Daughters of the Danaides: an orature on women on the operation of UK immigration control

Abstract

This thesis investigates the operation of the United Kingdom immigration rules, taking as a focus their effect upon women. The manner in which the immigration rules prescribe, deter and forbid movement is highlighted. The institutional culture of the Immigration Service is posed as a twentieth century counterpart to British overseas administration of earlier centuries. This parallel illustrates how British government practice of dealing with other cultures takes a form which, both under imperial rule and current immigration legislation, consistently marginalises lived realities. Immigration control is seen as part of a continuum of a tradition of administration in which racial discrimination is an integral quality of working practice. The mystification of working practices nonetheless ensures denial of discrimination. The embodiment of universal categories and an independent appeal system within immigration control stand as ostensible safeguards against departure from an ideal of non-partisan operation, yet the opposite is pervasive. The categories of passenger inscribed within immigration rules are identified as a core element of control. These demand fulfilment of particular constructs of identities which are culturally and gender role specific. The inclusion of examples of women who are subject to the immigration rules illustrates the implications of the dichotomy between self-knowledge which is a lived reality (of for example a mother or wife), and the categorisation of those identities within rules and practice. Administrative categorisation is revealed as manufacturing identities which serve specific ideological, political or economic ends. The constructed identities become received knowledge of those categorised, and of different cultures, which has socio-political consequences. Not least of these consequences is generation of a self-fulfilling prophecy of those legislated against standing as justification for immigration control.