Interception as Criminalisation: The Extension of Interdictive ‘external’ Controls

Abstract

The analysis thus far has shown that asylum policy has become increasingly restrictive in the UK since Labour came into power, and that it is in relation to the UK’s movement towards Europe that we can, in part, understand the development of the exclusionary politics of asylum. While Part II of the analysis focused on the exclusionary operations through which restrictive policy developments are naturalised, normalised and decontested in domestic and European debates, this part considers the exclusionary operations through which oppositional narratives of asylum-cum-illegal-immigration are consolidated by ‘internal’ and ‘external’ technologies of control. Specifically, this rests on the observation that any analysis of the exclusionary operations of managed migration requires a two-way consideration both of the way in which the logic of selective opposition is embedded in the technical practices of professionals who work across the broad field of migration control, as well as of the way in which such a logic is embedded in political and popular debate (see Chapter 2). Indeed, a proper consideration of the dominance or decontestation of restrictive developments in the area of asylum requires an analysis of the ways in which the administration of human mobility is extended and dispersed through technical practices of migration control that are selectively applied according to a rationality of deterrence.