Chronicle of a Crisis Foretold: The Politics of Irregular Migration,Human Trafficking and People Smuggling in the UK

Introduction

International migration is a fact of life for liberal states as people leave, enter or pass through them, but migratory phenomena in their many and various forms possess the potential to make a relatively sudden impact on public consciousness and to ascend swiftly the political agenda, as has been the case in Britain with asylum, people smuggling and human trafficking. This is because international migration and its analysis are necessarily about borders. They are about the relationships between forms of population mobility and their encounter with the territorial, organisational and conceptual borders of states. Territorial borders are those sites at which the sovereign capacity to include or exclude from the state territory are exercised. Organisational borders are those of institutions such as the labour market, welfare state and citizenship. Conceptual borders comprise more nebulous but no less important ideas about who ‘belongs’ and the basis for belonging to some given political community. These borders give meaning to international migration.

This article's concern is with the relationship between territorial, organisational and conceptual borders and irregular migration, people smuggling and human trafficking. A comparative historical analytical perspective is developed that explores the institutional patterning of debates about immigration to the UK while simultaneously seeking to demonstrate how and why such migration flows necessarily touch upon four core political questions: first, the sovereign power and authority of the British state to regulate admission to its territory; second, access to key social institutions such as the welfare state, labour market and national citizenship; third, the conceptual boundaries that influence ideas about belonging and entitlement; and fourth, the international dimension of the governance of migration made evident, for example, by the European Union's developing role.

The article begins by dealing with definitional and conceptual issues associated with the study of regular and irregular migration, people smuggling and human trafficking. It then explores some core underlying themes in British immigration politics before examining issues associated with current debates about people smuggling and human trafficking. It is argued that despite their apparent novelty, the political response to these ostensibly new issues draws from well-established themes in the debate about immigration to Britain, albeit with a contemporary twist imparted by the ‘war on terror’ and the EU's role. In this sense, recurrent ‘immigration crises’ in British politics draw from well-established repertoires of social and political contention.

Terms and Concepts

Irregular migration flows have been described by G8 leaders as the ‘dark side’ of globalisation or, alternatively, as ‘Europe's other market’ (Twomey 2000, 7). This was once more demonstrated to tragic effect in the UK in February 2004 when the bodies of 23 Chinese workers were discovered in Morecambe Bay in north-west England. Apparently most had been smuggled into the UK by Chinese ‘snakehead’ gangs and had then found work as cockle-pickers, an economic activity where labour market regulation was lax to non-existent. Other incidents too have contributed to irregular migration's heightened salience. In June 2000, 58 people from China suffocated to death in the back of a truck as an attempt was made to smuggle them into the UK. In August 2003 an eight-year prison sentence was imposed by a Belgian court on an Albanian reported to have smuggled 12,000 people into the UK from Belgium. The Belgian judge attacked the UK for ‘its poor [immigration] laws that attract illegal workers and offer them no protection’ (The Guardian, 13 August 2003). In February 2004 an Albanian man was sentenced to 10 years in jail for kidnapping women and forcing them to work in the sex industry and reimburse an £8000 ‘travel bill’ (Coward, The Guardian, 23 March 2003, 24). In May 2004, a gang of people smugglers were convicted for charging a reported £8000 to an estimated 400 people for a ‘club class’ smuggling service into the UK (The Times, 29 May 2004). It has been reported that prominent roles in people smuggling networks are played by Albanian gangs moving people from Albania to Italy, across Europe and then into the UK from Zeebrugge in Belgium while similar Chinese operations have been identified working through Rotterdam as the final point of departure for the UK (HC 163-I 2001). The House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee also reported that estimates of the scale of the global irregular migration and human trafficking business ranged from $12 billion (estimate by the International Organisation for Migration) and $30 billion (United States estimate) (HC 163-I 2001).

