Socially Distancing the ‘Irregular’ Migrant: An Arendtian Political Analysis of Contemporary UK Asylum Law

Abstract

Utilising Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’ thesis not only as an observation on citizenship but as an intrinsic eligibility and political opportunity for the stateless, this paper outlines how the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and Illegal Migration Act 2023 do not merely continue the general trend of criminalising migrants but take the further step of socially distancing the securitised migrant object. The recent legislation provides that those who arrive in the UK via ‘irregular means’ (i.e., small boats) will likely have their asylum claims deemed ‘inadmissible’. The lack of a ‘negotiated settlement’ in the asylum complex has been well noted; however, the systematic prejudgement and consequent bureaucratic social distancing inherent in the new legislation now threatens to remove even the prospect of negotiation. The means of arrival instantly proving decisive precludes the possibility for asylum seekers to present evidence that they are genuine refugees, and, with it, the politico-legal space and opportunity for the ‘irregular’ person to generally make themselves seen and heard is maliciously obstructed. The result is not just the denial of humanity and concomitant human dues (rights), but a distinct move towards denial of even the possibility of humanity (the right to have rights). Such works to distance system administrators from issues of vulnerability, assuredly direful consequences, and humanness itself, as is essential for the expansion of a system where basic human rights are so lacking.

1. Introduction

The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and the Illegal Migration Act 2023 are the two most recent reinforcements to the swelling legislative arsenal pertaining to asylum in the UK. The two statutory developments have been heavily criticised for denying routes to asylum on the basis of means of arrival contrary to the provisions contained in the 1951 Refugee Convention (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe 2022; House of Commons Joint Committee on Human Rights 2023); sidelining the criminal system’s constraining norms of harm, equality, and proportionality (The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants 2023); flagrantly disregarding the UK’s (international) legal human rights obligations (Powell 2024, p. 78);1 and transgressing the rule of law through, albeit now largely retracted, retroactivity (Public Law Project 2023). However, far less commentary has centred on the legislations’ impairment of human rights when understood not strictly legalistically but tactically, in the Arendtian (and republican) sense, as a demand, capacity, and opportunity for individual political action as a necessary check on the state itself.

This paper, in response, offers the first analysis of the new legislation from a political rights perspective. It utilises Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’ thesis as both a remark on citizenship and an intrinsic eligibility and political opportunity for the stateless, as well as her observations on bureaucracy and state violence. This analytical prism does not just further uncloak the asylum complex’s exclusionary motive and apparatus but reveals how the recent legislation constitutes the most deleterious form of social separation yet. The legislation makes it probable that those who arrive in the UK via ‘irregular means’ (i.e., small boats) will have their asylum claims deemed ‘inadmissible’. The lack of a ‘negotiated settlement’ (Bosworth 2013, p. 158; Legomsky 2007) in the modern asylum complex has been well noted, depicting the absence of a clear, participatory framework to manage migration issues that is mutually agreed upon by all stakeholders (government, legal authorities, communities, and migrants). However, the systematic prejudgement and consequent bureaucratic social distancing inherent in the new legislation now threatens to remove even the prospect of negotiation. The means of arrival likely instantly proving decisive precludes the possibility for asylum seekers to present evidence that they are genuine refugees, and, with it, the politico-legal space and opportunity for the ‘irregular’ person to generally make themselves seen and heard is maliciously obstructed. Such works to distance system administrators from issues of vulnerability, assuredly direful consequences, and humanness itself, as is essential for the expansion of a system where basic human rights are so lacking.

2. Arendt on the Stateless Malaise—And the Way out of It

Drawing upon her own experiences as a stateless refugee in the early 1940s—witnessing both the viciousness and banality of man that produces this condition, and indeed also constructs the borders which maintain it—Arendt foresaw a modern world characterised by unprecedented flows of stateless people. For Arendt (1943), the main strife for this stateless crowd would not be the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one.

Relentless incidences of persecution, failing states, and armed conflict, the instability of markets and climate, and reactionary political extremism have all come to define the nexus of precarity associated with an ever common, and increasingly divided, modern global order. Whilst, on one hand, precarity instigates a desperate human traffic, the same fears inform the exclusion of those deemed to not belong (Wacquant 2008, 2009, p. 300). The fortification of human borders manifests as an equilibrising measure, a semblance of home and security (and ultimately the sovereign power that provides it) while navigating the seemingly indomitable and borderless expansion of global capitalism, and the unfamiliarity and insecurity it produces (Loader 2009, pp. 245–46). This paradoxical globalisation equation not only vindicates Arendt’s numerical prediction, but also the potentially inescapable nature of the stateless condition.

Arendt’s writings identify the plight of the stateless as the starkest illustration of the seminal ‘English’ objection to doctrines of ‘human’ rights, first noted by Burke (1790, p. 9) and then defended by Bentham (1843, p. 523) in regard to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. This objection paints rights as an abstraction. That is, the formulation of rights that abstract from their stated means of realisation. Human rights imply, and declare, that they afford rights by virtue of humanity alone—they are universal. However, the supremacy of the nation-state in the international legal order asserts that no rights reliably exist independent of the nation-state (Benhabib 2004). For Arendt (1951, p. 301),

The paradox involved in the loss of human rights is that such loss coincides with the instant when a person becomes a human being in general—without a profession, without a citizenship, without a deed by which to identify and specify himself—and different in general, representing nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of expression within and action upon a common world, loses all significance.

Herein lies both liberal democracy’s central purpose and—what Agamben (1998, p. 132) terms—its ‘secret presupposition’: a system which guarantees universal values for its citizens, while defining those citizens and excluding those who are not. While the process of exclusion implicates and especially highlights the whims, biases, and contradictions of liberalism and humankind generally, the navigation of the liberal paradox has long encompassed a space where its own contradictions may be challenged.2 It is within this space that the peculiarity of Arendt’s philosophy of rights vis-à-vis the original English objectors is elucidated, and wherein her own incredulity towards the impermanency of statelessness becomes complicated. For while all pointed to the same linguistic contradiction which human rights in its orthodox constructions embody and that humans can certainly exist in a ‘place called nowhere’ when abstracted from political community (DeGooyer 2018), Arendt always retained hope of a way out of this malaise, and, most significantly, saw utility in invoking the vernacular of human rights in getting there. As with much of Arendt’s philosophy, a damning genealogy of oppression is qualified at its bleakest point by a modicum of optimism located in the same suppressible, corruptible, and surrenderable human condition to choose action, strength, and consciousness, and ultimately new beginnings.

