Everyday Border Struggles: Segregation and Solidarity in the UK and Calais by Thom Tyerman

Author:Thom Tyerman [Tyerman, Thom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000375954
Google: 9_MxEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 55826204
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

As I will demonstrate, deterrence in Calais involves not only preventing people from crossing the border ‘illegally’ but also policing potential transgressors by constructing everyday life as a ‘hostile environment’ for certain subjects but not others. Under the logic of deterrence, the border is repeatedly encountered in everyday life so that ‘irregularity’ becomes an unmanageable condition. The idea is that by ‘making life unliveable’, the subversion of immigration law and controls becomes unattractive and intensely difficult (CMS, 2011). Yet for ‘regular’ citizens, the border must remain unnoticed and unobtrusive. Therefore, the effective realisation of border deterrence requires segregation to keep apart those entitled to freedom of movement and those denied it. At the same time, this segregation must be every day; it must permeate the mundane intimate aspects of life and follow its targets wherever they go, making everyday life a continuously unliveable encounter with the border.

The task of enforcing this segregation is mostly outsourced to French police in Calais. As Mayor Natacha Bouchart stated, ‘it is the French police authorities who are doing the job of the Border Force in Calais’ (HAC, 2015b; 16; 26; 40). Or as the police union head succinctly put it: ‘we are doing Britain’s dirty work here in France’ (Samuel, 2015). This ‘dirty work’ involves imposing destitution and homelessness on ‘irregular’ migrants, preventing their access to basic needs including shelter, food, water, clothing, and washing facilities, prohibiting aid provision, and exposing them to daily police harassment and violence (DdD, 2012; 2017; Refugee Rights Europe [RRE], 2016). Through these multiple everyday embodied encounters with segregation, the border in Calais is powerfully brought to life and migrants are ostracised to an ‘irregularity’ within which it is increasingly hard to live. Different aspects of the border, as physical barrier, as differentiation between citizen/non-citizen, as social and political exclusion, as ‘weapon of dissuasion’ and tool of governmental power, are made real through the everyday practices of segregation (CMS, 2011; 3.1).

Global inequalities are also intimately embodied in everyday encounters with police, local government policies, shopkeepers, and security guards, all of which shape everyday life in terms of segregation. From the spaces migrants can inhabit to the routes they must take to avoid harassment or control, from the disrupted rhythms of their daily routines to the debilitating physical and psychological pressures they face, day in, day out the border is brought to life through exhaustion, fear, the inability to stay warm or dry, the denial of rest or respite. Prevented from moving and yet denied the right to remain, migrants in Calais are caught in spatial, political, and temporal ‘limbo’ between overlapping and often competing state apparatuses of border control (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, & Cassidy, 2019; 23; 131). Forced to rely on their autonomy for survival, and demonised for doing so, everyday life becomes a constant struggle with and against a border segregation that is both local and global.

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