Border Watch: Cultures of Immigration, Detention and Control. By Alexandra Hall.

Abstract

Given the strong feelings that immigration detention provokes in all spheres of society, including academia, Hall’s perspective on daily life inside a UK immigration removal centre is admirably unbiased. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2003, Hall’s book focuses on the frontline officers whose actions and decisions embody the detention regime as it is brought to bear on detainees. Hall’s field site, an immigration removal centre that she has renamed ‘Locksdon’, was run by Her Majesty’s Prison Service and housed male detainees. Hall’s rich analysis seeks to show how officers’ actions and attitudes not only produced the objectifying routine of the immigration removal centre, but also challenged it through meaningful human encounters with detainees. Gaining such a nuanced insight into the officers’ experiences and understandings of their work was not without its challenges, and Hall recounts with commendable honesty the ethical dilemmas faced by the ethnographer whose focus is not the detained, but those who detain. On one occasion—an episode that less frank researchers may not have published—Hall made the difficult decision not to back a detainee who was spoken to offensively by a member of staff. When the detainee made a complaint on the grounds of racism listing her as a witness, Hall felt compelled to side with the member of staff in order to avoid jeopardizing her fieldwork.