Thinking with space invaders: ‘Freed slaves’,‘asylum seekers’ and social wastelands

Introduction

‘Social spaces are not blank and open for any body to occupy’, Puwar (2004) observes, rather

Some bodies are deemed as having the right to belong, while others are marked out as trespassers, who are, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically and conceptually), circumscribed as being ‘out of place’. Not being the somatic norm, they are space invaders. (p. 8)

Puwar’s (2004) book addresses the question ‘What happens when those embodied differently come to occupy spaces rarely occupied by them?’ (p. 141). Through a focus on women and black and brown people who enter privileged spaces in the United Kingdom, it answers that the relationship between spaces and bodies locates them as ‘space invaders’. Their location as such is the result of two processes. On the one hand, over time specific bodies come to be associated with specific social and geographical spaces; on the other hand, these spaces become marked as territories belonging to particular bodies.

Drawing on a project that brings histories of Atlantic World slavery and its aftermaths into dialogue with the contemporary experience of marginalised and rightless groups, this article explores two very different moments when bodies that have come to be associated with specific spaces appear to be moving into spaces marked as belonging to others. It aims to show that the concept of ‘space invaders’ sheds light on commonalities between discourses and practices adopted in relation to people who were freed from slavery historically, and those used in relation to asylum seekers in contemporary Britain. Historically, refugees from slavery in Britain and Canada and people who were legally emancipated from slavery in the United States were imagined by many white British and North American people as ‘dissonant bodies’ attempting to claim the right to belong in a ‘white’ body politic. Today in the United Kingdom, Global South asylum seekers are likewise widely viewed as trespassing on geographical and social space to which they cannot belong.

The article begins by looking at the historical construction of enslaved Africans and their descendants as dissonant bodies in the social space of freedom, and the contemporary construction of ‘asylum seekers’ as trespassers on British soil. Despite certain differences between these exclusionary discourses, there are strong similarities between the imagined threat to the social order that animates them, and also in terms of policy responses to that ‘threat’. It then looks at two approaches to keeping dissonant bodies apart from society. The first involves efforts to simply remove ‘space invaders’ from the territory, a policy pursued in relation to black refugees in 18th-century Britain and later in relation to people manumitted or emancipated from slavery in the United States, and that is now being pursued through policies to ‘off-shore’ asylum seekers, including the current British government’s infamous Rwanda plan. However, the forcible removal of all ‘space invaders’ is not always possible. The second set of policies and practices considered in the article therefore concern the management of those who are not deemed to have the right to belong, but who cannot immediately be exported from the territory.

One of Space Invaders’ (Puwar, 2004) many contributions to theoretical understandings of the relationship between race, place and space came through its exploration of bodies simultaneously present in and excluded from contemporary society. Through this lens, some striking similarities are visible between the treatment of bodies imagined as ineligible for personhood and belonging (Cacho, 2012). In the United States post abolition, measures were taken to suspend the ineligible (the formerly enslaved) in a limbo between slavery and equal citizenship. So also in contemporary Britain, measures are being taken to keep asylum seekers apart from society by holding them in a social wasteland.

Abolishing slavery, unchaining the wolf

Those who were legally ascribed the status of chattel slave in the Atlantic World did not live in societies in which all non-slaves were formally constructed as political equals. Rather, in Europe and its colonies, and in the United States, Brazil and other Latin American countries after they achieved independence, people were largely divided into two groups: those who had masters and those who exercised mastery. Slave status relegated the enslaved to the ‘private’ realm of the household, along with white servants, apprentices, wives and children. It was the independent, propertied, white, adult male head of household who was understood to be endowed with the ‘free will’ or ‘moral mastery’ that was required to enter into ‘the social contract’ and play a part in political society (Brace, 2004). Freedom and dependency were thus imagined in oppositional terms (Marden, 2009: 95). In the sense that they, too, were constructed as dependents, the condition of enslaved people in the Atlantic World overlapped with that of white wives, children and servants. But slave status also differed significantly.

Slavery implied inescapable and lifelong dependency, and was also a condition inherited by the children of enslaved women. As critics of liberal social contract theory have observed, the public/private dichotomy is implicitly mapped onto both an imagined separation of masculine and feminine domains and bodies (as highlighted by Carole Pateman, 1988) and an imagined racial division (as explicated by Charles Mills, 1998 [1997]). The ‘natural’ inhabitants of positions in the public realm were fully human, civilised, propertied white men, who were ‘seen to have the right personal constitution to reside in political constitutions’, while black Africans were ‘defined as humanoids . . . not human enough to reside in the body politic’ (Puwar, 2004: 21). In this fictitious racially dichotomous hierarchy, ‘whites are associated with spirit and mind, the flight from the body . . . blacks are associated with nature and the body’ (Puwar, 2004: 21).

