UK border policy decreases migrant civil liberties

As of September 2009, the UK Border Agency will begin to institute its e-Borders policy. This policy states that everyone leaving the country will be required to submit 53 pieces of personal information relating to their travels. It is argued that it does not contravene UK data and information legislation and is seen by UK as a protective rather than invasive measure. In terms of state resources, it translates to £400 million that the traveller will pay for through ticket taxes. It is deeply ironic and troubling that gainfully employed people work to pay taxes to prop up a system that violates the individual's right to privacy and freedom of movement. Such is the peculiarly contradictory and oppressive nature of state politics; which is by no means a UK phenomenon but a universal condition that operates in ways as multiplicitous as they are complex.

Policing the movements of individuals through e-Borders questions the importance of the values of democracy and freedom in the eyes of the state. If the phenomenological relation between subject and state is one of accountability, responsibility and reciprocity, then UK state policy is sorely lacking in this regard.

These 53 questions, in my view, represent a new method of citizen control in the name of policing terrorism. It’s already being done in the US, Spain, Canada and Australia, so arguing that this is a global trend and a necessity, UKBA has been able to pass this as policy. In an age of hyper-fear and increasing surveillance stemming from 9/11, this is one of the many control features symbolising the panopticon state where everyone's every move is watched. While I am aware that all people will be subject to this system of tracking, the impact of this policy on a particular group of people is of concern to me. Those who have been historically targeted as public enemy number one by race, nationality or class, will as travellers top the list as those whose movements are to be tracked. If anyone naively believes otherwise, then the full framework of this policy, in the context of this article, needs to be pieced together. The revised UK visa system of November 2008 requires foreigners to carry bio-metric identity cards, and those coming in are subject to a similar bio-metric regulation that requires their details to be stored.

Adding to this the government mantra 'British jobs for British workers'; the UK is becoming increasingly inhospitable towards immigrants. More perverse manifestations of unwelcomeness will continue as the recession leaves many unemployed. As a non-British citizen who requires a permit to be here and to travel to other parts of Europe, I am worried about how much more 'the right of the stranger', as the late Jacques Derrida terms it, will be limited as time goes on. Marked out as 'the Other' in the construction of the Fortress of Europe, the Schengen visa system means I am subject to visa restrictions, arbitrary refusals of entry and its information system already tracks my movements.

Come September I and others of non-EU citizenship, will be subject to even more scrutiny and in the full glare of the panopticon British state and the European Union. For me, as an African whose native country has a strained relationship with the UK, this interprets into a new kind of containment that works in unison with the crackdown on asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.

The UK has among the highest records of deportations in Europe and statistics from the Border Agency show that 2008 the rate of removals was one person every eight minutes – even to countries like Algeria, Congo and Pakistan where conditions for safe returns are not always guaranteed, despite the UK's firm assurances.

From an immigrant's perspective, the relationship between deportation, biometric ID cards and the proposed 53 questions shows the true colours of the government, beneath the facade of a multi-cultural, tolerant Britain. Supposedly as progressive and democratic as it is cosmopolitan and diverse, in truth this is an economically unequal society, whose blue-collar immigrant labourers live on the margins of society. Government policy towards the broader group of immigrants in the form of travel surveillance checks such as e-borders is, in my view, indicative of the harsh curtailment of immigrants' civil liberties.

The laws of hospitality, as Jacques Derrida argues, are paradoxically bound with questions of state sovereignty and unconditional hospitality where the stranger is not subject to unwarranted interrogation when in the host country. Unfortunately, we live in a world where Derrida's ideal hospitality is becoming increasingly impossible to achieve. The balance between 'the right of the stranger' and that of the state is a precarious one, that raises tensions on nationalist, racist or political grounds and in its most extreme forms it has violently divided societies between 'us' and 'them', as evidenced by the electoral seat won by the neo-fascist British National Party (BNP) and the upsurge in Islamophobia.

In this regard, the 53 questions will feed this fear and mark out Muslims and Arabs as trackable individuals rather than as ones offered hospitality – in the form of more culturally-sensitive integration policies. For Arabs and those whom the juridical distinction between European and non-European is discriminatory, the e-borders policy gives the state more power to keep arbitrary 'non-suspect' tabs on travel. Public attention needs to be brought to the serious implications of e-borders and to mobilise a challenge to the legality of this autocratic surveillance policy.

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* Tendai Marima is a Zimbabwean currently undertaking a PhD in Zimbabwean women's writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.
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