In explaining the transformative potential of Arendt’s thesis, it is useful to consult Mouffe’s distinction between ‘politics’ and the ‘political’. For Mouffe (2005, pp. 8–9): ‘politics’ denotes the habitual, often mundane, practices of politics (debating and law-making, bureaucratic administration, and adherence to legal or constitutional processes); the ‘political’ signifies societal arrangement and the permanent tensions that exist therein. Politics attempts to generate order and coexistence amidst the strife of the political (Rancière 1995, 1998). The most belligerent example of the ‘political’ is the tension between those inside the bounds of citizenship and those outside, the ‘part of no part’ (Rancière 2004a, p. 12). Thus, the processes of ‘politics’ become most energised and perilous when outsiders clamour for membership. Lefort (2007, p. 389) calls this democracy’s ‘sauvage character’. (The ‘deeds not words’ of the suffragettes were assuredly wild.)

While the tensions embroiled in the ‘political’ can certainly ignite to enervate and tear down the structures, norms, and limits of ‘politics’ altogether in acts of grand revolution, ‘politics’ itself in the liberal tradition has long envisioned its own transformation of the ‘political’. For Kant (1784), who was a great influence on Arendt, such is necessary to protect liberalism itself; a doctrine wherein the preponderance of freedom strives for a constant better as opposed to best, in recognition of the imperfection and lustful tendency of man towards power. Furthermore, the salience of ‘equality’ as well as ‘freedom’ at the crux of the liberal order implicates a space where not only the content and object of that order is continuously interrogated and contested, but the very subject (Balibar 2004, pp. 313, 318). (The suffragettes assuredly defended and improved liberalism.) It is unsurprising, then, how ‘rights’ as performative, corrective functionalities have consistently been embodied in grand legal documents since their liberal inception. Early constitutionalism not only forbade unjust infringement on a person by government but guaranteed their right to free speech, to congress, and to vote for government. These rights present opportunities even for the most marginalised to continuously challenge the infirmity and corrupting urge of man to extend and stiffen power.

For some, this democratic limitlessness associated with the centrality of human rights to the liberal order has evoked criticism that democracy may eventually turn against itself (Gauchet 2007, pp. 16–20; Manent 1999).3 However, we may assert that democracy properly—in the liberal sense—is always against itself for human rights preclude that the law be settled indefinitely, since to do so would constitute the most malignant demonstration of the illiberal. Significantly, liberal orders have also long been ‘against’ themselves even when it concerns the most vivid, or sauvage, illustrations of the ‘political’. That is, liberal ‘politics’ has encompassed room for petition by the stateless.

It is worth introducing Sarat’s work on legal consciousness at this point. Writing on the welfare poor, Sarat (1990, p. 344) documents a ‘consciousness of power and domination […] and resistance’. Law, and the power dynamics it embodies and upholds, is commonly encountered by welfare recipients in quotidian transactions and occurrences. Whether and how welfare recipients fulfil basic needs is largely determined by legal rules and arrangements, invoked by the state to assume significant jurisdiction over the choices of welfare recipients in a manner not observable with non-welfare recipients. However, Sarat (ibid.) considers how welfare recipients use the same legal ideas and spaces to respond to problems with the welfare system—‘assert[ing] themselves and demand[ing] recognition of their personal identities and their human needs’.

Clear parallels may be drawn here with the experiences of ‘irregular’ migrants, for whom the law, too, ‘is all over’ (ibid., p. 377). The ‘obtrusiveness’ of law manifests not only in the lives of those ‘irregular’ migrants formally detained, but those released and indeed those who have never been arrested. The latter groups navigate reminders of the threat of future confinement under the common condition to regularly report to police and in the growing requirement to self-certify immigration status within non-penal institutions like schools, places of work, and rental properties, respectively. However, enclosure and engagement within the same state politico-legal apparatus can afford ‘irregular’ migrants an opportunity to assert themselves and demand that their human rights be upheld.

The 1951 Refugee Convention not only prescribes non-penalisation, non-refoulement, and prohibits arbitrary detainment, but also affords refugees the right to access courts, education, and work, and to claim asylum.4 The result is the formation of spaces whereby the ‘secret presupposition’ of the democratic political equation—the non-citizen, or ‘bare life’—appears openly in the political domain. Unlike asylum seekers’ (largely) passive presence in immigration detention as objects of political power, where Agamben’s (1998, p. 132) observations focus, the courts, places of learning and work, and asylum administration sites are traditionally spaces of action for asylum seekers. As Sarat’s work encourages, the difference in these settings invites additional nuance of how ‘bare life’ may manifest in politics as a political subject.

Semantically, ‘bare life’ resembles the abstract nakedness of Arendt’s ‘human being in general’, a body devoid of assured significance in a common world—as acquired through entering the realm of citizenship (Agamben 1998, pp. 1–12). Bare life has no reliable right; all that remains for the body is the fact of biological existence and a total subjection to sovereign power, whether destructive or sympathetically hospitable. The state-sanctioned ‘hostile’ and ‘compliant’ environments of the previous decade are illustrative of the former. These ‘environments’ refer to a string of administrative and legislative measures designed to make life in the UK as difficult as possible for individuals without leave to remain, in an attempt to ‘persuade large numbers to depart voluntarily’ (Bolt 2016, p. 2). The policies restrict ‘irregular’ migrants’ access to work, benefits, bank accounts, driving licences, and the private rental sector (Home Office 2025b).

In liberal court or asylum administration, however, ‘bare life’ is not (traditionally) a stupefied, processed—ordered—subject. Rather, notwithstanding illegality of arrival, ‘bare life’ may still actively assert a right to membership and work towards a negotiated settlement with sovereign power. Asylum seekers’ presence and activity in these settings reveal and challenge the bounds and contradictions of the liberal order in the shape of its borders and citizenship, including their own exclusion and ‘illegal’ presence.

Indeed, Arendt (1943) herself, like all those who find themselves stateless, grappled with the anxiety that (re)accession to political community is not guaranteed, but located hope in the propensity of Western liberal democracy—particularly, in her instance, the United States—to at least ‘consider newcomers as possible prospective citizens’. Significantly, it is here where Arendt’s seminal construct, ‘the right to have rights’, assumes its function as a means to seize Mouffe’s political opportunity.