The irregular branch of the international migration industry also displays an inventiveness that can make it more difficult to control. The effects have been particularly evident in some British towns where there is a reliance on seasonal and short-term labour. In Kings Lynn in Norfolk, The Times reported in July 2003 that the Chinese population had risen from 300 to 5000. Many were irregular migrants, living in terrible conditions and receiving extremely low levels of pay for the (often arduous) work that they did. Much of this short-term and seasonal work in the UK has been controlled by around 5000 ‘gangmasters’ (most of them running legitimate businesses), reportedly supplying up to 75,000 workers. Trafficked migrants are then portrayed as helpless victims of what Shadow Home Secretary David Davis called

The day before, The Sun reported on the ‘wicked gangmasters’ that ‘exploit vulnerable men and women’. The Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 established the Gangmasters Licensing Authority to set up and operate a licensing scheme for labour providers operating in the agriculture, shellfish gathering and associated processing and packaging sectors ensuring that they are registered, that they abide by health and safety rules and that they pay at least the minimum wage to their employees.

When analysing international migration there are definitional questions that need to be addressed. International migration comprises a highly diverse set of phenomena with people moving for a wide variety of reasons (to work, to study, to join with family members, to seek refuge, to name four broad motives) and for different durations. As a distinct social process, international migration is made visible by the borders of states and by institutional processes that determine migrant categories (Zolberg 1989; Dobson et al. 2001). These institutional processes can be located at the borders of the state territory, at key organisational borders (such as labour markets and welfare states) and at conceptual borders. Those forms of migration defined by state policies as irregular or illegal are epiphenomenal because they could not exist without forms of migration defined as regular and legal (Samers 2004).

The UK has developed mechanisms for regulating international migration that are centred on the exercise of control at air and sea ports of entry (Liedtke 2002). There are four main ways to become an irregular migrant: clandestine entry, forged documents, overstaying, or as a result of judicial or administrative decisions that can retrospectively produce irregularity. Those who arrive as students or on work permits are registered, but there are no mechanisms to tell the authorities if they have overstayed and there are no exit controls. Some doubts have been cast on the veracity of migration statistics, particularly when asylum numbers fell after 2003, with allegations that this was at the expense of increased irregular migration. The National Audit Office found that, despite ‘several weaknesses’, the figures were ‘in most respects reliable’ (National Audit Office 2004, 3).

Smuggled and trafficked migrants necessarily engage in forms of clandestine entry that are defined by state policies as illegal. There can be definitional confusion with John Salt and Jennifer Hogarth (2000) identifying 22 classifications. The Home Office saw the difference between the two as that smuggling involves surreptitious attempts to evade border controls while trafficking has an exploitative element, linked, for example, to the sex industry (Home Office 2002, 75–76). This distinction is often made between trafficking and smuggling related to the extent of compulsion and exploitation. The United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime of June 2000 (the Palermo Convention) distinguishes between smuggling as the procurement of illegal entry of a person into a state of which a person is not a national or does not possess a residence status for financial or material benefit, while trafficking involves fraud, coercion, physical or psychological abuse (see also Koser 1996 and 1997; Morrison 1998 and 2000). Other analysts have focused on the global migration business within which occurs ‘the trading and systematic movement of people as its “commodities” by various means and potentially a variety of agents, institutions and intermediaries’ (Salt and Stein 1997, 470–471). This definition is useful because it highlights the range of networks and actors linked, for example, to particular forms of economic activity that are central to the production of migrant flows.

The study of irregular migration presents methodological challenges because it is by definition a submerged phenomenon. For obvious reasons, the numbers of irregular migrants present in the UK are not known. Even though numbers of people apprehended are usually numbered in thousands rather than hundreds of thousands, estimates of the irregular population do run into the hundreds of thousands (Home Office 2002, 78). The Control of Immigration Statistics produced by the UK government provide information on the number of persons removed from the UK (including failed asylum applications). In 1992, 21,160 persons were removed from the UK. By 2002 this number had risen to 65,460. The number of persons removed as a result of enforcement action rose during the same period from 6,210 to 14,205 (Home Office 2003). Whether these figures signify larger-scale irregular migration, better enforcement or a combination of the two is an open question. Moreover, the total number of irregular migrants can only be deduced by making some link between the numbers of people detected and a deduced total population of irregular migrants (Salt 2003).

