Description
This paper aims to explore what the British Government’s push to expand and intensify the deportation of ‘foreign national criminals’ tell us about the resuscitation of colonial bordering in Northern states. The paper focuses on the metropolitan police and immigration enforcement platform called Operation Nexus which institutionalises the fast tracking of targeted deportations. The scheme is a significant part of the British government’s hostile environment agenda because it allows for the expulsion of suspected foreign national criminals. In doing so it also intensifies the over policing of communities racialised as ‘migrants’. Operation Nexus exemplifies the increasing authoritarian practices of immigration control as it by passes criminal justice procedure and persecution and allows for systematised deportation through foreign policy agreements with commonwealth states. Furthermore, the scheme reveals how the spatialization and racialisation of policing in urban centres in Britain, such as in practices of stop and search or gang surveillance and intelligence gathering, has become tied to the question of international borders. This paper argues that the co-joining of police and immigration enforcement is far from novel but instead represents the intensification of the control of racialised mobility which was central to expansion of European Empire. The paper argues that we need a re-theorisation of borders to better understand how forms of internal colonisation such as policing are bound up with the global/colonial government of mobilities. This means interrogating and challenging how we conceive of sovereignty, race and the history of the control of mobility.