In her ‘right to have rights’ thesis, Arendt (1951, p. 43) posits a foundational reconceptualisation of human rights as a ‘right to the human condition itself, which depends upon belonging to some human community’. Contrary to more narrow, decontextualised readings (Barbour 2012, pp. 307–8), the avenue of relief sought by Arendt alludes to how to speak of the ‘right to have rights’ is not to claim institutionalism and the institutionalised (vis-à-vis the citizenry) as the sole space and proprietors of action. Rather, it is to recognise the capacity of those human beings in general—without a profession, citizenship, or deed—to gain recognition, specificity, and significance by radically altering the citizenship space through their own action. Such is distinct from the rights of man: human rights are no longer reduced to a tautology (the right of members who already have rights) but become the right to political membership (and the right to effectively participate within, and disrupt, that order) (Balibar 2007, p. 733). ‘To have’ rights, then, is to participate in conceptualising, forming, seizing, and defending (whether through legislation, lawful petition, or protest outside the institutional confines of ‘politics’) a common political order within which it is possible to legitimately assert a rights claim against that order (Maxwell 2018). For Arendt (1958, chap. 1), the foundational human basis, ‘the right’, which justifies and grounds one’s capacity ‘to have’ rights, is vested in the ‘natal’ politico-linguistic experience—the truly inalienable facet of humankind. That is, the potential to see, hear, think, dream and believe in extraordinarily better and then act for it remains even amongst the barest entity abstracted from all but humanness itself, and with it the opportunity to make oneself seen and heard and assert eligibility.

In fact, it is the wild struggle over the denotation of citizenship—of human—itself that informed Rancière’s (2004b, p. 304) contention that ‘bare life’ can be ‘political’ and that human rights are the rights of those ‘deprived of the rights that they ha[ve]’. For Rancière (ibid., p. 303), Olympe de Gouges’ proclamation during the French Revolution, ‘if women are entitled to go to the scaffold, they are entitled to go to the assembly’ encapsulates how ‘through public action, [de Gouges demonstrated she] had the rights that the constitution denied [her], that [she] could enact those rights’. Significantly, this action can be regarded as ‘within the political’, for the space it operates within—the divide between state and nowhere, law and lawlessness, citizen and the less-than—is inside the bounds of a sovereign, political order.5

As alluded to, meaningful political action need not always manifest in such gallant spectacles of revolution, though Arendt always reserved space for that. Rather, assertions of a ‘right to have rights’ can arise within everyday, bureaucratised processes of the political and, significantly, still disrupt that processing. While institutionalised channels of action are less well-documented than louder means of disruption, the central Arendtian observation of an ability to belong and a choice to assert that belonging remains potentially transformative within, as well as against, institutionalised settings themselves. Institutional processing of the excluded in the liberal tradition—through the courts, administration, and temporary leave—not only affords the excluded visibility but a ‘political opportunity’ to show they can enact the rights and security a liberal constitution denies them because they are human and thus equal.

The seizing of this opportunity promises not just legal redress, but potentially, per Arendt’s conception of ‘new beginnings’, a redress of the social that underpins and defends the law. Arendt (1958) attests that political action stems from the biological, and thus enduring, power to begin anew. Citing St. Augustine, Arendt (1972, p. 170) characterises each human as a ‘beginner’ and an ‘initium’ who can continuously evolve, and prompt evolution, through their experience with others, both the purposeful and spontaneous. The result is that civic participation—however localised—and acts of humanity, kindness, passion, storytelling therein, are never wasteful choices. Indeed, Arendt captures a relational, incremental model where, because of the boundless sociability of man, the potential to just change one person’s perspectives—just one new beginning—can inspire that person to change another’s, and so on (Heller 2001). Thus, the ability to access formal work and participate openly in public spaces ought not to be overlooked as essentially political channels, nor should the capacity for visibility and assertion of ‘the right’ in the criminal complex be confined to legal analyses of statutory contradiction. Indeed, such promises to be transformative in a more foundational, politicosocial sense, by challenging preconceptions and inciting backlash against laws which persecute migrants.

‘New beginnings’ need not always (and indeed seldom do) occur urgently or overtly in grand denouncements of former prejudice but may be subconscious or even just inspire a greater suspicion of prevailing (meta)narratives and an openness towards alternate ideas. Either way, it remains true that the benefits are most likely to be reaped at those moments of civic unrest and institutional exhaustion wherein the ‘political’ comes to the fore. Indeed, as ‘politics’ conspires to (re)arrange the ‘political’—likely with the aid of a stigmatising discursive path well-trodden by actors past—community (re)assertion, or the absence of, come to define whether one is situated in a human rights community, or not. (Eichmann always retained the prerogative of action against the directives of the Nazi machine, which likely would have been compensated by other agents and made no difference, but what if others had joined him and it had?) It is thus not the force of law itself, the claims of our leaders and judicial crusaders, or (selective) heritage, which is conclusive, but the choices of a people today and tomorrow to defend rights. As Arendt (1951, p. 106) remarked on the Dreyfus affair:

There was only one basis on which Dreyfus could or should have been saved. The intrigues of a corrupt Parliament…should have been met squarely with the stern Jacobin concept of the nation based upon human rights—that republican view of communal life which asserts that (in the words of Clemenceau) by infringing on the rights of one, you infringe on the rights of all.

It is unsurprising, then, that as the UK government (like so many of its liberal counterparts) has sought to systematically withdraw human rights protections from the world’s vulnerable that it has necessarily been accompanied by both securitised narratives and a shattering of the bonds of human experience. Amidst these narratives, it is the absence of conversance which provokes a spectral so tangible and a silence so deafening. The next sections of this paper shall map this progressive symbiosis. It will outline how previously, asylum seekers were afforded ‘political opportunity’ in this UK, but the recent legislation has sought to remove that privilege. Through the Arendtian prism of presence and action, it will outline how these Acts do not merely continue the general trend of criminalising migrants but take the further step of socially distancing the securitised migrant object. The result is not just the denial of humanity and concomitant human dues (rights), but a distinct move towards denial of even the possibility of humanity (the right to have rights).

3. The Securitisation Shift and the Withdrawal of Political Opportunity

The 1951 Convention defines a refugee as someone who ‘owing to well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country’.6 Signatory states are required to formally recognise all those who fall within this definition as ‘refugees’ and extend essential rights to them. Thus, refugee status has been labelled a ‘surrogate’ source of human rights for those who cannot effectively invoke their citizenship (Nafziger 1992, p. 706). The Refugee Convention itself makes direct reference to Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 as underpinning this form of protection.7 However, while seeking to circumnavigate the dubiety of the nation-state as protector of rights, this surrogacy is a mode of ‘rights’ paradoxically still reliant upon and delimited to the nation-state apparatus (Harvey 2013). Like the conventional route of citizenship, access to humanity’s attendant compilation of rights via refugee status is contingent on an effective display of that humanity. It is about seizing political opportunity.

This opportunity previously arose in the UK, whereby an asylum claimant, upon arrival, was able to submit a claim in line with part 11 of the Immigration Rules.8 Per these rules, claimants would undertake a screening interview to establish the basis of their claim before attending a substantive interview. During the second interview, claimants would put forward their claim to a decision-maker. This process could take several hours and typically involves claimants presenting a narrative account of their claim (Powell 2024, p. 69). The decision-maker subsequently considered whether the claimant had sufficiently proved they had a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country per the Refugee Convention or whether they ought to be afforded ‘complementary protection’ via the UK’s broader human rights obligations under international law. ‘Complementary protection’ stems from the obligation contained in key human rights treaties to not deport claimants to countries where they would risk facing human rights violations (McAdam 2007).

