Immigration Political Games (and Their Bruises)

Abstract

This chapter places the work of immigration officers within the broader politics of immigration in the UK. Front-line staff operate in a charged and polarizing environment, and are required to traverse this complex political arena in their daily shifts. Their work is laid open to politics in their daily work like no other area of government. Against the background of the Brexit vote, the chapter traces the growing salience of immigration in contemporary politics and the damaging effects of its electoral games in post-colonial Britain. Although such games have paid electoral dividends in the short term, they have also destroyed livelihoods. As if these games came full circle with the Windrush scandal, they had toxic institutional reverberations. The ambivalent and almost neurotic politics of immigration and its control which stirs imperial melancholia and profits from racialized public fears and anxieties, while shielding border work from view, brutalizes and demoralizes officers and tarnishes the department’s fragile legitimacy. It renders their everyday work hostage to the vagaries of politics and exposes them to the consequences of bad choices. As the chapter shows, immigration officers work to fulfil a fantasy, that of complete and perfect security, and bear the brunt of its disenchantments.