The rise of the private border guard: Accountability and responsibility in the migration control industry

Abstract

On 12 October 2010 Jimmy Mubenga was to be deported from the United Kingdom. The 46-year-old Angolan national had come to the country as a refugee 16 years earlier, but his status was revoked after his involvement in a pub fight and subsequent criminal conviction. Three security guards escorted him through Heathrow Airport and on board British Airways flight 77 to Luanda. The exact details of the events that followed are still unclear and currently subject to criminal investigation. Several passengers on board the plane reported that Mubenga repeatedly complained that he could not breathe and that he was being held down with his head between his knees while security guards on either side of him were forcibly restraining him. While the airplane taxied to the runway, Jimmy Mubenga first lost consciousness and subsequently died. The three security guards responsible for carrying out JimmyMubenga’sdeportation worked for the Anglo-Danish security company G4S. Up until the Mubenga incident G4S held the exclusive contract with the UK Border Agency to provide escort for all immigration detainees deported from the United Kingdom.1 The loss of this contract does not end G4S’ involvement in migration management activities, however. As the world’s largest security company, G4S is involved in a plethora of migration functions all over the world, from operating immigration detention centers in the United Kingdom, to carrying out passenger screening and profiling at European airports, and to running deportation buses along the US-Mexican border. In 2012, the UK Border Agency signed a new contract with G4S to house asylum-seekers. Yet G4S isonly one example of a growing trend to contract out, or in other ways involve, private actors in migration management. The last decades have seen the emergence and rapid growth of a distinct migration control industry with private companies taking over a wide range of erstwhile governmental functions to screen, control, detain and deport migrants. The migration control industry raises a number of questions as tothe significance of this development for both migrants and the outsourcing states. Within law and political science, migration control has traditionally been viewed as an inalienable function of the state; a key sovereign prerogative flowing from control over territory. The privatization2 of migration management in this sense represents a fundamental reorganization of state sovereignty that may have a lasting impact on the actual performance of control as well as the development of migration policies in outsourcing states. As previous chapters in this volume equally point out, however, privatization of migration management does not necessarily mean that states are losing control, but rather that they seek to establish such by other means. Yet, the migration control industry does raise a number of concerns in regard to the rights of migrants and refugees and the ability to ensure democratic controls in this field. Where do we locate responsibility in situations such as the Jimmy Mubenga incident-with the security guards in question, at the corporate level, or with the outsourcing state? The present chapter sets out to provide a general introduction to themigration control industry as a subset of the migration industry at large. The first section maps the different modes through which private actors are today assisting or taking over otherwise governmental migration management functions. From this overview it is suggested that this outsourcing process may be qualitatively characterized by simultaneous processes of increased politicization, multi-layering and hybridity. Section two looks at the migration control industry from a human rights perspective. Repeated reports suggest that human rights and asylum obligations are being undermined as a result of outsourcing migration control. A brief look at the legal avenues for ensuring responsibility does indeed suggest that, while not impossible, ensuring responsibility in situations of outsourcing does impose an additional legal threshold. Finally, section three probes the structural conditions for ensuring accountability in the operation of the migration control industry. Like other areas of outsourcing, much of the migration control industry appears to operate behind a corporate veil creating an “out of sight, out of mind” effect that further complicates public oversight and independent scrutiny in this area. The rise of the migration control industry in this sense fundamentallyimpacts both the human rights of those subjected to control and thedemocratic ability to ensure rule of law in this area. Yet, at a time when asylum and immigration is highly politicized, part of the marketability of the migration control industry may well be exactly that governments can, through privatization, avoid the ordinary checks and balances of a democratic system.