Significantly, the guidance contained in part 11 of the Immigration Rules (para. 339J) made it clear that the assessment undertaken by the decision-maker in these interviews must be carried out on an ‘individual, objective and impartial basis (my emphasis)’. Decision-makers ought to have considered ‘the individual position and personal circumstances of the person, including factors such as background, gender and age, so as to assess whether, on the basis of the person’s personal circumstances [the treatment they would face in their home country would amount to persecution or serious harm]’ (para. 339J [iii]). Such information may be acquired from ‘relevant statements and documentation’ presented by the applicant (para. 339J [ii]), as well as the ‘general credibility’ of the applicant established during the interview (para. 339L [v]). Furthermore, if asylum was denied at this stage, applicants reserved the right to appeal with an immigration judge in the First-tier Tribunal, Asylum and Immigration Chamber.9

It is pertinent to note here that legal aid shortages and Home Office backlogs somewhat limited the material capacity of asylum seekers to take action and articulate their claim in court. Overall, though, we see how individualism, presence, and personal invocation guided the asylum process. Neither the lack of citizenship nor the potential lawlessness of arrival precluded the individual’s capacity for action within the institutional political bounds of a sovereign order—to petition for inclusion and bridge the divide between law and lawlessness, state and nowhere, to contest their ordering. Here, the secret presupposition of the liberal equation does not just appear in the political domain, but exercises that most distinctly human capacity—to speak purposefully and be heard and pondered. If only transiently, the migrant appeared as human, eye-to-eye with an equal, capable of and deserving ‘to have’ rights. In particular, the capacity of storytelling proved essential in the invocation of equality and appeal for just protection.10 The recounting of (anticipated) horrors was a (last) call by the applicant for their human rights to be vindicated by a liberal order whose propensity for succour and defence of the universal sanctity of humans provided legendary hope to those who had been failed elsewhere. The narrative accounts individualised and humanised the migrant subject, for recounting a fear of persecution invokes hopes and fears, essentially a vulnerability that is inherently human and thus resonates beyond legal distinction as a humanity needing and worth protecting.

However, as the disorder of globalisation continues to expose liberalism as a complex which upholds universal values only for its citizens (or desirable outsiders), it distorts it. Western states—the most salient figmental beacons of liberal sanctuary—are devising new and more permanent means of distinguishing the citizen and the less-than. Scholars have pointed to a shift away from humanitarian discourse with universal human rights at its crux, which once enveloped those seeking asylum, towards securitisation logics that construct those seeking asylum as security risks who require processing and ordering (Perez 2023; Stevens 2004, p. 11). This shift justifies, and has been characterised by, the embrace of penal logics and apparatuses to manage, remove, and exclude presumed polluting elements (all while further restricting legal aid) (Bloomfield 2016).11 Of course, criminal systems have long been utilised by liberal democracies to delineate the boundaries of membership in the sense of justifying (largely) temporary exclusion from social life, while elucidating and verifying through the criminal justice process the basal sovereign political authority (Garland 1996). However, the modern asylum complex constitutes a more sinister manifestation of biopolitical power by enabling a permanent and unchecked exclusion not merely through suppressing rights, but through disassembling sociability itself and suppressing even the prospect of rights (Lefort 2013, p. 130). As Rancière (2010) observed, politics carries with it the capacity to ‘police’: to not just determine who belongs and who does not, but what is visible and what is not.

Prior to 1999, we may say that the non-citizen was the (worst-kept) secret presupposition of the liberal equation. Indeed, detention was rarely employed against asylum seekers (Welch and Schuster 2005, p. 337); however, the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 marked a shift towards exclusion, ultimately seeing detention become an ‘essential element’ of asylum processing (Home Office 2002, para. 4.74). In spite of official guidance to utilise detention ‘sparingly and for the shortest period necessary’ (Home Office 2025a, p. 7), asylum-seeking populations now commonly find themselves subject to detention and banishment notwithstanding the fact they have not been found guilty of any crime (Bigo 2004, pp. 61–62; Home Office 2022).12 This move has been coupled with the growth of ‘right to work’ and ‘right to rent’ checks, which obstruct undocumented migrants from accessing house and work security as well as participating in spaces of human sociability (Griffiths and Yeo 2021). Of course, as Powell (2024, p. 71) reminds us, ‘illegal’ or ‘irregular’ persons commonly form meaningful associations beyond the state apparatus, including work in informal economies and underground political organisation. Nonetheless, the point stands that without accessible routes to legalise status, the opportunity to flourish within an increasingly state-driven context is hindered. The recent legislative developments only compound this social distancing.

As summarised above, presence in the asylum complex previously afforded asylum seekers the opportunity to challenge their illegality and be recognised as a human equal deserving of the dignity liberal orders attach to that status. However, recent legislative developments in the UK threaten to establish a permanency of political order whereby entire groups of people are automatically assigned inferior positions that they are unable to contest individually in line with the liberal tradition.

The class to which securitisation logics are particularly evident in asylum policy are the well-branded categorisation, ‘”small boat” arrivals’. For the Home Office (2021b), these arrivals do not reflect a failure to offer safe and accessible means of arrival for the world’s vulnerable, but rather pertain to the operation of people smugglers and trafficking gangs who facilitate ‘small boat’ channel crossings. The focus on organised crime, notwithstanding that asylum seekers themselves are implicated as victims in this narrative, securitises arrivals through these means and subjects those arriving on ‘small boats’ to increasingly punitive measures.

The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 orders asylum seekers to this end. Section 16(1) of the Act provides that the Home Secretary ‘may’ deem an asylum claim ‘inadmissible’ when the subject has a ‘connection’ with a safe third country, and subsequently facilitate the removal of the subject to any other safe third country. The externalisation of asylum processing has been a common evolution within the ‘securitisation’ shift and, indeed, the 2022 Act empowers the formation of bilateral agreements whereby the UK may transfer asylum administration responsibilities to third countries. The 2022 memorandum of understanding and 2023 treaty between the UK and the Republic of Rwanda to establish an asylum transfer scheme—albeit from which the current Labour government has subsequently distanced itself—are examples of such agreements.