In connecting the white/black binary to a separation between mind and body, 18th and 19th-century European race thinking continued but reworked long-standing Western beliefs about the division between the human and the animal, and about which flesh and blood human beings were incorporable into humanity or personhood. Aristotle had argued that while sharing certain traits, behaviours, desires and passions with lower animals, humans were distinguished by their capacity for ‘self-reflection or moral intelligence’ (Roberts, 2008: 5). His justification for slavery was that some humans were naturally inferior, lacking intellect and power of choice. Like domestic animals, they would fare better ‘under the rule of a master’ (cited in Roberts, 2008: 62). From the 18th century, the pseudoscience of ‘race’ animalised black Africans as the most degraded of the ‘human races’, the closest to beasts.

The portrayal of those racialised as black as ‘separate creature[s], outside the family of man’, served to explain their inevitably absolute dependence on biologically and metaphysically superior white masters (Roberts, 2008: 74). For many white European and North Americans, it also indicated that the consequences for society would be dreadful were they to be released from the chains of slavery. Such fears were highly sexualised. Because imagined as close to brutes, black women were represented as hypersexual, lascivious beings, and black men as sexually insatiable and rape-prone. Moreover, the reproductive capacities of those racialised as black were seen to threaten the body politic of liberal thought as ‘a masculine domain of whiteness’ (Puwar, 2004: 13). If equality was extended to black men such that they too enjoyed mastery over women in the private realm, whiteness itself would be at risk through ‘miscegenation’.

In slave states of colonial America and then of the United States, while chattel slavery existed as a legal institution, the strictest control of the physical and social mobility of the enslaved could be enacted to keep the ‘beastly’ in their ‘natural’ place, force them into dependence on their masters, exclude them from the realm of civil rights and freedoms, and contain and limit them in what was imagined as the private realm. Slave law protected white society against the ‘contamination’ of ‘racial admixture’. It ruled, on one hand, that the children of enslaved women inherited their mother’s slave status, and on the other hand, it denied those of slave status the right to legal marriage. The latter served to exclude most men racialised as black ‘from access to the attributes and privileges of manhood’ (Van Tassel, 1994: 925).

Slave law thus made it possible for black bodies to be simultaneously part of, and entirely apart from, society; to be present the same space as white bodies without ‘invading’ it or compromising white supremacy. Its abolition threatened to undo this. This troubled many white people who in principle opposed slavery, as well as those who defended it. In fact, some of the white figures who are today held up as icons of the British antislavery movement shared proslavery thinkers’ vision of black slaves as, in William Wilberforce’s words, so ‘uninformed’ and ‘debased’ as to be ‘almost incapacitated for the reception of civil rights’ (Festa, 2010: 14). This, Wilberforce opined, made the idea of immediate emancipation of enslaved people in the West Indies ‘madness’. He did not envisage slavery’s legal abolition as implying the freedom for formerly enslaved black people to occupy social and geographical space as the equals of propertied white men. Rather, he and others of his ilk hoped for an eventual emancipation in which ‘the Negroes in the West Indies should have the full enjoyment of a free, moral, industrious and happy peasantry’ (Scanlan, 2020: 500). The formerly enslaved would stay put – remaining in a lowly social station in colonies far away from Britain.

For white Americans, the problem was more proximate. The celebrated ‘apostle of liberty’, Thomas Jefferson was of the view that Africans and their descendants, ‘whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to whites in the endowments of both body and mind’, and that this was a ‘powerful obstacle’ to slave emancipation (Burton, 2009). While convinced of the wrong of slavery, Jefferson was equally certain that ‘whites and blacks could never permanently coexist as free and equal citizens’ (Davis, 2003: 31). In 1824, he wrote that he despaired about ‘how we are to disengage ourself from that deplorable entanglement’ with slavery: ‘we have the wolf by the ear and feel the danger of holding or letting loose’ (Jefferson, 2021).

