Category: Refugees
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New article on Australian Border Force for Salvage mag
This is just a quick post to let people know that the new left-wing magazine from the UK, Salvage (established by ex-SWPers China Miéville and Richard Seymour, amongst others) has just published an online article by me on the failure of Operation Fortitude and the Australian Border Force controversy. You can find the article here.…
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Trends in myths about immigration
Today The Guardian published a very thorough Q&A about European immigration to the UK and addressed some of the routinely asked questions about immigration, particularly as UKIP and the Tories seem to want to make immigration an issue at the next election. As I was reading the article, I was reminded that many of the…
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A Fascist View of Australia (1937)
As part of my research into how the British Union of Fascists viewed Australia during the inter-war period, I came across this description of Australia in the BUF weekly newspaper Action from May 1937, written by A. Raven Thomson (one of the BUF’s chief ‘theoreticians’): One of the Pivots of the Empire – A. Raven…
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Phillips on the modern immigration control system
Hello everybody. I’m massively busy working towards a deadline, getting the book on the body and border control ready for submission this week. But rather than not post anything, I thought I’d post this quote that we use in the introduction to our book. It is from Kristen Phillips’ 2009 PhD thesis, ‘Immigration Detention, Containment…
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The ‘Smethwick Problem’ in 2010: Labour, Immigration and Responding to Electoral Defeat
This is a draft paper that I wrote in early 2012 for a proposed collection on social democracy and labour politics in Australia and Britain in the 21st century. However this proposed collection seems not to have taken off and I thought I’d post it here, partially in response to Ed Miliband’s comments last week…
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New journal article: Examining the body through technology
I am pleased to announce that the latest issue of Anti-Trafficking Review has published an article by myself and Marinella Marmo on the non-medical use of x-rays in British immigration control history, especially their use for assessing the age of teenage migrants. The article is titled ‘Examining the Body through Technology: Age Disputes and the UK Border…
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Rudd revisits 19th century German penal colonialism
In the 19th century, Imperial Germany investigated the viability of establishing penal colonies in Pacific (as well as elsewhere), following the examples of the British in Australia and the French in New Caledonia. As my colleague Matthew Fitzpatrick has written in a new article on the subject (academia.edu version here), the ‘Pacific Solution’ for Germany…
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Strict borders are a deadly fiction
If the government wanted to break the people smugglers’ ‘business model’, then they would open up the borders This post was inspired by this post by Fatima Measham, who asked ‘are we at an event horizon on asylum’? A lot of the argument used to promote Labour’s shift to the right on asylum seekers…
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The British left and immigration controls
In the last week, I have read two pieces that argue why the Australian left should embrace the concept on ‘open borders’ and ‘no immigration controls’, and it got me thinking about the position of the British left towards immigration controls. In my PhD, I explored the position of the Communist Party of Great Britain,…
New Historical Express 