The violent externalisation of asylum

Processes of externalisation of migration control have been ongoing for a long time (Faist 2019; FitzGerald 2019), and have involved the creation of structures, systems and agreements, which attempt to restrict mobility of people before they reach a state’s borders and thus prevent migrants entering into a national territory to make an asylum claim. These externalisation processes have very largely been used to prevent mobility of racialised migrants from countries of the Global South towards countries of the Global North. These processes can be described as a kind of ‘social mechanism’ involving a wide variety of actors. As Stock et al. (2019, 2) argue, ‘externalisation measures can be understood as processes which produce and reinforce relations of inequality in the management of mobility between states, states and civil society organisation, and migrants’. Externalisation policies are frequently presented as being in the interests of both migrants and receiving states, preventing trafficking and human rights abuses of people on the move, and stopping so-called ‘illegal’ migration to destination countries (Frelick et al. 2016). The perception of increasing numbers of refugee arrivals, together with the growing strength of populist and anti-immigration parties in many countries has accelerated this trend in recent years, and has led, for example to agreements such as that between the EU and Turkey in 2016 for the return of migrants arriving in Greece (Haferlach and Korban 2017), or proposals such as that of the UK government of forcibly deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda (Collyer and Shahani 2023). However, it can be argued that externalisation policies are in fact ineffective and that their only impact is to create more dangerous and difficult journeys for people on the move.