Dissonant bodies present: the coming swarm

Unlike fears about the consequences of slavery’s abolition in the past, objections to ‘illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers’ are rarely explicitly articulated in racial terms in the contemporary United Kingdom, even though the vast majority of those who are constructed as unwanted on the territory are racialised as black and brown. Some even claim that their anti-migrant sentiment is a form of anti-racism, asserting that immigration controls are necessary to protect black and brown people who are already here, as well as white British folk (Goodhart, 2013). The problem with the people who enter the country by irregular means, such as crossing the Channel in small boats, is, in the words of Robert Jenrick, Conservative Minister of State for Immigration since 2022, that they ‘tend to have completely different lifestyles and values to those in the UK and tend to settle in already hyper-diverse areas, undermining the cultural cohesiveness that binds diverse groups together and makes our proud multi-ethnic democracy so successful’ (quoted in Taylor, 2023).

These people are ‘space invaders’ not because of their assumed biological race or phenotypical characteristics, we are told, but because ‘they’ do not respect the rule of law (they enter the country ‘illegally’ and engage in criminal activities once here); ‘they’ do not appreciate the dictum that beggars cannot be choosers (they are ‘asylum shoppers’ and come to Britain to greedily take advantage of its supposedly generous welfare system instead of staying put in the first ‘safe’ country they reach); ‘they’ do not wait their turn in a global south refugee camp but take matters into their own hands and ‘jump the queue’ for asylum. Such claims ignore the realities facing those on the move. Legal routes of entry are in fact heavily restricted, especially to those who most need to come; the European country of arrival is not necessarily a safe haven; people who travel to the United Kingdom often have family and community here, and/or speak English as a result of British colonial ventures in their home country; waiting is not an option for many who need asylum, and so on (Mayblin, 2020). Nonetheless, these assertions are worked to construct a conceptual opposition between ‘illegal immigrants and asylum seekers’ on the one hand, and on the other hand, an imagined ‘British public’, cast as warm and tolerant, but also law-abiding, stoic in the face of long queues, and with a strong sense of ‘fair play’.

It is true that this conceptual opposition does not map perfectly onto the classificatory system generated by the 19th-century pseudoscience of race as biologically fixed. A small number of those cast as ‘invaders’ have phenotypical characteristics more usually associated with whiteness (e.g. Albanians), a small number of those cast as ‘the British public’ are racialised as black or brown. But the language of race and its associated classificatory divisions shift over time (Hall, 2021; Lentin, 2021 [2018]). From the second half of the 20th century, forms of racial rule have increasingly relied on notions of essential and irresistible cultural differences between different groups of people to supplement or replace those of essential biological differences, or ‘cultural racism’ as Balibar (1991) termed it. The people who are negatively framed as part of the problem of ‘illegal immigrants and asylum seekers’ are overwhelmingly racialised as black or brown, and/or are from Muslim majority countries. This helps to explain the marked difference between initial reactions in the United Kingdom and across the European Union (EU) to Ukrainians fleeing war and reactions to refugees from other war torn regions. As Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov (quoted in Esposito, 2022) put it, Ukrainians

are not the refugees we are used to . . . These people are Europeans . . . These people are intelligent, they are educated people . . . This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.

Continuities between the contemporary conceptual opposition between ‘illegal immigrants and asylum seekers’ and ‘British’ (also ‘European’ and ‘American’) people, and the historical binary of ‘black slave’ and ‘white citizen’ can also be seen in the animalising techniques that have featured prominently in anti-migrant discourse across the Global North (Musolff, 2015; Shariatmadari, 2015). Speaking of those crossing the Mexican/US border in 2018, then US President Donald Trump explicitly stated, ‘These aren’t people. These are animals’ (Davies, 2018). In 2015, then British Prime Minister David Cameron likened migrants to insects when he spoke of ‘a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean’; journalist Katie Hopkins wrote of British towns being ‘plagued by swarms of migrants and asylum seekers’ and explicitly stated that ‘migrants are like cockroaches’; the Daily Mail published a cartoon that represented migrants as rats (Hart, 2021).

Sexuality features prominently in the 21st century Global North anti-migrant discourse, just as it did in anti-black discourse of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the past, it was interracial marriage and ‘miscegenation’ that excited concern. In contemporary Britain, the idea of ‘sham marriages’, enacted purely for the purpose of by passing immigration controls, has been a focus of media and political anxiety (Benson and Charsley, 2015), as has the idea that migrants are using their capacity to give birth to children as a means of ‘space invading’ (see, for example, BBC, 2023). The Home Office has responded with restrictive rules and policies that make it ever harder for migrants to marry or occupy the social place of parenthood (Taylor and Perraudine, 2019). For example, when a couple registers an intention to marry, the registry office must now inform the Home Office if one or both are persons subject to immigration controls. Between 2016 and 2022, just over 107,000 cases were referred, of which 15,000 were viewed as ‘suspicious’ and investigated. Only 1319 of these cases were deemed to be ‘sham marriages’, but ‘2,211 people were deported following a registry office referral’ (Barton, 2023).