In the absence of precise and reliable information, it becomes relevant to explore the ways in which irregular migration as a particular form of international population mobility has been understood and processed as a social and political issue in the UK. There are obvious elements of ambiguity because numbers of irregular migrants are not known. This could be seen to imply that the contemporary debate in the UK about irregular migration is constructed on a tabula rasa, but this is far from being the case. Irregular migration can appear novel (with all the associated uncertainties), but the contentious politics of irregular migration in the UK linked to broader debates about migration to the UK can best be understood as ‘a crisis foretold’ in that it draws deeply from underlying and more deep-rooted concerns in Britain about immigration and an associated rich repertoire of contentious social and political action that has developed for more than 40 years. Moreover, the dimensions of this crisis foretold have important implications for the ‘virtual social identities’ of immigrant newcomers in the UK with starker polarisation between ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ migrants dependent on their perceived economic contribution (Goffman 1963).

To develop this argument the article seeks to build a comparative historical analysis of current debates about irregular migration, people smuggling and human trafficking. Comparative historical analysis according to Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers (1980) comprises three elements: the parallel demonstration of theory or what Shlomo Eisenstadt (1963) calls ‘illustrative comparison’; the contrast of contexts in order to discern better the unique features of particular cases to show how these features affect the unfolding of putatively general social processes; and the development of macro-causal analysis for the purpose of making causal inferences about processes and structures. Applied to UK migration policy and politics this approach can also draw from a body of scholarship that analyses various dimensions of the social and political patterning of UK immigration, asylum and ‘race relations’ policy (on ‘race’ see Paul 1997; on debates about immigration control see Spencer 1997; Hansen 2000; on asylum see Gibney 2004).

Key Themes in UK Debates about Irregular Migration, Human Trafficking and People Smuggling

This section of the article explores the underlying themes that provide the social and political setting within which discussions of irregular migrations, human trafficking and people smuggling occur and that can facilitate understanding of the ways in which international migration in its many forms interacts with key elements of the British polity and the territorial, organisational and conceptual borders that give meaning to international migration.

The first core theme is the race-related frame for immigration and immigration-related issues in the UK. The ‘immigration problem’ as it has developed since the late 1950s has been strongly associated with social and political constructions of race and racial difference (Miles 1982; Layton-Henry 1992; Solomos 2003). A clear link has been established between the regulation of migration—particularly by those groups deemed racially distinct such as migrants from south Asia, Africa and the Caribbean—and the maintenance of good ‘race relations’ and public order. Thus, effective ‘integration’ of immigrant newcomers is founded on attempts to exercise controls at air and sea ports of entry with a link between controls and integration. The same kind of reasoning is also found in other European countries, albeit often without the ‘racial’ referent because of the different settings within which migration has been processed as a social and political issue (Geddes 2003).

The second core theme in British immigration politics is the British state's sovereign authority and capacity and the organisation of British efforts to regulate at its territorial and organisational borders various forms of international migration. A distinction can be made between sovereign authority and capacity, in order to differentiate the formal attribution of power and the locations at which this power is exercised from the capacity of the state to exert, administer and implement this power in relation to the many and various forms of international migration (Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1985). It has been the sovereign authority of the British state exercised at territorial and organisational state borders that establishes those categories of migration such as high-skilled labour that are wanted and, particularly since the late 1990s, to be encouraged compared with those such as asylum that are unwelcome and to be deterred (McLaughlan and Salt 2002; Salt and Clarke 2004). The authority to exercise these controls and administer the complex web of legislation, rules and regulations has been largely vested in the immigration services controlled by the Home Office (Düvell and Jordan 2003).

