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Speaker: Luke de Noronha
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It is nearly ten years since I first landed in Kingston, Jamaica, a PhD student in my mid 20s, hoping to meet ‘foreign offenders’ who had been exiled home. Much has changed in a decade. In 2015, the United Kingdom was still part of the European Union and Trump had not yet been elected president. 2016 is often seen as a kind of turning point, heralding electoral and ideological gains for the hard right, most often described in terms of ‘populism’. The scourge of minorities and migrants looms large in the appeal of these ascendant nativist forces, and yet we were living in anti immigrant times long before 2016. The ‘deportation turn’ began in the 1990s, and New Labour has by far the best record when it comes to ‘sending immigrants home’, having increased state capacity to detain and deport throughout the 2000s.
Most of the research for this book was conducted between 2015-2019, a tumultuous period in British politics, characterised by various wranglings within the Conservative party – Cameron, May, Johnson – to define the terms of Brexit and secure the dividends of the referendum. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party attempted to construct a new social-democratic offer, summarily defeated in the 2019 election. In the intervening years, Home Secretaries appeared to get ever more cartoonishly evil: Priti Patel promised to construct floating barriers in the Channel and to banish asylum applicants to the South Atlantic; Suella Braverman would try (and fail) to contrive an offshoring policy with the Rwandan government, describing the mass deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda as her "dream" and "obsession". None of this worked very well and in 2023 the number of overall enforced returns were half what they were a decade earlier.
In 2024, a very different Labour party were back in power, triangulating their way to unprecedentedly low approval ratings while desperately proving their muscle at the border. Deportations reached a five-year high in 2024, proudly announced by Keir Starmer’s government as a sign that they were serious about tackling ‘illegal migration’. Starmer has done little to reverse the policies which effectively ended the right to asylum in Britain, and has vowed to get tougher when it comes to boat crossings. Labour will be more efficient, more rational, and more well-resourced than previous administrations This means working with foreign governments in more sustained and reasonable ways (UK-Jamaica diplomatic relations, and the place of deportation within them, are a central theme in this book). Put simply, if the Tories made a lot of noise about stopping the boats and deporting “the illegals”, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party promises to actually do it.
Deporting Black Britons was published in the most intense period of the COVID-19 pandemic – before we were vaccinated, before we knew about aerosols and were still wiping down our groceries, between lockdown 1 and lockdown 2. The book launch was on zoom. Importantly, the pandemic saw a huge reduction in the number of deportations; some respite, perhaps, for those threatened with expulsion. And yet, when deportation flights to Jamaica were resumed in December 2020, the justification was that everyone on board was a ‘serious foreign criminal’. Meanwhile, even as most immigration detainees were released on bail during the first lockdown, a few hundred with criminal records were held in prison-like conditions, despite various warnings from public health professionals about the spread of disease in sites of confinement.
It was my concern with precisely this, with what can be done to those labelled ‘foreign criminals’, that motivated this project back in 2014. I was exercised by the ways in which non-citizens with criminal records were turned into ultimate ‘baddies’, beyond the pale, and the ways in which their undeservingness catalysed the intensification of bordering more broadly, including through attacks on human rights law and access to justice. Unfortunately, this remains as timely a concern now as ten years ago. Criminality is still at the heart of justifications for hard bordering (detention and deportation), and this book tracks the ways in which racism within the criminal justice system propels certain people towards deportation. Indeed, my focus on the expulsion of ‘foreign criminals’ was part of a wider inquiry into the relationship between racism and immigration control in contemporary Britain.
My intention was not to prove, again, that discrimination based on skin colour creates disparities of outcome, but to examine the ways in which racism in Britain is inherently connected to the bordering of the nation. My argument was that immigration controls don’t just discriminate on the basis of ‘race’ but actively produce racial meanings. There is a vignette in the ‘Ricardo’ chapter that I regularly reference when explaining what I mean by this. A policeman says to Melissa’s friend, an Albanian child: ‘Remember, you ain’t even got a visa’. His threat reminds us that the police officers who surveil, arrest, and build evidence against young people in multi-ethnic cities like Birmingham understand that criminal sentencing has immigration consequences. Local acts of state racism, interpersonal racism, street racism are all framed by a set of meanings and policies in which fears about national decline seek resolution via immigration control, and, ultimately, deportation. Racial conceptions and racist practices are not static, they are in formation and produced through law, policy and related discourse.
The summer of 2024 witnessed a series of far-right protests, riots, or pogroms (depending on your viewpoint), across various towns and cities around the UK – in response to conspiracies over the origins, religion and legal status of a man who had murdered three young children in Southport, Merseyside. People assembled to demand that the government ‘stop the boats’ and ‘send them back’, including outside hotels where asylum claimants were being housed. In Rotherham, a mob tried to enter and then burn down one such hotel. The events revealed quite clearly the synergies between street racism and government policy, the ways in which legal categories take on cultural form, force and meaning.