There is also a preoccupation with sexual violence. Rape has been invoked by mainstream politicians to argue for further restrictions on the rights of migrants. It featured prominently in media and political discourse that whipped up support for the passing of the 2014 Immigration Act, which facilitated the rapid expulsion of ‘Foreign National Prisoners’ on release from prison, something that further enshrines in law the division between those eligible and ineligible for personhood (De Noronha, 2020). Around Europe, the trope of asylum-seeking men as rapists has been mobilised by far-right parties.

Following allegations on social media that around 90 women in Cologne were victims of sexual assault and robbery by ‘foreign’ men on New Year’s Eve 2015, the hashtag ‘refugeesnotwelcome’, which already indicated explicit opposition to refugee resettlement in Europe and the United States, was reformulated as ‘rapefugeesnotwelcome’ (Ingulfsen, 2016). That slogan subsequently appeared on banners at anti-migrant protests in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands (Gulf Times, 2016). In the United Kingdom, stickers featuring a Nazi propaganda-style cartoon of three knife-wielding men (one wearing a kandora to signify that he is Muslim) chasing a woman and stating ‘Rapefugees Not Welcome – Stay Away!’ were plastered on lamp posts and bus stop windows in various towns and cities in 2016 (Deccan Chronicle, 2016). The same slogan and stickers continue to be used by far-right groups in the United Kingdom, especially in their efforts to garner support for protests in front of hotel accommodation for people seeking asylum, including a violent riot that took place outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Knowsley, Liverpool, in February 2023.

There are, in short, many commonalities between the construction of people emancipated from slavery in the past as incapacitated for rights and belonging, and contemporary British thinking on Global South migrants as trespassers on the territory of freedom and citizenship. In both moments, excising the bodies imagined as ‘space invaders’ from the body politic by exporting them to distant territories has been presented as a policy solution.

Exporting asylum seekers

Over the past three decades, the idea that ‘illegal immigrants’ pose a threat to the wealth and stability of affluent Global North states has become widely accepted (Blunt, 2018). Although the right to humanitarian protection from war, armed conflict, natural disaster, and persecution is in theory guaranteed in international law, ‘asylum seekers’ from the Global South have increasingly been constructed as part of the so-called ‘migration crisis’ imperilling the North. Across Europe, North America and in Australia, anti-immigration sentiment has been popularised to such an extent that mainstream parties from across the political spectrum, as well as far-right nativist political groupings, find it expedient to express an uncompromising commitment to controlling immigration, securing borders and expelling ‘illegal immigrants’ from their territory. Everywhere in the Global North, increasingly harsh measures have been introduced both to curb ‘illegal immigration’ and to deter people from seeking asylum, regardless of the validity of their claims.

In the United Kingdom, one element of the current government’s response to the so-called immigration ‘crisis’ is a spoken commitment to removing as many asylum seekers as possible to ‘safe third countries’ without first assessing their asylum claims. At present, however, the only third country with which the United Kingdom has forged an agreement to accept asylum seekers is Rwanda (Walsh and Sumption, 2023). Ignoring the many concerns about human rights violations in Rwanda (Amnesty International, 2019), including the fact that 12 Congolese refugees were shot dead by Rwandan forces in 2018 and scores more injured when live rounds were used against protesters outside the UN refugee agency in the Karongi district (Norris, 2022), former Home Secretaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman have both have insisted that ‘Rwanda is a safe and secure country with an outstanding track record of supporting refugees and asylum seekers’ (Hoffman, 2022). Indeed, they extol Rwanda as a fertile land of opportunity, a ‘lovely country’ which it will be ‘a blessing’ to be removed to (Hoffman, 2022).