Section 16(2) of the Nationality and Borders Act clarifies that a claimant deemed ‘inadmissible’ on account of a ‘connection’ with a safe third country will not be able to claim asylum under the Immigration Rules. Furthermore, Section 16(3) explains how inadmissibility is not a refusal, thus claimants have no right to appeal to the First-tier Tribunal because there is nothing to appeal.13 ‘Connection’, per Section 16, is interpreted very broadly to the point of encompassing the mere presence of the subject in a safe third country where they could reasonably have claimed asylum but failed to do so (Home Office 2021a, para. 185–86). Thus, merely transiting a safe state prior to arrival in the UK leaves an asylum seeker’s claim at risk of inadmissibility, notwithstanding whether they have initially fled a country where their life or freedom may be imperilled (Perez 2023, p. 310). Under this directive, those who cross the English Channel in small boats departing from Belgium and France are particularly likely to have less right to claim asylum or invoke human rights protections than those who arrive by other means.

In 2023, the Illegal Migration Act was passed by Parliament, which threatens to compound the two-tier asylum system introduced in 2022. The Act provides that anyone who arrives ‘irregularly’ into the UK (i.e., via small boats) will have their asylum application or relevant human rights claim deemed automatically ‘inadmissible’—the Home Office will not even consider an individual’s claim, no matter its merits.14 The Act thus places a legal duty upon the Home Secretary, as opposed to a discretionary power, to remove any ‘irregular’ arrivals either to their home country or to any ‘safe’ third country.15 However, these provisions have yet to be commenced and the current Labour government have stated they have no plans to this end. Thus, the Nationality and Borders Act remains the pertinent legislation. Though while Section 16 only confers a discretionary power upon the Home Secretary to rule a claim ‘inadmissible’, Powell and Rifath (2023, p. 759) have noted how, amidst the present political context, it is ‘highly likely that this discretionary power will be widely used’. Moreover, amidst the well-noted procedural and logistical difficulties of facilitating removal (The Migration Observatory 2025), it is feared that ‘irregular’ migrants who cannot have their claims processed may find themselves detained indefinitely under this power (The Institute for Public Policy Research 2024).16

In sum, the contemporary legislation does not merely further (symbolically) distance the criminally ‘irregular’ arrival from regularities of process and human rights (and in turn those who belong and are deserving of such treatment), but this exceptional status translates into real attendant physical boundaries of space—the distancing of the migrant themselves—together compounding the perennity of the stateless condition. This social distancing of process and subject is not merely employed for ease of administration or legal expediency (though it is suggested that it also attempts to serve those aims), but is essential in a far more foundational political sense to liberalism’s own downfall by making banal what should be exceptional.

It is here to which this paper will now turn. Drawing upon Arendt’s conception of bureaucracy, it will argue that the systematic prejudgement and transferring of processing responsibilities to third countries contemplated by the new legislation threatens to socially distance asylum applicants from the political opportunity to bridge state and nowhere. This novel analysis complements existing legalistic reviews, suggesting the obfuscation of humanity and individualism inherent in the systematic denial of spaces for action by asylum seekers is central—along with prevailing ‘securitising’ discourses—to the flourishing of a system which disregards human rights law so brazenly.

4. ‘Irregularity’—A Bureaucracy of Space and Construction

The disempowerment of individual decision-makers in favour of pre-decision, and the consequent social distancing this creates between agent and object of sovereign power, bears uncomfortable resemblance to Arendt’s conception of bureaucracy as a mode of antihuman governance. Writing On Violence, Arendt (1969, p. 88) designated rule by bureaucracy as ‘the latest and perhaps most formidable form of [political] domination’. For Arendt (ibid), bureaucracy—‘the rule of an intricate system of bureaus’—was a mode of political governance wherein no individual(s) may truly be held responsible for its output and thus it could be ‘properly called the rule by Nobody’. The ‘rule by Nobody’ alludes to how the thousands of agents of the state, by simply doing their (habitual, often mundane) directed duties in their respective bureaus, operate in practice to arrange society vis-à-vis the ‘political’, wherein ultimately the labyrinthine arrangement of bureaus obscures channels of accountability. Increasingly, ‘decision makers’ do not make decisions for which they are ultimately responsible; instead, they merely ‘process’ the arrangement predetermined by another bureau that itself defers to the (statistical) output of another. The result is that the aggrieved has nobody left to meaningfully argue with, whereby alternate outcomes could be secured, because no ‘decision maker’ is so empowered (ibid., p. 81). Arendt (ibid., p. 88) remarked:

If, in accord with traditional political thought, we identify tyranny as government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done.

The end result is the (self-)denial of human politico-linguistic activity at the crux of public government, which is replaced by a scientifically rationalised private conformity where justice is averted.

Foucault’s dimensional genealogy of the state’s punitive apparatus mapped the complex’s vacillation between the public and the private spaces. The former offers political utility in the defining and compounding of a public enemy, while the latter presents an opportunity for the quelling of that public enemy to ‘leave the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness…justice is relieved of responsibility by a bureaucratic concealment of the penalty itself’ (Foucault 1979, p. 34). That is to say, populations are seldom confronted with the material consequences of their delineation of public enemies. The private space becomes all the more appealing for state power when its punishment apparatus diverts from its liberal premise. The facade of liberalism is maintained for both the population and the administrators of the system, who are assured through the force of law and prevailing narratives that they are administering an outcome that is noble and just. In fact, Arendt documented how a bureaucratic pursuit of efficiency and discourses of (differing) righteousness obscured the violence of the Holocaust for Eichmann and colleagues, while (largely) concealing the human suffering from the general population.17

In the asylum complex, the ‘border’ alone, both physically and conceptually, helps sovereign power manifest loudly while beginning to situate the parameters of belonging. However, public discourses of a small-boats ‘crisis’ or ‘invasion’ or pending terrorist destruction are necessary accompaniments in contextualising the selective permeability of the border and depicting what the unwelcome look like. Notwithstanding the prima facie race-neutrality of categorising asylum seekers by means and route of arrival, the near impossibility of those fleeing disorder in Africa and the Middle East to produce requisite travel documents casts the unwelcome as visually different (De Genova 2018, p. 1766),18 helping define the most suitable enemy, and indeed a discernible semblance of home.

Butler’s (2009, pp. 1–15) framework of grievable and non-grievable life explains how prevailing discursive constructions of identity against the surrounding political capital of inter alia security, innocence, bravery and kindness, and productive potential attribute different worth to human life and subsequently variable demands for its protection. Per Butler’s lens, the discourse of ‘invasion’ homogenises and isolates ‘small boat’ migrants, obnubilating individual humanity to the point their demise at sea or stupefication and banishment in the criminal justice system occurs without sympathy or demand for redress or even due process. The migrant exits what Bauman (1989, p. 191) termed the ‘universe of obligations’. Drawing upon Butler’s work, Powell (2024, p. 72) notes how refugee status is not only a legal avenue through which one accesses rights, but is also a ‘form of epistemic legitimacy’, which has historically fostered sympathy and action as grievable life. However, the epistemic (de)legitimacy assigned to moving humanities is not a mere corollary, but is a foundational constituent in the systematic obstruction or liberation of legal avenues through which one may access rights. The linguistic construction of ‘small-boat’ arrivals through the binary logic of risk and alerts of ‘invasion’, as opposed to a wave of ‘refugees’, is essential to the process of distancing the migrant subject from critical consciousness, wherein human rights violations can continue largely uncontested.