None of this is wholly new: racism in Britain and Europe is always centrally concerned with the immigrant and with dreams of repatriation. What Deporting Black Britons tries to do is approach and theorise racism through the study of deportation as it is lived by individuals and their loved ones. I have found it helpful to define Britain as ‘multi-status’, which helps describe the ways in which borders get into people’s lives, in more intensive ways, following them around, drawing lines between neighbours, friends, partners and colleagues, and perhaps anticipating a future in which divisions between immigration and citizenship status come to be more socially significant than those based on skin colour alone.
This book shows that racism in Britain today is not only about second-class citizenship but also about the realisation of non-citizenship, of foreignness. If this argument is hard to make sense of here, it should become clearer after reading more of the book. Put most simply, many more people in the UK are subject to immigration controls than they were in an earlier period (say, the 1970s-1990s); for people who experience racism in schools, work and police stations, therefore, deportation is often a live threat; and even as Britain becomes more comfortable with its multi-racial character, in popular culture and dominant institutions, not least in government, there are more people than ever before who are actively threatened with being ‘sent back to where they are really from’.
While the book uses Jamaica and Jamaicans as its case study, it is not only a story about Caribbean/Black minorities and migrants (notwithstanding the book’s title). Jamaica does not receive the most ‘deportees’ from Britain, and the share of Jamaicans among enforced returns has been falling since the mid 2000s. Of course, the book speaks to specific histories of Jamaicans in the UK and attends to quite particular (post)colonial entanglements – especially in later chapters – but it aspires to represent the damage of anti immigrant politics in much broader terms, where it is difficult to tell the story of anti-black racism without connecting it to anti-Muslim racism, and where the plight of Albanian, Romanian, Polish and Vietnamese nationals can be related to the violation of the ‘Black Britons’ in the pages which follow – not least because some of the deported men in the book made these connections themselves.
Since publishing the book, I’ve spent more time in Jamaica, although no longer researching deportation (I’m interested in Jamaica’s attempted roll out of a digital national ID scheme). From the Jamaican side, the fall in the number of deportations from the UK has been noticeable: fewer arrive each year, an effect of the Windrush Scandal and then the pandemic. The organisation I volunteered with on my first two fieldwork trips – the National Organization of Deported Migrants – is now defunct; the UK government stopped funding them after the number of enforced returns fell (see Chapters 7 and 8). Still, the dangers facing deported people on return remain largely the same; the risk of destitution, homelessness, conflict with estranged family members, worsened mental ill-health, and vulnerability to crime and violence remain widespread. Since 2015, various parts of the island have been under repeated states of emergency, with joint military and police operations, zones of special operation, warrantless mass arrests, cordons, curfews, and other anti-gang measures. What is most notable in relation to recent patterns of crime in Jamaica is the diffusion of homicide and violence outside the Kingston Metropolitan Area, first to Montego Bay (the home of “scamming”) and now all around the island (especially Clarendon, Westmoreland, Hanover, St Elizabeth, and Trelawny).
I am regularly enlisted by immigration lawyers to write expert reports on these conditions. The legal process remains stacked against appellants, making many of these cases feel unwinnable, but sometimes my reports help. In the end, though, it is very hard to predict how an individual will fare on return. There are ways people find to adapt and survive, as people do. Violence is endemic but not random; it is leveraged by organised criminal groups and is inherent to economies surrounding drugs and lotto scamming. That said, deported individuals in particular neighbourhoods, at particular times, might find themselves victims of pettier crimes, based on low level extortion rackets, robbery, or family feuds – and the ubiquity of guns means that even petty crimes can be life-threatening. This book wants to draw attention to just how cruel deportation is for those that live it. I have no interest in litigating proportionality, even if I hope my legal reports can help shift the scales in some small way.
One of the important claims this book makes is that deportation is not the end, even if for legal and campaign work in the UK it is necessary to emphasise the severity of the danger, risk and permanent separation. For the men in this book, deportation precipitated an immense rupture in their lives. But life goes on. I hope Deporting Black Britons stands as a document to these men’s lives, one which can help us understand our anti immigrant times and by extension the character and force of racism and nationalism in the 21st Century. It is the piece of writing I am most proud of primarily because it does not stand or fall on whether I convince you of anything. I hope you will be compelled by the narrative and the testimony and recognise in it the humanity of people denied dignity, sympathy and respect by institutions of the British state.
Recording ends 12:30 minutes