Understandings of national sovereignty have long been a key theme in British politics with implications both for migration and for British relations with the EU. The entanglement of immigration and European integration has presented challenges to the British state and exposed a somewhat ambivalent relationship between the British state and developing patterns of EU migration policy and co-operation. The UK did not participate in the Schengen Agreement and opted out of Title IV of the Amsterdam Treaty that linked immigration and asylum to free movement within the Union's ‘Community’ pillar (Geddes 2000a). Yet, the UK has pursued those forms of intergovernmental co-operation at EU level that can reinforce the ability to attain migration policy objectives and also enhance executive autonomy in pursuit of these objectives. If we bundle together these concerns about the sovereign authority and capacity of the British state then the maintenance of (or impression of the maintenance of) a strong state has long been at the heart of the political sociology of British immigration policy with power vested in the executive, a largely subservient legislature and relatively weak courts (Freeman 1994 and 1998; Joppke 1999). This focus could ostensibly be contrasted with the relatively deregulated and liberal state–society relations, but the existence of less-regulated spaces can create space for the economic insertion of irregular migrants and raises the dilemmas of control and security that are closely associated with the discussion of irregular migration. For example, the introduction of identity cards in the UK has been suggested as one way to tackle irregular migration (Home Office 2004). Whether or not ID cards would help tackle irregular migration is a moot point. Equally interesting can be the way in which moves towards a regulatory state centred on ostensible liberalisation and deregulation since the late 1970s have induced new forms of state ‘colonisation’ as the range of social and economic activities subject to public power expands (Moran 2003, 6).

Emphases on flexible labour markets and a concern to render ‘UK plc’ as competitive as possible have implications for both regular and irregular migration flows, as well as efforts to monitor and regulate these phenomena. Demands can arise because of labour shortages in sectors such as health and education, or because of the operation of dual labour markets whereby native workers are no longer willing to undertake arduous tasks in low status employment such as working in the fields while regularly and irregularly employed migrant workers will (Düvell and Jordan 2002). Labour market shortages, population change and the potential benefits of migration have informed a reorientation of UK migration policy since the late 1990s. In 2002, there were an estimated 1,396,000 foreign nationals working in the UK (around 5 per cent of the workforce). In 2003, 139,000 new work permits were issued (HMSO 2004; IPPR 2003). Since the late 1990s, arguments about needs and resources have been recast in such a way that a new openness to labour migration has been generated. This has been accompanied by measures that redefine the conceptual borders of the British state with an approach to citizenship that emphasises socioeconomic integration and adaptation by newcomers to what Home Secretary Blunkett called ‘norms of acceptability’ (Brown, Independent on Sunday, 9 December 2001; Home Office 2002).

Recruitment efforts through Work Permits UK and its employers’ panels and through the High Skilled Migrants Programme launched in 2001 have been particularly concentrated on the recruitment of skilled workers, even though there are labour market gaps at lower skill levels too. Shortages are particularly acute in sectors such as construction, food processing and agriculture. There is, however, a pool of regular and irregular migrant labour ready to fill these labour market gaps. Moreover, they do so within sectors where regulatory enforcement has been lax and the chances of detection for irregular workers are quite low (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 1998; Düvell and Jordan 2002). There can be market incentives for the illegal branches of the migration business to bring people to the UK and then deploy irregular migrants in economic sectors such as agriculture where there are seasonal demands for low-skilled workers and where formal schemes such as the Seasonal Agricultural Workers scheme (with scope for 25,000 workers to enter in 2003–2004) may prove insufficient. Demand for low-skilled, cheap and flexible labour can also offer profitable opportunities for those that can deliver cheap foreign labour. State attempts to restrict migration can often be counterproductive with new controls producing new evasions and, in the case of irregular migration flows, people smuggling and human trafficking operating as a lucrative but elicit branch of the migration business. While the authorities know that irregular migration exists they are not able to quantify its scale or extent. Or as Home Secretary David Blunkett put it when asked about the numbers of irregular immigrants in the UK in an interview on the BBC's Breakfast with Frost programme on 21 September 2003: ‘I haven't a clue’.