The securitisation shift has been characterised by a broader culture of physical social distancing, which works in conjunction with these prevailing linguistic delineations to conceal deserving humanity, of which the recent legislation constitutes the most definitive step yet. Arendt (1969, p. 81) wrote how ‘the transformation of government into administration, or of republics into bureaucracies [necessarily coincided with] the disastrous shrinkage of the public realm’. Scholars have hitherto documented, for instance, how the outsourcing of the daily running of immigration detention facilities to private companies has ‘unhinged’ the process from the state qua the source (and guarantee) of rights, whilst diminishing transparency and accountability (Franko et al. 2017, p. 40; Gündogdu 2015). The engagement of private companies shifts immigration management towards privatised standards of ‘production’, as opposed to public standards of, inter alia, constitutional obligation, individual evidence burdens, and human rights. The focus is on the ‘how’, not the ‘why’.19 These institutions thus become judged against their raw numerical processing capacity (Bowling and Westenra 2018; Feeley and Simon 1992),20 which aligns with the progressive fortification of loud folktales and dialogic stereotypes with the actuarial production of diverse individuals into a readily processable and disposable homogeneity—‘irregular’ migrants.

Mayblin (2019) has previously documented similar processes of ‘complexity reduction’ in the governing of asylum seekers. It is recorded how the production of a ‘policy imaginary’—a story that reduces the complexity of ‘irregular’ migration—allows the government to readily devise sweeping policy responses to it. Mayblin outlines how the salient notion of ‘economic pull factors’ asserts that asylum seekers are merely economic migrants in disguise, responsive to economic opportunities in Britain rather than broader global instability within which British interests and legacy remain embroiled. From this, asylum seekers’ economic rights to labour market access have been curtailed.

Arendt (1971a) foresaw this rise of theoretical production and ultimately metricisation in bureaucratic government; in particular, the ‘fascination’ with ‘translating all factual contents into the language of numbers and percentages, where they can be calculated’. Arendt observed how the rise of “intellectuals” in government triggered the mobilisation of sociological ‘theory’ as a definitive and automatic means of sorting populations, retreating from past attempts to constantly verify sociological fact and justice. However, excessive adherence to the ideological formation of certain categories as a means of navigating precarity threatens to undermine the responsiveness of the political man (Winegarten 1983, p. 26). It was anticipated that theory and ultimately the embrace of scientific technique would see the intellectual ‘remain unaware of the untold misery that their “solutions” held in store for a “friend” who needed to be “saved” and for an “enemy” who had neither the will nor the power to be one before we attacked him’ (Arendt 1971a). While Arendt’s cautions were initially presented amidst the context of devising ‘solutions’ in the Vietnam war—‘pacification and relocation programs, defoliation, napalm, and antipersonnel bullets’ (ibid.)—the perils of privileging the theoretical and the algorithmic over the experiential within the governmental operation have plangency beyond military campaigns.

Contemporaneously, the embrace of mathematical modelling adds a veneer of objectivity to what— ultimately, in the absence of individual substantiation—remains the theoretical, further devaluing the latter, more personalised endeavour. It has been noted how the migrant-securitisation shift’s navigation of ‘risk’ does not involve an assay of individual pathologies or even a connected, tangible, established threat beyond loose evocations of (Islamic) ‘terrorism’ (Bhatia 2015). Indeed, Broeders and Hampshire (2013, p. 1213) have noted how decision-making capacity in the asylum complex is increasingly distanced from those agents of the state who have personal contact with asylum seekers. Instead, the calculation of ‘risk’ has come to embrace actuarial techniques, and power is located more and more with those tasked with designing risk-algorithms, wherein factors like race and nationality inform a ‘probabilistic operation’ to define ‘a statistical collectivity, a subpopulation’ (Krasmann 2007, p. 306). This modelling, however selective, has provided a stubborn epistemic base for the expansion of the disposable typology, justifying its encompassment of means of arrival so as to comprehensively capture the routes of untrustworthy mobility. This statistical modelling serves a dehumanising function. Inevitably, asylum seekers—absent any legitimate scientific verification—become constructed against the supposed attributes of the terrorist spectre, which depersonalises migrant experiences and vulnerabilities (Mythen and Walkate 2006).

Furthermore, within these private institutions, we see clearly how the surrounding semantic discourse of the ‘refugee’ vis-à-vis the ‘illegal’ or ‘irregular’ migrant is no post hoc exercise, but rather functions as a diffuse political technology which supplements actuarial production, bureaucratic legal shifts, and the pursuit of efficiency. In fact, Arendt herself identified a rift between the ‘problem-solving’ elite and the governed classes as a rationale for bureaucratic dominion; however, this not only existed along the lines of perceived intelligence but was often too entwined with racial difference. Indeed, Arendt (1951, chap. 7) located the governing of colonial populations in Egypt, India, and Algeria outside of traditional legal bounds and responsibility in the embrace of bureaucracy.

Scholars have since documented the growing post-/neo-colonial ties of the asylum complex, wherein global North states continue to systematically manage and exclude global South populations (Winder 2004, p. 222; Bhui 2013; Bosworth and Turnbull 2015, p. 51). Detention facilities—penal and ‘administrative’—within the global North are inordinately populated by racial minorities from former colonies (Wacquant 2010). Many of whom are then subsequently banished back to the global South, commonly straight into prisons erected during the colonial era (Bosworth 2017). The same psychosocial rift Arendt observed in colonial governance continues to guide Western management of these communities today. For instance, when courts administer automatic deportation following the criminal conviction of a foreign national, these individuals are relocated to immigration detention centres where they are processed and their expulsion facilitated. Within these facilities, Bosworth’s (2018, p. 227) qualitative study captures how private staff are guided by prevailing racialised discourses, which ‘assist in the process of estrangement that permits and justifies detention as well as the politics and practices of [race-related] expulsion that these institutions enable’. The recent Brook House Inquiry (Eves 2023) corroborates these findings. The first public inquiry into the mistreatment of individuals in immigration detention found a ‘toxic’ environment wherein some outsourced staff utilised racist, derogatory language against detainees (ibid., p. 30).21 The idea of ungrievable life seemed to manifest clearly within the institution, with the inquiry reporting ‘a lack of empathy [from staff] and, on occasion, a mocking approach to the men in their care’ (ibid., 10).22