As Collyer and Shahani (2023) have already observed, despite representing ‘a departure from the UK’s post-1970s deportation policy’, the Rwanda plan is consonant with Britain’s longer history of thinking and practice with regard to colonised peoples. Indeed, it is strongly reminiscent of late-18th century proposals made in response to the arrival in England of several thousand refugees racialised as black following the American War of Independence (Pybus, 2006). These people, many of whom had freed themselves from slavery by taking ‘refuge in the English army’ (King, 1798), had supported the British during the war. There were some white Britons who believed this gave them a special claim to justice, relief and protection (Braidwood, 1982), but in general, they ‘were not welcome in a white nation that had tried to deport all blacks in the late sixteenth century’ (Davis, 2003: 65). To allow black refugees to ‘swamp’ London placed ‘civilised’ society in great peril, according to proslavery thinkers like Edward Long (Hall, 2014), who were especially concerned by the idea of ‘miscegenation’. There were black refugees in London who had married white Englishwomen after arrival in the country (Pybus, 2006: 86), and in a pamphlet written in 1772, Edward Long (1772) railed against such marriages, describing the children born of them as an unnatural contamination of ‘English blood’, an ‘infection’ that would spread throughout society if left unchecked. But even luminaries of the British antislavery movement like Granville Sharp, expressed anxieties about ‘swarms of negroes’ arriving in England (Blackburn, 2011: 151). Sharp and other philanthropists therefore supported a ‘Plan of Settlement’ that would transport black refugees to the ‘Province of Freedom’ Sierra Leone.

The plan’s author, Henry Smeathman, described Sierra Leone as ‘one of the most pleasant and feasible countries in the known world’, and stated that the refugees would be given land to cultivate and ‘enjoy perfect freedom settled in a country congenial to their constitution’ (Schama and Crossings, 2005: 203). In reality, Sierra Leone proved far from congenial to the 340 people who were ‘resettled’ there in 1787. A rescue mission in 1791 found only 46 survivors (Pybus, 2007). As formerly enslaved antislavery activist Ottobah Cugoano observed at the time, the colony’s promoters had not developed ‘any prudent and right plan’, but rather approached the black refugees in London as persons ‘to be hurried away at all events, come of them what would’ (quoted in Norton, 1973: 426). Despite the Plan’s disastrous outcomes for refugees, British officials went on to encourage formerly enslaved people who were unwelcome in Canada, a ‘white’ settler colony, to emigrate to Sierra Leone. They also used it (along with a British colonial outpost, McCarthy Island, the Gambia) as a ‘resettlement’ site for enslaved people intercepted in illegal slave ships in the Atlantic (Webb, 1994: 136), thereby ensuring these refugees were not brought to Britain to enjoy their ‘freedom’.

As noted earlier, the question of what was to be done with the bodies released from slavery was regarded as even more pressing by many white Americans. Fear of black bodies/‘the wolf’ invading and rampaging in social space deemed to be the territory of white male citizens made colonisation projects of the type initiated by Henry Smeathman very popular in the United States. The American Colonization Society (ACS), formed in Philadelphia in 1816, founded the colony of Liberia in 1822 and dedicated itself ‘to promoting the manumission of slaves, with an undertaking that, once free, they would agree to be shipped to Liberia or some other African destination’ (Blackburn, 2011: 245). As the spectre of abolition loomed closer, political support for the policy of exporting black bodies to what were imagined as black territories (Haiti as well as Liberia) grew. Even Abraham Lincoln expressed fears that peace and stability after the Civil War would be impossible ‘unless we get rid of the Negroes’ (Wesley, 1919: 2).

So far as comparisons between the 18th-century Sierra Leone project and the British Government’s current Rwanda plans are concerned, it is worth noting that the latter makes no pretence at voluntarism, whereas the Sierra Leone resettlement plan did initially enjoy support from some black refugees. Those who emigrated agreed to do so, albeit in preference to the destitution and racism they were experiencing in England and in the context of false promises about what awaited them. There are also differences in terms of the rationale provided for exporting people seeking asylum past and present. In 18th-century Britain, the ‘problem’ presented by black Loyalist refugees was explicitly constructed in racial terms, as was the solution, in the form of resettlement on territory more ‘congenial to their constitution’. Today, race is explicitly disavowed as a motive for removing asylum seekers to Rwanda. In fact, as Lentin (2021 [2018]) has observed, currently, the ‘deepening and expansion of systemic, state and popular racism against migrants and asylum seekers, the undocumented, Indigenous people, Muslims and Black people is . . . accompanied by an ever more vigorous denial that these phenomena are racist’ (p. 3). And yet the vast majority of those migrants and refugees who are the focus of ‘offshoring’ policies are people imagined as standing ‘at the bottom of racialised hierarchies’, so that in reality, these policies continue ‘an extended history of colonial forms of thinking and practice on the physical location of racialised peoples’ (Collyer and Shahani, 2023). They thus express what Sharma (2022) terms postcolonial racism: ‘the historic articulation between ideas of “race” and “nation” wherein ideas of national soil are racialized and racist ideas of blood are territorialized’ (p. 638).