If irregular migration was widely viewed as a benign or beneficial phenomenon then this would probably not be seen as a problem; but, because it is often construed as a threat, ‘not having a clue’ can produce a heightened emphasis on societal security and population control. For example, Blunkett's ‘I haven't a clue’ remark was used as part of a justification for ID cards as a measure to tackle irregular migration. The links between knowledge, control and security are underpinned by the fact that states have difficulty understanding and predicting migration flows and projecting future levels of population and labour market change. In an area as sensitive as immigration, states have to give the impression of being in control, but migration is driven at least as much by migration networks and market dynamics that operate across states as it is by formal state interventions (Castles 2004). Uncertainties about scale and extent are compounded by the economic, social and/or cultural threats that some sections of society see migration as bringing. Policy-makers know that irregular flows exist, but not the scale or extent, while they do know that enforcement can be very costly (Jahn and Straubhaar 1999). Knowledge gaps can also create a political vacuum with space for a rich repertoire of anti-immigration rhetoric and action that centres on perceived threats, including to welfare, to the labour market and to understandings of national culture and identity.

The Crisis Foretold

Although irregular migration, human trafficking and people smuggling bring with them some novelty and clearly present new legal, social and political challenges, the ways in which they have been processed as social and political concerns in the UK draw heavily from a repertoire of contentious migration politics that can be traced back at least to the 1950s. Moreover, the social and political construction of irregular migration, human trafficking and people smuggling has important implications for the ‘virtual social identities’ of migrants (Goffman 1963; Loury 2002). The social and political settings within which meanings of population movement are produced sustains migrants’ identities that are virtual in the sense that they are not based on full information about an individual but rather on observable characteristics such as the perception of economic costs/benefits, skin colour, religion or membership of a particular national group. They are social in the sense that they are defined in social settings. These virtual social identities of irregular migrants are the means by which people make sense of irregular migration. These processes are one stage removed from actual experience or knowledge of irregular migrants because, despite overblown rhetoric of floods and invasions, numbers of migrants remain relatively small as a percentage of the UK population of whom most people do not have direct experience.

The article now moves on to explore some of the themes that have prevailed in recent discussion of irregular migration, human trafficking and people smuggling, with links also to debates about labour migration and asylum-seeking migration.

The first theme of public debate about irregular migrations is the elision of migration categories with some categorical confusion and the imputation of bogusness or abusiveness to ‘unwanted’ migration flows. As states and their borders make international migration visible then the definition and redefinition of migration categories is a key aspect of migration politics. The history of British migration policy since the 1960s could be understood as the progressive shrinking of channels for regular immigration. But, immigration is a broad term that covers many and diverse forms of movement. The categories established by states can be imperfect vessels for the complex and diverse forms of international human mobility that states encounter. The salient issue in the UK since the mid-1990s has been asylum and the powerful image of the ‘bogus asylum seeker’. Much of this debate was informed by the view propagated by government and much of the print media that many asylum seekers were not genuine in the sense that they were seeking refuge from persecution, but were really either economic migrants in disguise or, worse still, had been attracted by welfare state benefits (Kaye 1999). This view was articulated by the former deputy prime minister (1995–1997) Michael Heseltine in a Daily Mail article on January 1 2001:

At the same time, a MORI survey for Readers’ Digest in October 2000 found that people in the UK thought asylum seekers received £113 a week in benefit payments. This was about three times the actual figure of £36 in cash and vouchers for a person aged 25 or more (plus the cost of accommodation). Home Office research has, however, cast doubt on the welfare state pull factor that has been seen as a major draw for asylum seekers and informed policy developments since the 1990s that have rendered more tenuous the links between asylum seekers and the community of legitimate receivers of welfare state benefits (Robinson and Segrott 2002; Bommes and Geddes 2001).

There are important links between asylum-seeking migration and irregular migration. The EU and its member states profess the need to combat irregular migration. This involves measures to make it more difficult for migrants without appropriate documentation to enter the territory of EU member states. Such measures can also have the effect of fundamentally recasting the relationship between the EU as a regional organisation and the international legal standards governing the rights of stateless people (as stated in the 1951 Geneva Convention and 1967 New York protocol). European immigration and asylum policies are acquiring an increased ‘external’ dimension linked to measures designed to combat irregular migration and asylum. Indeed, the borders of Europe are in some senses ‘moving’ as the EU states seek to co-opt neighbouring states and regions within EU measures or involve private actors in the enforcement of controls (Guiraudon and Lahav 2000; Guild 2001; Schuster 2003). An unresolved question is the tension between asylum in Europe (and the principle of state responsibility) and border enforcement (Morrison 2000). The asylum system could be a casualty of the ‘fight against illegal immigration’ and the use of a regional organisation such as the EU to pursue domestic immigration policy objectives. For John Morrison (2000, 5) ‘much of existing policy-making is part of the problem and not the solution … The direction of current policy risks not so much solving the problem of trafficking but rather ending the right of asylum’.