Regrettably, the recent legislation only seems to build upon this trend. The potential to subcontract almost the entire asylum process, per the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, further distances the state (and community) from the migrant, whose removal is processed by staff with whom they have no potential of peership. Indeed, the UK’s proposal to Rwanda would see even those ultimately granted refugee status remain in Rwanda (Home Office 2023a, sct. 10.1). Moreover, the prospect of automatic inadmissibility and removal for ‘small boat’ arrivals sans criminal conviction and attendant censure (however far removed from its constraining norms of proportionality, equality, and that no one be punished twice), compounds the importance of publicly constructing these migrants as criminogenic, aberrant invaders in order to guide the (increasingly distant) conduits who privately process removal. Furthermore, concerns pertaining to a lack of transparency, accountability, and the ability of the migrant to directly challenge their predicament or even make a meaningful assertion within detention institutions are heightened by the lack of connection to the state power that compels them (Bloomfield 2016).23 This too manifested within the Brook House Inquiry (Eves 2023), where the Home Office had attempted to deflect accountability for abuses onto readily replaceable individual staff members, as opposed to their own role as ultimate directors of the dynamics of control and exclusion that produce the harmful cultures that have come to characterise these institutions.24

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2017, p. 237–38; 2018) has suggested inter-state transfers of asylum seekers may be lawful provided they stringently uphold the rights of asylum seekers contained in the 1951 Refugee Convention and other relevant human rights instruments like the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Initially, the Nationality and Borders Bill contained no such assurances. Following criticism from the UK Joint Committee on Human Rights, later modifications defined a safe third country as one that does not threaten the person’s race, religion, nationality, or membership of a particular social group or political opinion; has ratified the Refugee Convention; and guarantees that the asylum seeker will not be subject to torture or degrading treatment (per ECHR, Article 3). However, these stipulations lack clear evaluative standards, and in light of no established mechanism to verify them, it is unclear whether bilateral transfer agreements will include proper oversight mechanisms (Perez 2023, p. 314). Furthermore, there exist concerns that human rights threats ‘less than’ perils to life and liberty may not disqualify a country from ‘safe’ status (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2022, para. 140). For instance, the prohibition of slavery is not contemplated by the Act. More pressingly, however—and testament to the tendency to overlook rights not only as a shield to government overreach but a sword to challenge it—the risk posed by externalisation in any form to the more foundational right to access courts and claim asylum under the 1951 Convention, and indeed assert one’s own rights, is also left unaddressed by the Act and much surrounding commentary. However, especially considering the inadmissibility clause and, indeed, the potential full commencement of the Illegal Migration Act 2023, this risk is peracute.

5. Social Distancing and Political Withdrawal

Significantly, it is within the 2022 Act’s discretionary power to declare an asylum claim inadmissible when the subject has transited a safe third country, and more so, the prospect of ‘automatic’ inadmissibility per the 2023 Act, where the social distancing of the irregular migrant reaches its zenith. The Acts not only infringe on due legal process but more foundationally withdraw the final opportunity for ‘irregular’ migrants to personally challenge their polluting otherised construction, and indeed the sovereign power that compels them. Having envisaged a philosophy of rights premised upon action, Arendt (1969, p. 81) contended that bureaucracy threatened Praxisentzug—‘the suspension of action’. That is, Arendt understands rights not as legalistic but social; they rely upon a human to speak to and convince. However, the shift from the public as a site of political opportunity to private concealment and pre-decision impresses political impotency upon those subjected to sovereign power. This is significant, for Arendt’s political anatomy of the human subject identified a conglomeration of cognitive and expressive functions that exist independent of any juridico-politico apparatus, and thus (save for the mostly politically untenable destruction of the subject) their exercise and potential path to disruption are only truly suppressible by the subject themselves. And this self-suppression manifests within the asylum complex.

As state punishment’s conventional panoptic logics (premised upon the ‘training of souls’ prior to reintegration into the social (Foucault 1979, p. 4)) shift towards a ‘ban-optic’ operation when migrants are enveloped within its remit (Aas 2011, p. 331), the asylum complex from arrest, processing, and detention, up to deportation may be thought of as a (lengthy) intermediary. That is, as the migrant enters the carceral operation, they are already excluded, and then subdued and hidden while awaiting physical banishment. The migrant remains subject to the state’s panoptic gaze and disciplinary apparatus yet divorced from both its presumption of reintegration (Platt 2021) and, following recent legislative developments, its participatory rationale.

The migrant’s fate is now predetermined by someone who has never met them. Arendt labels this bureaucracy’s ‘lack of human face’ wherein the absence of any meaningful face-to-face engagement to promote sympathy with a decision-maker is indicative of a lack of equality from the beginning of the process and throughout (Bauman 1989, p. 215). The anticipated implications are assuredly grim, for even prior to the 2023 Act, in Bosworth and Kellezi’s (2013, p. 92) study with women immigration detainees, interviewees most feared ‘the loss of subject-hood itself, and with it, the capacity of experiencing and shaping life in their own terms’. The recent Acts further negate the past, present, and future lived experiences of ‘irregular’ migrants, compounding the perennity of the stateless condition, and indeed threatening the loss of subjecthood.

While many of the traditional constraining limits of the criminal law have been hollowed out when extended to asylum-seeking populations over the previous two decades, the removal of the participatory rationale under recent legislation constitutes the most troubling departure yet. Previously, the prima facie strict liability of illegality of arrival (along with pseudo-actuarial assumptions of character) was challengeable at the point of face-to-face engagement by confronting an agent of the state (or the state more broadly given the public nature of the appeal chamber) with humanity and the potential denial of human rights and ergo with the contradiction of executing this liability in a liberal order. The problem inherent in the ascendancy of calculation ‘at the expense of the mind’s capacity for experience and its ability to learn from it’ (Arendt 1971b, p. 48)—which of course underpins assertions of the ‘right to have rights’ as an effective political disruption— however, is that ‘theory’ may supplant reality at the crux of government. The systematic denial of refugee status, rather than an animate decision by a human face who can ultimately be held accountable, sees the parallels with Arendt’s (1971a) observations on the embrace of bureaucracy by the ruling classes become salient and damning:

They needed no facts, no information; they had a ‘theory,’ and all data that did not fit were denied or ignored… Defactualization and problem-solving were welcomed because disregard of reality was inherent in the policies and goals themselves.