There is currently growing research attention to parallels between contemporary practices of ‘off shoring’ and deportation and colonial practices of forcible relocation (e.g. Lemberg-Pedersen et al., 2022; Mayblin, 2017). However, as noted in the ‘Introduction’ section, it has not always been, and still is not always possible for states to forcibly remove all unwanted, dissonant bodies. In the United States, for example, only small numbers of formerly enslaved people were moved through colonisation projects. When a legal end to chattel slavery came in 1865, far from being in a position to ‘get rid of the Negroes’ (in Lincoln’s words), white political leaders were faced with the quandary of whether and how to incorporate some 4 million formerly enslaved black bodies into social and political space as free subjects. As outlined below, the response to this in southern states of the US post-abolition was to create a new social space, one that made it possible to suspend ‘freed people’ between slavery and equal citizenship. There are marked similarities between this social space, and the 21st-century construction of a kind of social, legal and spatial wasteland for asylum seekers in Britain. Both spaces, I will argue, make it possible to hold in abeyance the bodies that can neither be expelled nor allowed to belong.

‘No man’s land’, criminalisation and dependency in the US South

The Proclamation of Emancipation in 1863 stripped the enslaved of slave status, and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 legally abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime. But ending slavery did not, of itself, amount to the granting of equal rights and citizenship to black Americans. Before the Civil War, Southern states had already enacted controls over manumission that seared the freedom/slavery binary onto the imagined racial binary of white/black in such a way as to ensure that freedom was white. Manumission, Judge Joseph Lumpkin ruled in Georgia in 1853, ‘does not and cannot confer citizenship, nor any of the powers, civil or political, incident to citizenship’ (Tushnet, 1981: 150). He explained this in overtly racial terms, remarking that ‘the taint of blood, adheres to the descendants of Ham in this county, like the poisoned tunic of Nessus’ (Tushnet, 1981: 150). The racial character of rights and freedom was also made explicit in the notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision of the US Supreme Court, which ‘judged that blacks were “beings of an inferior order” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect”’ (Mills, 2011).

Following slavery’s legal abolition, the meaning of freedom for those racialised as black remained uncertain. Citing a court reporter in Texas in 1868 who likened the destruction of slavery to a funeral pile, Perrone (2019) notes that

Death, of some sort, had transfigured the slave and rendered him masterless. But it was not immediately clear to the Texas Supreme Court – or any other Southern court – how to construe the newly freed person who arose from slavery’s smouldering ruins. (p. 265)

The federal government may have promised emancipated people citizenship status, yet, still marked as more beastly than human, Southern courts continued to struggle to conceive of those racialised as black occupying the social space of citizenship:

Faced with the task of resolving post-emancipation litigation related to slavery, many judges placed freedpeople into a de facto legal category of their own: the former slave. Critically, the designation allowed judges to locate freedpeople within an existing framework rather than accept that emancipation had revolutionized American law and legal traditions. However, it frequently left freedpeople in a no man’s land between slavery and full and equal citizenship, defined by a status that included badges of former servitude and the presumption of race-based difference. (Perrone, 2019: 257, original emphasis)

To fix freed people and their descendants in this social space, it was necessary to ensure that emancipation from slavery did not equate to economic independence and social equality. This was initially achieved by reformulating Slaves Codes of former slave states as Black Acts, which, as Angela Davis (2003) explains, allowed ‘the behaviour of free blacks’ (p. 28) to be regulated in much the same way that slaves’ behaviour had been controlled during slavery. Some of these codes laid the foundations for the Southern system of peonage through which significant numbers of persons racialised as black were forced into economic dependence on white landowners and locked into a set of social and labour relations closely resembling chattel slavery well into the second half of the 20th century (Novak, 1978). Although such codes were contested and federal civil rights legislation protecting newly freed slaves enacted during the Reconstruction period, ultimately, those racialised as black were re-subordinated ‘under the new regime of Jim Crow’ (Alexander, 2010), the system of racial segregation or apartheid ‘given formal federal sanction in the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision’ (Mills, 2011).

