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Deportation is Freedom!: The Orwellian World of Immigration Controls
This book is a searing critique of today's immigration systems. Former barrister Steve Cohen declares that these systems are deeply flawed, and takes a fresh look at the ethical and political problems that surround this controversial subject. Cohen proposes that current immigration controls are so inherently racist and irrational that they require the creative dystopian ideas contained within George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to adequately describe them. He seeks to understand the irrationality of these controls - complete with their own brand of newspeak, doublethink, memory holes and thought police - and undertakes an incisive critique of immigration controls, revealing the nightmare world in which refugees, migrants and immigrants find themselves. The book also scrutinizes the latest developments in UK immigration legislation and compares and contrasts the UK experience with that of other countries. Deportation is Freedom! is a lively yet thought-provoking read that will captivate anyone who cares about the immigration systems that are shaping our world today. It will be of particular interest to social workers, lawyers, social policy makers and all people politically engaged in immigration campaigning.
224 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2005
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November 26, 2022
This polemic, written by the late immigration lawyer and activist Steve Cohen at arguably the peak of the New Labour government's anti-migrant crusade, is (unfortunately) still pertinent today. Whilst Cohen is largely unknown amongst today's Left, his ideas and arguments find much credence in the present campaigns against ever-persistent government battles against migrants and asylum seekers in the UK and beyond. But Cohen's book is an important reminder that, for as unjust and unsavoury as the politics of - for example - Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Sajid Javid are, none of this is new. Indeed, even during the apex of anti-migrant hostility in the early 2000s, it wasn't a new phenomenon. Rather, it builds on more than a century of symbolic and material programmes designed chiefly to create a distinction between so-called "genuine" and "ingenuine" migrants in order to divide and rule the working classes and implicitly position the ruling elites as supposed "defenders" of these very classes.
Cohen's primary aims in the book are largely two-fold: 1. To 'provide a political and historical analysis of immigration restrictions [through] the use of literary metaphor' (p.14) and expose their inherent irrationality; and 2. To 'show that the only equitable controls are no controls' (p.11). On the first aim, the book wholly succeeds and provides a masterful, well-referenced documentary analysis of various legislation, as well as first-hand accounts from both migrants themselves and those working within the security (and social) apparatuses.
On the second aim, however, the book is wholly insufficient. Don't get me wrong, I entirely support the abolition of arbitrary borders and violent framework that upholds them, but the arguments Cohen presents in favour of this (when he does at all) aren't convincing and he does not at any point anticipate the counter-arguments of his opponents - the most prevalent being, of course, the "potential criminal" argument. This could at least be countered with, say, statistics showing the slightly lower proportionality of actual criminals amongst migrants and refugees to the general population, or making the point that we don't argue for internal restrictions on movement even though we would readily accept there are many "potential criminals" in the general population. The idea of a border check between Kent and London to prevent county-lines drug crimes would seem wholly ridiculous. He does, to be fair, show convincingly that at some point you have to inevitably draw an arbitrary line with exclusion and for that reason they are unjust. But that is one small part of the book, and the entire last chapter (built up to analyse what a world without borders and restrictions might look like) does nothing to further the argument in favour of this point.
Let none of that, however, take away from the real strengths of the study. Cohen convincingly shows how the first legislative attempt at migration restriction in the UK (the 1905 Aliens Act) was rooted in antisemitism and irrational moral panics about Jews (and other "aliens"), and rejects the 'classic Orwellian manner whereby [...] arguments are presented, irrespective of the circumstances, as natural God-given truths [...] What has every appearance of unreality is that controls are presented by their supporters as being timeless - as having no context, as having existed for ever, and as being literally a-historical' (p.30). Like national identity itself, the very concept of borders is often erroneously thought of as being ahistorical and as have always been existing. But Cohen here is right - borders are distinct from pre-modern imperial frontiers and have a very demonstrable start in history. But it does not suit proponents of nationalism and borders to admit this, because to admit it would also be to infer that, just as they had a start, they might have an end - and that is unacceptable to them. He also documents the introduction of indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals under the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act, its extension to British citizens in the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, and the abolition of a right to appeal immigration decisions under the 2004 Asylum and Immigration Act. These all make for frightening reading and contemporary defenders of the Blair government would do well to remember these things when they criticise the post-2010 anti-migrant landscape. Indeed, Cohen compares the common argument that left-wingers should "appeal to the right" by favouring restrictions to Nazi appeasement.
Cohen also makes a humorous (albeit depressing) nonsense of the ever-prevalent argument of "overcrowding" - sometimes prefaced with declarations of good intentions "but we just can't fit that many people in." But, as he shows, this was an argument used in favour of the 1905 Act. So if the UK was "overcrowded" then, surely it would have 'literally sunk without trace by now' (p.30). But it hasn't. One could add further to this that the rate of population growth per annum in the UK has been largely steady, hovering around the 1% mark for the best part of 40 years. So if suddenly we are in danger of crossing the imaginary Malthusian line, why now and not in - say - between 1870 and 1910 when increase was around 45%?
It's a good book, but the drawbacks are disappointing. In addition to the aforementioned failure to make a convincing case for no restrictions, at other times Cohen overstretches his point - for example when in (correctly) identifying the racist impulse behind controls, 'namely the preservation of British heritage or British nationalism or British blood' (p.91), he critiques the pseudoscientific concept of race. That's fine in and of itself, but Cohen ignores the extent to which vanishingly few people in the UK still actually believe in the notion of Britishness as an actual "race". Today, British identity tends to be framed (however inaccurately) around a notion of shared culture and values rather than the notion of 'false and meaningless biology' as he puts it. Of course, this reframing still carries underlying racist assumptions and problematic (incorrect) beliefs about "culture" being both homogenous and conforming to arbitrary state borders, but Cohen doesn't discuss any of that, he focuses purely on the false biological understanding of race.
