does not reassure people – in fact, whatever people’s position on immigration, such measures can make them more fearful.

People who see migration as a threat told us they see government publicity as pure theatre. It can never be tough enough; there can never be enough fences or guards. People who feel targeted by measures to control immigration, whether they are immigrants or not, feel increasingly unwelcome, excluded, and unable to function normally in their own homes.

We also found that the tough rhetoric and action by the government – promising to control “swarms” of people, publicising raids and enforcement measures – have led to increasingly vocal activism opposing them.

The “Go Home” vans and public raids seen in Britain over the summer of 2013 mobilised people to gather both in the streets and online to counter Home Office enforcement, and to show solidarity with the people affected.

This drew in people who had not been active in politics before, for example the BritCits group, which was organised to support British citizens with non-EU partners threatened with separation by new immigration rules.

Stirred into action

This summer, we are seeing much more vivid pictures of the mass movement of people that bring home just what it means. The focus is back on borders, and not on enforcement on our streets.

But this stage of the crisis has stirred a similar impulse to the one we identified in our research. Across Europe, ordinary people are now offering their homes, their money, their time, and their support to those in desperate need. It seems that it has taken the unbearable image of Aylan Kurdi to have this recognised as a public outcry.

Rise up: a
Reuters/Leonhard Foeger

But desperate images of people drowning or close to drowning – including children – have been out there for a good while. The figures for the numbers of people drowned trying to seek shelter in Europe were well known.

There are constant reminders that, compared to the number of displaced people in the world as a whole, the numbers trying to enter the UK are tiny. And people across the UK were responding to this with both feeling and action.

This crisis is not new. For years, people have been dying crossing borders and seeking sanctuary. They have been living in desperate, destitute conditions in the UK and other “advanced countries” after they are refused asylum. They have been held without charge for indefinite periods in the prison-like conditions of detention centres, unable to return to their country of origin but unable to remain in their “host” country too.

And for years, the bulk of the media, most politicians, and a majority of the public have ignored these stories. But whatever it’s taken to get here, this is beginning to feel like a turning point.

20,000 people took to the streets of Vienna on September 1 to demonstrate their support for refugees, just days after a similar march in Dresden. And on the morning of September 3, a petition on the British Parliament’s website hit 100,000 signatures, enough to require a debate in Parliament on increasing the number of people granted refuge in the UK. A few hours later, it was at nearly 200,000.

What happens next depends on ordinary people’s empathy and will to action, and on the courage and ethics of our political leaders.

Hannah Jones is Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Warwick

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

By Hannah Jones

Migrants arriving on the Island of Lampedusa in August 2007. Sara Prestianni / noborder network – http://www.flickr.com/photos/noborder/2495544558/

Over the summer, national attention has been drawn to the ‘migrant crisis’ at the border between Britain and France. With at least 3,000 people living in temporary accommodation in Calais while they await a decision on whether they will be allowed to stay in France, many are also trying to cross the channel to the UK – risking their lives as they do so. This has been going on for many months – but came to a head over the summer as disruption was also caused by strikes by transport workers in French ports.

The UK government response has been to identify the people trying to come to Britain as a threat, and to make ever-escalating promises to keep them away. Having already spent £7 million on fences and security on the French side of the border, the Home Secretary is today signing a deal with the French government to invest further in security, including through a jointly run “command-and-control centre” to further “target criminals who smuggle migrants into France”. This follows the Prime Minister’s comments that characterised people crossing the Channel as a “swarm” while expressing “every sympathy with holidaymakers who are finding access to Calais difficult” in response to the death of a man trying to enter the Channel Tunnel. Meanwhile the Labour MP Keith Vaz declared that the French government should “deport [migrants] back to their countries” – despite all the talk of ‘illegal immigration’, it is rarely mentioned that this in itself would contravene international law if the people being deported were in danger in their countries of origin.