Migrants do not just encounter the sovereign authority of the British state exercised at territorial borders, but also encounter it at the borders of key social institutions such as the labour market and welfare state. Legislation in 1993, 1996, 1999 and 2002 rendered increasingly tenuous the relationship between asylum seekers and the welfare state and sought to limit access both to British society (withdrawal of labour market access) as well as entitlement to welfare state benefits (Bloch and Levy 1999; Geddes 2000b). Yet, as the numbers of asylum seekers fall then the debate has shifted to irregular migration. For example, the anti-immigration Sunday Express on 22 February 2004 alleged that the government was soft-pedalling on illegal immigration in order to keep the asylum figures down. In 2003, Keith Best of the Immigration Advisory Service also made the link between falls in asylum and irregular migration when he contended that ‘The figures will have come down substantially, but the trouble is that it is almost certainly going to be at the expense of greater illegal immigration’ (The Observer, 22 October 2004, 7). He went on to claim that ‘The benefit for [Home Secretary] David Blunkett is that nobody can say for sure that his legislation has led to this side effect because illegal immigration cannot be quantified’ (ibid.). A related point here is that state policies can actually contribute to the perception of a migration crisis because being ‘tough’ fuels new evasions such as those offered by traffickers and smugglers. This point was recognised by the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, which reported in 2003 that migrants could be forced to seek irregular migration routes and fall into the hands of smugglers and traffickers as a result of tougher asylum laws (HC 654 2003).

Being a soft touch also impels fears that somehow the state is losing control of migration. The most recent manifestation of this was the accession of 10 new EU member states and predictions of large-scale migration from these countries to the UK. For example, the fervently anti-immigration Daily Express asserted that enlargement could bring with it a ‘massive gypsy invasion’, as well as potentially millions of migrants from central and east European countries supposedly flying Easyjet at £2 a journey. Without lurching to these rhetorical excesses, this ‘losing control’ theme has also been picked up by mainstream politicians. In the wake of the Morecambe Bay tragedy, the shadow home secretary, David Davis, commented in an article in the Mail on Sunday on 15 February 2004 that: ‘By doing nothing, the government is giving tacit consent’ to the smugglers and traffickers. Losing control becomes a key theme. In this kind of construction the ‘losing control’ argument is not particularly redolent of Saskia Sassen's (1998) argument that as a result of ‘globalisation’ states are finding themselves subject to the increased reach of international laws and institutions. In fact, the UK variant is primarily a domestic argument about the reach of government—about the sovereign authority and capacity of the British state—and a failure to enforce controls both at territorial and organisational borders.

It's only a short step from the ‘losing control’ theme to another relatively long-standing issue in British immigration politics: loss of control fuelling the extreme right. The supposed failure to exert the authority and capacity of the British state undermines the legitimacy of elected government and opens the way for populist and extremist organisations. The current manifestation of this is the argument that ‘if we don't clamp down on illegals then the Nazis flourish’. In the aftermath of the success of the List Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands and Le Pen's success in the first round of elections for the French presidency, one of New Labour's architects, Peter Mandelson argued in The Times on 11 June 2002 that New Labour needs to be tough on traditional right issues such as illegal immigration and thus stop what has happened to other centre-left parties. This was also seen as informing some Machiavellian manoeuvres by the British government. In June 2002 the UK, with Spain and Italy, proposed that EU development aid be linked to efforts by recipient countries to deal with irregular migration flows. The plan was rejected following opposition from, among others, the French and Swedish governments, but The Independent on 22 June 2002 suggested another motive with the move being an attempt to play to the domestic gallery because the UK government wanted to be seen as tough on irregular migration even though it was clear that the proposed EU measures would fail.