Indeed, we may say with this latest step to withdraw participation rights—the storytelling—that the theoretical production of an undesirable class has firmly replaced a governance by realities, premised upon the most principal liberal traditions of (eventual) inclusion, evidence, individualism, and presumptions of innocence. And it really is a subversion of reality by the government’s own admission. Astonishingly, the Home Office’s (2023b) own statistics at the time the Illegal Migration Act passed into law suggest that three in every four people who cross the channel via ‘small boats’ would be recognised formally as refugees if the UK government processed their asylum applications (Refugee Council 2023).25 Herein lies the government’s thin Freudian slip: the migrant subject is socially distanced for the purpose of withholding the political opportunity wherein they may elucidate the contradiction in the prevailing order by invoking the exact humanity, and the sanctity thereof, the liberal (sub)conscious recognises. It is connivingly deliberate.

The result is what Feldman (2015, pp. 47–48) terms a ‘silencing effect’ within immigration facilities, where, though ordering and processing is experienced as wrongful, the structures of distance and the inability to secure an audience with a real decision-maker see many detained perceive resistance as futile and thus they do not resist. (There is a consciousness of power and domination in law, but not resistance.) As one immigration detainee in Zedner’s (2013, p. 140) study conceded: ‘There is no way out of it. A criminal may improve and become a decent member of society. A foreigner cannot’.26 Again, the steps are interlinked. The fatigued subject who no longer believes in better and stops asserting themselves and their individual rights is easier to mould and process; it maximises quantifiable production.

Bosworth’s 2014 ethnography, Inside Immigration Detention, captures this link. It is described how in both Tinsley House and Colnbrook immigration detention centres, new detainees experience difficulties in accessing information on their case as well as the expectations of confinement and are unable to procure support from staff. One Tinsley House employee admitted to Bosworth (2014, p. 114): ‘[The conditions ensure] when men come over to the longer-term units they are happy to be there and more obedient (my emphasis)’. A Somalian man in another facility seemed to reflect on such tactics: ‘I was treated less than human…When I entered Brook House [detention facility], I felt relatively normal. When I left it, I felt broken, hopeless (my emphasis)’ (Eves 2023, p. 20). The note gives credence to the fears of losing subjecthood itself noted by women detainees above. It reflects how the confined experience shapes a broken, hopeless subject whose silence and political organisation transcend the institution itself as inmates leave detention.27 But many do not get out.

While some detainees are deported, and some return to the social, others are detained seemingly indefinitely, wherein many reach a point of social fatigue and political atomisation where they take steps towards an ultimate withdrawal. In some instances, enduring political action in detention has swiftly been met with ultimatum and deterrence. The women detainees on hunger strike at Yarl’s Wood site, in which they may be held indefinitely, were cautioned by the Home Office that their protest could expedite their deportation (BBC 2018). There is no prospect of challenging arrangement (no way out of it). Social severance can only be sped up. However, we ought to afford attention to the (increasingly bimodal) routes through which this is reached, where assumptions of passivity become modulated by one last action.

Suicide attempts in detention facilities have now reached record levels, with almost one attempt made a day (Taylor 2023). Gargiulo’s (2021) systematic review of European immigration detention locates this in the application process, pointing to uncertainty of outcomes and prolonged procedures, all while social isolation grows as causing anxiety, depression, and ultimately inclinations to self-harm.28 The distinct processes and growing procedural barriers faced by asylum seekers compound the administration of two-tier justice between citizen and non-citizen. This helps to explain an earlier finding by Cohen (2008) that suicide attempt rates are higher in immigration detention facilities than prisons; it is not about confinement itself, but political confinement.

It is likely that Foucault would be unsurprised by this statistical variance and indeed also contemplate its political connection. Like Arendt, Foucault understood rights not as natural or legalistic dues, but as ‘tactical’ instruments in that the human ability for cognition and action is deployable in a manner that challenges the established order.29 On (assisted) suicide, traditional liberals comprehend the practice within the sphere of autonomy and escaping pain and suffering (Dworkin 1997, pp. 41–47). However, Foucault envisioned the process as a direct transgression against bio-political rule; the subject is not a resigned body around which the state’s grip tightens but an ‘agent of social disruption’ (Golder 2015, pp. 132–35). For the ‘irregular’ migrant, repressed and socially distanced from formal channels of resistance, suicide in detention institutions is not an abstract exercise of residual autonomy, nor is it just an escape. Rather, facing the squeeze of sovereign power, it is final resistance. It may ultimately produce withdrawal, but, for a brief moment, no matter how bureaucratically concealed, it constitutes an enactment of a right to autonomy that politics seeks to deny them. It is within the political.

6. By Infringing on the Rights of One, You Infringe on the Rights of All

In conclusion, this paper has tracked how the recent legislative developments compound the UK’s shift from an asylum system comprising human obligation and human decisions with attention to human consequences, towards a system comprising antihuman obligation and antihuman decision ultimately conducive, though inattentive, to the most antihuman consequence. It has illustrated how socially distancing the ‘irregular’ migrant, both psychologically and physically, is a necessary consociate of the legislative step to automatically exclude such populations and curb their human rights protections. Through prevailing hostile rhetoric, the ‘irregular’ migrant is dehumanised and no longer a suitable liberal candidate, while the further abandonment of due process depersonalises, deresponsibilises, and ultimately disempowers those individuals involved in administering the process. In particular, the inability of ‘irregular’ migrants to secure a meaningful audience—face—with an agent of the state and elucidate the contradiction of their exclusion, in fact and principle, constitutes the most damning but demanded step yet. For if ‘irregular’ migrants were afforded such political opportunity, we would be directly confronted with the injustice, corruption, and real motives of the swelling asylum system—and likely our entire ‘liberal’ politico-complex.

As Arendt (1969, p. 81) cautioned, bureaucratic arrangements of ‘politics’ that render political action inconceivable or otherwise obscure are a form of government that threatens to politically disempower—and thus dehumanise—all. Perhaps it is easy to forget that liberal arrangements are not natural, but unnatural, indeed quite rare. They are the manifestation of the ongoing choices by those in them to surrender the natural state and defend the terms of engagement, even—especially—when it is most tempting to deviate.

It is true that the history of security ‘crises’ warns how the extending reach of unaccountable sovereign power is ushered in against perceived undesirables whose suffering is deserved, though hidden, only to be insidiously extended to the entire citizenry (Lacey 2008).30 It is, therefore, imperative that communities challenge narratives of fear and emergency, work to see the regular humanity behind the ‘irregular’ label, and demand an evidence-based rule of law from their governments. Therein, we must ask, for everyone, every time, why do we do this to them? This demands the publication of stats that make for sober reading, but also the stories and names behind them to overcome the ‘blindness’ to state violence, which the pursuit of efficiency threatens. The individual ought to be recentred as the source and authority of political organisation, wherein action has effect and more dignified, vital routes can be envisioned. This is no easy endeavour given the forceful digitalisation trend in modern governance. The promise is a more antagonistic politics of the political, further uncertainty in times of precarity. But the alternative is certainly miserable.