Newspaper coverage repeatedly discusses how the “migrant crisis” is of much larger magnitude in other countries of Europe – the German government estimates it will receive 800,000 asylum applications by the end of the year while nearly 50,000 migrants entered Greece by sea in the one month of July 2015, and 90,000 have entered Italy so far in 2015. 2,000 people have already died in the Mediterranean this year trying to enter Europe; 3,279 died in 2014. By contrast, the numbers of people successfully entering Britain through the Channel Tunnel are in the low hundreds. Yet the government’s emphasis remains on the entry of migrants to Britain as a threat which must be tackled with ever tougher measures.

Our research demonstrates that this ever-increasing “toughness” on migration only increases fear and anxiety. This is true for people who think migration is too high; for people who are concerned about the well-being of migrants; and for people who are migrants themselves, or feel that others will see them as such. Yet the tough talk continues, not only at Calais, but also seen over the summer in the government announcement of increased measures to make sure public service workers speak English, alongside drastic cuts to English language teaching which is already unable to cater to the number of people who desperately wish to learn or improve their English. Government policies on being “tough” not only increase anger and fear without reassuring a worried public, but they appear to lead to increased harassment of ethnic minority British citizens and settled migrants, while there is no evidence that such measures actually reduce any of the problems associated with the migration crisis.

Our research also showed that government campaigns demonstrating “toughness” on immigration have produced new waves of activism to counter them. This can also be seen in reactions to the situation at Calais and across Europe, with increasing number of ordinary people arranging journeys to support people in the camp at Calais, comments by the Bishop of Dover, and calls for support for refugees from senior figures in Britain’s Jewish community.

Our research showed complex attitudes about immigration control across the country, which do not easily map onto the widespread assumption that the majority of British people are hostile to migration as a whole, or to people seeking refuge. We were told by migrants who had come to Britain, that they wanted to come because of the “British values” of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs which this government continues to celebrate. If the government is serious about such values, perhaps it might consider taking the lead of the cyclists taking help to people in need, and the Bishop of Dover’s call to “rediscover what it is to be a human, and that every human being matters.”

By Hannah Jones

On a Friday back in February, Kirsten and I attended the Detention Forum annual social event, which was in the form of a discussion ‘salon’, focusing on the question “what is immigration enforcement doing to us?”. There was a great turnout for an event confronting such a grim issue on a Friday evening. Many of those in attendance had also spent the day discussing immigration detention too, as part of the Forum’s campaign for a limit on the amount of time that people can be kept in immigration detention (the UK is the only European country where this can be indefinite).

Detention Forum Salon February 2015. L-R Ben du Preez, Aderonke Apata, Hannah Jones, Kirsten Forkert, Harley Miller, Ian Dunt, Eiri Ohtani. Photo courtesy of The Detention Forum.

We had been asked to share some of our findings as a way of kicking off the panel discussion. It was a lively discussion, and while there wasn’t much chance for the audience to engage with the debate in the room, several people there did make comments through Twitter (see #DFSalon for a taste of this). One comment in the discussion which seemed to resonate very strongly was the need to confront how immigration enforcement is no longer just about passport checks at the border, or even just uniformed officers patrolling the streets. Landlord checks being piloted in the West  Midlands mean all private landlords are charged with verifying the immigration status of any prospective tenant, under threat of fines, and it seems many are already making decisions based on guesswork. NHS staff are being asked to request proof of immigration status from patients, when they could be spending time on healthcare. Universities – and ‘even’ prestigious private schools – are  being required to report to the Home Office on the attendance of overseas students, with some setting up ‘immigration offices’ within the university and many going over and above the legal requirements, in fear of having their ability to host lucrative international students taken away. While university staff may try to avoid this – and to try avoid breaking the law on discrimination – by abiding by their union’s guidance and applying any such checks to all students, the consequences of missing a ‘monitoring point’ cannot be the same for UK and EU students as they may be for non-EU students, who risk being deported. Some of these instances of everyday passport control may be shocking, but also note that it has become unremarkable that employers now ask for a passport before issuing a contract of employment. In the case of employment, this is asked of everyone; in many of these other cases, it is likely that only those who ‘seem like’ they may not have citizenship or entitlement will be asked to prove they belong.