Underlying these debates that draw from the race-related frame for understanding immigration in the UK and debates about the sovereign authority and capacity of the British state is a related discussion about the economic pull factors that can bring trafficked and smuggled migrants to the UK. Labour market enforcement can be lax because the immigration authorities are overstretched (Düvell and Jordan 2003). For example, the Reflex Immigration taskforce set up in May 2000 has focused on organised crime and involves the security services, immigration authorities and the police force. Between July and September 2003, 520 irregular migrants were found working, of whom 350 were deported (HC 654 2003). Between 1998 and 2002, there were 22 prosecutions for employing an illegal immigrant. This could suggest that quite a few were getting away. To illustrate this point The Times ran a story on 25 July 2003 which reported that policemen found a picture of smiling irregular migrants employed as contract cleaners sitting on the (Conservative, thus pre-1997) home secretary's desk. Franck Düvell and Bill Jordan (2003) report implementation problems with the Immigration Service Enforcement Directorate not ranking undocumented work as a priority, but rather seeing the removal of failed asylum seekers as their main concern.

An additional element of the debate about immigration is that it remains decidedly national in the sense that the discourse of international human rights appears to have limited reach. It is, of course, a badge of honour for the home secretary of the day to offend the ‘chattering classes’ characterised as inhabiting the salons of North London. Yet, there is much to be concerned about when international human rights are considered. A 2004 Amnesty International report stated that of EU countries only Ireland and Luxembourg were upholding their international human rights obligations: ‘It is not enough for the EU to preach human rights abroad. Europe must look at itself first. Otherwise the EU's human rights credibility in its international relations will always be called into question’ (Amnesty International 2004). This kind of report can, however, provoke a robust response. The Sun's columnist, Richard Littlejohn (5 December 2003), seemed to have rather a different take on the human rights issue when he argued that Home Secretary Blunkett was a prisoner of the ‘human rights lobby, the men in wigs and the Guardianistas who run every government department’. This was a theme picked up by Melanie Philips in the Daily Mail on 7 July 2003 when she wrote that the government's ‘own Human Rights Act has made immigration policy impossible’. There was also an aggressive reaction in much of the UK press to a UN report criticising the press coverage of immigration: ‘left wing politicians smearing honest journalists and slandering the British people by claiming that they are motivated by gross racial prejudice’ … ‘dishonest liberals are to blame’, as the Mail on Sunday (19 January 2003) put it. International human rights are the preserve of out of touch liberals, a veritable fifth column in the national debate, it would seem.

This becomes even more pertinent when the contemporary twist to discussion of irregular migrations, human trafficking and people smuggling is considered. One element of this is that links have been made between irregular migration and the war on terror. According to a Daily Mail report (8 September 2003), the Italian secret service had warned that Al Qa'eda was ‘masterminding the illegal immigration racket to raise millions of pounds for its terrorist operations’. The Italian interior minister Pisanu was quoted as saying that ‘illegal immigration is a filter for drug trafficking, arms and terrorism’. A leading exponent of immigration as threat has been the Daily Express, which reported on 20 December 2003 that a Europol report linked enlargement and illegal immigration which was posed as a greater risk than the drugs trade.

Another contemporary twist is the EU's role. Measures to combat irregular migration, people smuggling and human trafficking have become a component of EU competencies and structured relations between the UK, its EU partners and non-EU countries (CEC 2001; Boswell 2003). There has also been a blurring of the distinction between domestic and foreign policy. For example, illegal immigration was cast as a Foreign and Commonwealth Office priority in a December 2003 66-page strategy document. The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, proclaimed that ‘foreign affairs are no longer really foreign’ (Foreign and Commonwealth Office 2003, 5). The UK and France have, for example, co-operated on measures to reduce the numbers of asylum seekers entering the UK (Schuster 2003). In June 2002 the British and Italian prime ministers Tony Blair and Giuliano Amato published a joint article in The Observer with a particular emphasis on the western Balkans and Albania as being at the heart of human trafficking and people smuggling networks (The Observer, 4 February 2001). Blair and Amato called for more effective returns policies, intensified co-operation, tougher penalties and better intelligence. Prior to the June 2002 Seville EU summit there were plans from the UK, Spain and Italy to link development aid to measures tackling illegal immigration, although as has already been mentioned, this has also been linked to the UK government playing to the domestic gallery in a bid to appear tough on immigration.