Other small annoyances are that the Orwell metaphors that are repeated ad nauseum, with the term "doublethink" or "newspeak" appearing every other page or so, and an inconsequential remark in favour of the Corn Laws in Ireland (in a sentence about the Famine, without also recognising the role those laws played in causing the famine).
Cohen's voice is sorely needed in the landscape of today, and his presence sorely missed. But the work he has left remain useful in deconstructing the erroneous assumptions underlying and reinforcing immigration restrictions. The recent declarations of Keir Starmer that there "isn't much between the two main parties" on migration, and that we must "restrict" immigration, show the elite haven't learned a thing.
Cohen's primary aims in the book are largely two-fold: 1. To 'provide a political and historical analysis of immigration restrictions [through] the use of literary metaphor' (p.14) and expose their inherent irrationality; and 2. To 'show that the only equitable controls are no controls' (p.11). On the first aim, the book wholly succeeds and provides a masterful, well-referenced documentary analysis of various legislation, as well as first-hand accounts from both migrants themselves and those working within the security (and social) apparatuses.
On the second aim, however, the book is wholly insufficient. Don't get me wrong, I entirely support the abolition of arbitrary borders and violent framework that upholds them, but the arguments Cohen presents in favour of this (when he does at all) aren't convincing and he does not at any point anticipate the counter-arguments of his opponents - the most prevalent being, of course, the "potential criminal" argument. This could at least be countered with, say, statistics showing the slightly lower proportionality of actual criminals amongst migrants and refugees to the general population, or making the point that we don't argue for internal restrictions on movement even though we would readily accept there are many "potential criminals" in the general population. The idea of a border check between Kent and London to prevent county-lines drug crimes would seem wholly ridiculous. He does, to be fair, show convincingly that at some point you have to inevitably draw an arbitrary line with exclusion and for that reason they are unjust. But that is one small part of the book, and the entire last chapter (built up to analyse what a world without borders and restrictions might look like) does nothing to further the argument in favour of this point.
Let none of that, however, take away from the real strengths of the study. Cohen convincingly shows how the first legislative attempt at migration restriction in the UK (the 1905 Aliens Act) was rooted in antisemitism and irrational moral panics about Jews (and other "aliens"), and rejects the 'classic Orwellian manner whereby [...] arguments are presented, irrespective of the circumstances, as natural God-given truths [...] What has every appearance of unreality is that controls are presented by their supporters as being timeless - as having no context, as having existed for ever, and as being literally a-historical' (p.30). Like national identity itself, the very concept of borders is often erroneously thought of as being ahistorical and as have always been existing. But Cohen here is right - borders are distinct from pre-modern imperial frontiers and have a very demonstrable start in history. But it does not suit proponents of nationalism and borders to admit this, because to admit it would also be to infer that, just as they had a start, they might have an end - and that is unacceptable to them. He also documents the introduction of indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals under the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act, its extension to British citizens in the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, and the abolition of a right to appeal immigration decisions under the 2004 Asylum and Immigration Act. These all make for frightening reading and contemporary defenders of the Blair government would do well to remember these things when they criticise the post-2010 anti-migrant landscape. Indeed, Cohen compares the common argument that left-wingers should "appeal to the right" by favouring restrictions to Nazi appeasement.
Cohen also makes a humorous (albeit depressing) nonsense of the ever-prevalent argument of "overcrowding" - sometimes prefaced with declarations of good intentions "but we just can't fit that many people in." But, as he shows, this was an argument used in favour of the 1905 Act. So if the UK was "overcrowded" then, surely it would have 'literally sunk without trace by now' (p.30). But it hasn't. One could add further to this that the rate of population growth per annum in the UK has been largely steady, hovering around the 1% mark for the best part of 40 years. So if suddenly we are in danger of crossing the imaginary Malthusian line, why now and not in - say - between 1870 and 1910 when increase was around 45%?
It's a good book, but the drawbacks are disappointing. In addition to the aforementioned failure to make a convincing case for no restrictions, at other times Cohen overstretches his point - for example when in (correctly) identifying the racist impulse behind controls, 'namely the preservation of British heritage or British nationalism or British blood' (p.91), he critiques the pseudoscientific concept of race. That's fine in and of itself, but Cohen ignores the extent to which vanishingly few people in the UK still actually believe in the notion of Britishness as an actual "race". Today, British identity tends to be framed (however inaccurately) around a notion of shared culture and values rather than the notion of 'false and meaningless biology' as he puts it. Of course, this reframing still carries underlying racist assumptions and problematic (incorrect) beliefs about "culture" being both homogenous and conforming to arbitrary state borders, but Cohen doesn't discuss any of that, he focuses purely on the false biological understanding of race.
Other small annoyances are that the Orwell metaphors that are repeated ad nauseum, with the term "doublethink" or "newspeak" appearing every other page or so, and an inconsequential remark in favour of the Corn Laws in Ireland (in a sentence about the Famine, without also recognising the role those laws played in causing the famine).
Cohen's voice is sorely needed in the landscape of today, and his presence sorely missed. But the work he has left remain useful in deconstructing the erroneous assumptions underlying and reinforcing immigration restrictions. The recent declarations of Keir Starmer that there "isn't much between the two main parties" on migration, and that we must "restrict" immigration, show the elite haven't learned a thing.
Displaying 1 of 1 review