This takes us back to another key point raised at the Salon. Journalist Ian Dunt, who was also on the panel, made a strong argument for the need for news and comment stories to be ‘relatable’, that is, in order to care about an issue, or even read to the end of an article, readers should be able to see that it could happen to them or someone close to them. The example was given of another panellist at the event, Harley Miller. As she outlined in her presentation to the Salon, her encounter with Home Office Immigration Enforcement happened suddenly and was shocking to her, those around her, and the many people who picked up and followed her story as it went viral online. As an Australian previously married to an EU citizen, who had lived in the UK for many years on a perfectly legal visa and working in a highly skilled profession for the NHS, her life was turned upside down when the Home Office refused to renew her visa and her status in the UK – her home – became ‘illegal’. For Dunt, this story is one that ‘ordinary people’ can relate to, because they can identify with Harley and imagine themselves in her position, much as the campaign group BritCits has taken off as the clampdown on immigration rules increasingly affect all British citizens who might want to marry someone from outside the EU.

This raises interesting questions when we look at some of the results of our national survey[1] on reactions to immigration enforcement measures among the general population. When we asked people who were aware of Immigration Enforcement branded vans on UK streets how they felt about seeing these vans, 31% of people said they felt reassured that the government was taking action against illegal or irregular immigration. 28% said it made them concerned that some people are being treated with unnecessary suspicion. And 16% said it made them think that illegal or irregular immigration might be more widespread than they had realised. This suggests that, like many of the measures the government is using to demonstrate ‘toughness’, these vans barely reassure more people than they worry – and they actually increase worry among a significant number of people who see them.

But then look at the breakdown between the reactions of white majority respondents, and ethnic minority respondents, to that question. More ‘white’ respondents (34%) were reassured than for the population as a whole. And far fewer ethnic minority respondents (21%) were reassured by these vans. This was reversed for those who were concerned that the vans may indicate that some people were being treated with unnecessary suspicion – only 25% of white respondents thought this, but 36% of ethnic minority respondents. That is, ethnic minority respondents were much  more likely to see the enforcement vans as a stunt, but also as a stunt that could result in unfair treatment. Ethnic minority respondents were also much more likely to be aware of these vans (23%) than white respondents (16%).

This suggests that there may well be a connection between being able to see oneself in a situation, and how one reacts to it. That ethnic minority respondents were so much more likely than white people to worry about people being treated with unfair suspicion as a result of more high visibility immigration enforcement raids may well have something to do with their experience of being unfairly treated with suspicion in similar situations. As one of our focus group respondents told us,

“people can’t tell who is legal or illegal and they make judgements based on your appearance, sometimes that changes when they hear your accent”

So what do people mean when they say ‘ordinary people’? Aderonke Apata, who also talked about her experience at the Detention Forum Salon, is an ‘ordinary person’ too. Actually, she’s extraordinary in many ways – her survival and her campaigning, and her recognition as a role model attest to that. But she is also ordinary in that her main demand is ‘I want to be who I am’. In order to survive, she had to flee the country she lived in, survive the murders of many people close to her, endure immigration detention in the UK where she also experienced homophobic harassment, and sleep on the streets to avoid deportation to a country where she would be punished for her homosexuality with up to 14 years in prison. She is continuing to appeal her asylum case after the most recent ruling on her case by a High Court Judge on the basis that he did not believe she is a lesbian, despite her providing evidence of her relationships with women. It might be hard for many people in the UK to imagine that series of events happening to them. But maybe they could imagine themselves or someone they know being persecuted for their sexuality. And maybe it doesn’t take such a great leap to see the connections between that, and Aderonke’s experience.