The UK had an ambivalent relationship to European structures. The exercise of controls at the external frontiers of the British state has been seen as incompatible with some of the measures developing in Schengenland. Yet, European integration in the area of migration does not necessarily weaken member states as they ‘lose’ sovereign authority (Freeman 1998, Geddes 2003). Instead, Europe can be the venue for the pursuit of new ways of regulating those forms of migration that European states have defined as unwanted. The UK has been to the fore in developing measures on asylum and irregular migration that seek to offload the problem of ‘unwanted’ immigration beyond the borders of the EU by placing responsibility on sending states and on countries close to these sending states. For example, in a letter to the Greek prime minister Costas Simitis in the run-up to the June 2003 Thessaloniki EU summit, Blair argued for the processing of asylum claims outside the EU in camps located outside the EU (Romania and Albania were suggested as possible locations). Both the European Commission and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees expressed doubts about this proposal because it was seen as undermining the principle of state responsibility, which has been one of the cornerstones of the post-war refugee protection system (see, for example, European Commission 2003).

Conclusion

This article has argued that interpretations of migration—even ostensibly new phenomena such as people smuggling and human trafficking—draw from a rich repertoire of social and political contention. Conceptually, it has been argued that forms of population mobility that involve the crossing of state borders are made visible by social and political processes at those borders that determine which forms of migration to be facilitated and which to be discouraged. We therefore need to understand the ways in which the territorial, organisational and conceptual borders of the British state have shifted if we are to understand contemporary responses to irregular migration, people smuggling and human trafficking. Moreover, by relating the study of immigration to four key political concerns: the regulation of admission to the state territory issues; access to key social and political institutions; the conceptual boundaries of state and nation; and the international governance of migration, we can see how and why the study of borders and their changed meanings needs to be central to the analysis of international migration in its various forms. It is insufficient to imagine that migration is something that simply ‘happens’ to European states. The territorial, organisational and conceptual borders of the British state give meaning to international migration in its various forms and are necessarily central to the analysis of irregular migration flows. This article began by asking how sense can be made of the social and political processes associated with human trafficking and people smuggling in the UK. Epistemological problems were identified because of the lack of knowledge concerning the scale, extent and effects of irregular migration in the UK. It was argued that while there are clear elements of novelty and that new legal, political and social challenges are clearly evident, there is also much that is not particularly new about this debate. The contentious politics of irregular migration are in many ways a crisis foretold, drawing as they do from prevailing themes that underpin the UK immigration debate: the race-related framing of issues; perceptions of state authority and capacity; the deregulated and liberalised UK economy; and the links between knowledge, control and security. These provide the backdrop for the resuscitation of many themes that have been long-standing components of the debate about migration in the UK and have now been applied to irregular migration and the networks that sustain it. New twists have been added to the debate by the making of links between irregular migration and the ‘war on terror’ and by the ways in which irregular migrations have become part of the structured relations between Britain, its EU partners and other non-EU countries. Finally, it was argued that there is now a starker distinction in UK migration policy between ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ migration flows with a debate recast in terms of the perceived costs and benefits of migration in relation to the competitiveness of ‘UK plc’. This has led to a renewed openness to (mainly skilled) labour migration. Irregular migration and the networks that sustain it demonstrate a flaw in this approach because of apparent continued demand for migrant labour at lower skill levels. The resultant virtual social identities of irregular migrants tend towards their portrayal both as threats to the UK's territorial, organisational and conceptual borders but also as the helpless victims of ruthless traffickers and smugglers.