Alongside this, the actions of black people who attempted to live independently or claim social equality were increasingly criminalised. Vagrancy laws, for example, criminalised those who could not provide evidence of a labour contract tying them to a propertied employer, also those deemed to be making ‘mischief’ or ‘insulting gestures’. Once convicted of such ‘crimes’, the southern convict lease system operated to further strip those racialised as black of any rights to which their presumptive ‘freedom’ entitled them. This system allowed convicts to be contracted out as labourers, and subject to brutal regimes of coerced and unpaid labour in lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, farms, plantations and other privately owned businesses. It ‘transferred symbolically significant numbers of black people from the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison’ (Davis, 2003).

Wastelands: criminalisation and dependency in the United Kingdom today

The human rights regime set up in the wake of the Second World War created a number of ambiguities and tensions with regard to the rights of people on the move. It assumes a clean division between people who have voluntarily left their home country in pursuit of particular ends (such as economic advancement, educational opportunities, and family reunion) and people whose movement is forced by circumstances beyond their control, affording special and particular rights and protections to the latter. The imagined binary between forced and voluntary movement has been extensively critiqued by migration scholars (e.g. Anderson, 2013; Castles, 2003; Martins and Davidson, 2022; Stock, 2019 [2018]). Here, however, I want to focus on the position of those who attempt to exercise their rights (such as they are) to escape persecution, rights afforded by Article 14 (1) of the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights and by the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. For when people flee a country where their lives are at risk, and enter another country to find refuge, they, too, step into a kind of no man’s land. At this point, they may be free of the dominion of the state or individuals whose persecution prompted them to flee, but they are not yet legally recognised as a refugee. They are seeking asylum, and while ‘the Refugee Convention grants a broad range of rights for those recognised by states as refugees under the Convention, it is largely silent on the position of those applying for refugee status, ie asylum seekers’ (JUSTICE, 2023).

In the United Kingdom, since the 1990s, an increasing number of restrictions have been placed on the basic rights of asylum seekers, while the length of time taken to process their cases has extended, meaning that ever larger numbers of people are spending ever more time suspended in this no man’s land. The ways in which rights have been curtailed over the past three decades include

restrictions on the right of asylum seekers to appeal against negative asylum decisions by the Home Office, the introduction of ‘fast track’ procedures with minimal safeguards against removal, the use of ‘non-suspensive’ appeals whereby asylum seekers are forced to return to their home country to continue their appeals, the detention of asylum seekers for purely administrative purposes, limitations on access to medical treatment, and–in extreme cases – the removal of income support for food and shelter. (JUSTICE, 2023)

By May 2023, there were 172,758 people living in this legal limbo and the number of people waiting more than 6 months for a decision on their claim had risen to 128,812 (Refugee Action, 2023). Most have rights to food and shelter, but they are heavily restricted. They are often housed in squalid, damp and overcrowded accommodation. The provision of shelter to asylum seekers is also already arranged in such a way as to spatially segregate and socially isolate them.

By the end of 2022, the number of asylum seekers housed in ‘contingency accommodation’, mostly in repurposed hotels, stood at almost 50,000. The quality of the food provided is typically extremely poor, as is the physical environment of many hotels. Damp, mould, leaks and rodent infestations have been reported (Taylor, 2023). Unless travelling with family or a spouse, people are often required to share rooms with total strangers and so have no privacy, adding to the stress induced by the indefinite nature of their stay. Some have been living in hotels for a year, mostly denied the right to work, and waiting for their claim to be processed. While in the hotels, ‘their freedom of movement and basic liberties are restricted’ (Refugee Action, 2023). Often in remote locations on the outskirts of cities, and in receipt of just £9.50 per week (supposedly to cover non-prescription medications, toiletries, clothes and any other necessities beyond bed and board), even those who are not actively prevented from leaving the premises by security personnel (Walawalkar and Bulman, 2022) cannot afford to go anywhere or do anything.

These conditions are very close to imprisonment, a form of de facto detention, that would never be imposed on free and equal members of society except as punishment for a crime. But even these dismal and degrading conditions are perceived by the tabloid press, far-right groups and the government as too luxurious, and steps are now being taken to remove as many asylum seekers as possible from hotels and place them in alternative, even more oppressive sites, such as the Bibby Stockholm barge (in effect, a floating prison) or disused army barracks (such as the Manston site used to contain people who arrive on small boats in Kent until outbreaks of diphtheria forced its closure, Taylor, 2023). Those who are moved from ‘contingency accommodation’ in hotels to multi-occupancy ‘dispersal accommodation’ receive just £45 a week to cover food as well as all other necessities. Wherever they are housed, people who are seeking asylum in the United Kingdom are denied the right to vote and to drive, they are ineligible for mainstream benefits and in most cases denied the right to work. They are therefore forced into dependency on the state, the actors to whom the state deputes powers to control and manage their daily lives, and civil society actors that attempt to provide support, information and advice, and they are criminalised for any effort to live independently.