Ian Dunt argued that the politicians, journalists and decision makers still tend to be middle class white men who will identify more with ‘people like them’ (as London Mayor Boris Johnson’s statements on UK-Australian immigration seem to attest). But there is nothing particularly ‘ordinary’ about politicians, journalists and decision makers. Isn’t it time that campaigners, commentators and others recognise that ‘ordinary people’ are not made in the image of the London elite, but have lives and experiences that are complex, diverse, and that can allow for identification with and care for people in all sorts of situations – including immigration detention?

And time too for journalists, campaigners, and even social researchers to start to recognise that many ‘ordinary people’ have been on the sharp end of immigration enforcement for a long while?

Ordinary people are not just subject to immigration enforcement, they are also increasingly being required to enact it. What is this doing to all of ‘us’?

[1] All statistical data in this article is based on a face-to-face survey conducted for Mapping Immigration Controversy project by Ipsos MORI, 15 Aug-9 Sept 2014, with nationally representative sample of 2424 adults.

It’s a blustery and sunny day. As the protesters snake along the side of a field, Yarl’s Wood comes into view. Yarl’s Wood is tucked away out of sight on the edge of a business park outside Bedford. To one side a motorway, on the other green fields. Two perimeter fences stand between the protest and the detention centre. As we approach the end of the track, the volume of the protest increases (‘Shut it down! Shut it down!’) and we see hands sticking through the windows. The windows must barely open, the hands and arms can only squeeze through up to the elbow. On the right, an orange scarf is waved. In two of the windows I can make out figures of women but either the windows are mirrored or the light is such that the hands are all we can see of most of the people inside. After a while, alongside our own chanting, we can hear noise coming from inside. There is a ‘shushing’ among the crowd and a chant of ‘freedom’ from within becomes audible.

Photo by Geraldine Smith

Travelling across London to get to my coach to the demo, I had been reading ‘Death and the Migrant’ by Yasmin Gunaratnam. It is a beautiful and urgent piece of writing about the coming together of migration histories and end of life care in the bodies and experiences of dying migrants. The book reflects on the interactions between people at the end of their lives and those who care for them. In Yasmin’s book there are fumblings, moments where palliative care workers get it wrong, often through being worried about causing offence to someone due to worries about cultural differences. But the book also uncovers moments where new ways to alleviate or grasp suffering come out of interaction and negotiation at the borders of bodies and of life and death.

What kind of exchange is our waving and chanting across the border fences at Yarl’s Wood? What does it do? It is an expression of solidarity and an attempt to bridge a border with bodies, through physical gestures and making noise. It relies on volume because the gap between the groups is so wide. It is a highly-charged affective and emotional event that resonates differently in our bodies, according to what side of the fence we are on and our previous experiences. There are tears at the fence. Some on the demonstration side know what it is like to be kept inside this place. Earlier in the day Lydia Besong, from Women Asylum Seekers Together, spoke about what it meant to revisit Yarl’s Wood where she had previously been detained. She described being able to ‘smell the place in the air ‘. For those of us who have not experienced the horrors of detention, this moment of hearing voices and seeing hands brings for a moment a different kind of connection to the suffering inside.

Photo by Geraldine Smith

Carrying out the ‘Mapping Immigration Controversy’ research project has involved examining how the border is brought into everyday spaces, from the hospital waiting room to the street, through anti-immigration campaigns and resonate differently, through bodies in place and time. It has involved sitting down with people who have been scared by these campaigns for a variety of reasons – their experiences of detention or racism, or because their fears of immigration have been exacerbated. Our focus groups were often highly emotional events. They were characterised by powerful stories of fear and anxiety, and by bodies shaking with rage or blinking back tears. The project is now coming to a close and we have the challenge of communicating our findings back in a way that conveys some of this embodied experience of the border in everyday life.

A gust unfixes a placard from its stick and it blows across the cornfield, away from Yarl’s Wood. I recognise it from a workshop carried out with women asylum seekers and the choir I am in. This is another alliance characterised by both fumbling and moments of connection and solidarity. The cardboard sign reads ‘we are all human’. The choir walks back to the bus.