Though the outcome of these immigration controls are similar in one respect to the outcome of laws relegating the formerly enslaved to a kind of ‘no man’s land’ (namely, people are held apart from the society they are part of), the legal and institutional means by which asylum seekers in the United Kingdom today are corralled into this space of dependency are clearly very different to those by which the formerly enslaved were kept out of equal citizenship in post-abolition southern states of the United States. Moreover, measures to force the formerly enslaved and their descendants into relations of dependency in the American South worked to maintain a supply of cheap and malleable labour for sectors on which the South depended economically. In the United Kingdom today, by contrast, ‘illegal migrants’ and most asylum seekers are legally deprived of the right to work. Even in the face of a serious labour shortage post-Brexit, they are criminalised for undertaking paid work, and may be detained if discovered working, as opposed to being imprisoned for ‘vagrancy’ if they cannot provide proof that a ‘master’ is employing them.

Yet, by criminalising people’s efforts to earn money to subsist and erecting other barriers to independent survival through ‘hostile environment’ policies (Goodfellow, 2020; Mayblin, 2020; Webber, 2019), the law forces people into heavy dependency on third parties who offer to help them access the means of life. Although some such third parties are decent people, and/or act on the basis of solidarity, these laws leave asylum seekers and illegalised migrants vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous employers who know that they will not dare report wage theft, sexual harassment or violence for fear of detention and deportation. Moreover, there are plenty of lawful ways in which to extract profit from ‘illegal migrants and asylum seekers’. Processing, warehousing, and guarding these dissonant bodies is big business. Two private companies supplying the Home Office with accommodation for asylum seekers reported a combined profit of more than £113 m in 2023 (Taylor, 2023); since 2019, private companies contracted to run Government-funded accommodation for asylum seekers in the United Kingdom have collectively paid £121 m in dividends to shareholders (Kersley, 2023), while private security firms, such as G4S and Serco, generate vast profits from the management of immigration removal centres and accompanying prisoners during deportation (Hirschler, 2021).

Conclusion

Puwar’s concept of ‘space invaders’ emerges from her analysis of the relationship between spaces and bodies. This article has explored two very different moments when bodies that have come to be associated with specific spaces appear to be moving into spaces marked as belonging to others. In both moments, plans have been devised to prevent them from so doing by physically transporting these bodies elsewhere. But where it has been impossible to rid the body politic of ‘space invaders’ in this way, measures to arrest the mobility of dissonant bodies in social space have been enacted.

In the United States in the past, the spectre of people racialised as black, loosed from slave law that had previously tethered them securely to the inferior, servile and subordinate space to which they were imagined as belonging, inspired elaborate legal measures to block them from moving into the social space of white citizenship. Refusal or failure to remain in their allotted place was criminalised and violently punished by state and non-state actors. Today in the United Kingdom, strategies to ensure that people constructed as ‘asylum seekers’ remain physically and socially apart from society have been devised, and they too are criminalised for entering social spaces integral to citizenship, including employment. The already restricted spaces that such ‘invaders’ are permitted to occupy are constantly being narrowed. At the time of writing, asylum seekers are being driven out of the repurposed buildings that provided temporary, bleak, and crowded shelter as far-right protesters and their political allies insist that ‘hotels’ are ‘British’ spaces that these dissonant bodies cannot be allowed to inhabit (Khan-Ruf, 2023).

The oppositional, legally and socially constructed categories of ‘illegal migrants and asylum seekers’ and ‘the British’ are worked to justify and make sense of these practices of demarcation, just as legally and socially constructed categories of ‘biological race’ were worked historically. Approaching the two sets of discourses and practices described in this article through the lens of Puwar’s (2004) analysis of race, place and space reveals what they have in common. The concept of ‘space invaders’ illuminates how boundaries between bodies that are eligible for personhood and belonging and those that are ineligible (Cacho, 2012) are drawn, justified and enforced. Such boundary drawing works to preserve the social, political, cultural and economic privilege of whiteness that is ‘based on a legacy of colonial conquest’ (Puwar, 2004: 22), and continues Britain’s long-standing political drive to restrict the entry and stay of racialised and dispossessed peoples from its own and other former colonies (El-Enany, 2020).