From the so-called ‘hostile environment’ in Britain to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States, it seems as if the topic of immigration is becoming an ever more prominent part of political discourses across the world. It was in this context that Dr Nisha Kapoor, Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Warwick, published her book Deport, Deprive, Extradite in 2018.

Dr Kapoor points out at the beginning of our discussion that of the extradition cases discussed in her book, only one individual had been convicted of a crime before they were extradited, and that crime was not the reason for their extradition. This serves to demonstrate the point that the UK has deported people to “places that are known for carrying out torture who have not been convicted of any crimes.”

A large part of this comes down to counterterrorism legislation which “is sufficiently expansive so as to allow for other mechanisms of punishment where the criminal justice system isn’t sufficient. So, if you haven’t been convicted of a crime because the evidence isn’t sufficient … you can nevertheless, because you’re deemed to be a risk to national security, be subject to deportation on national security grounds.”

With the issue of deportation constantly making headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, with the controversies surrounding the actions of ICE in the United States often focussed on detaining and deporting both migrants and asylum seekers who come from Central America, and the Windrush scandal at home regarding the deportation of people originating from the Caribbean, Dr Kapoor acknowledges the fundamentally racial element to deportations and notes the political nature of the original construction of borders as part of the idea of the nation-state. Referring to the “arbitrary boundaries” which was the result of this development, Dr Kapoor adds that “there’s no kind of normative way in which certain groups of people belong here, and other groups of people belong there.”

“The rhetoric of the War on Terror connects all kinds of disparate political struggles that are very different physically, historically, socially”

Dr Kapoor refers to history in noting how the enforcement of immigration legislation in Britain began in the early 20th century restricting Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, before later being used to restrict immigration from the Commonwealth of Britain’s former colonies. Thus, “if we look at the institution of immigration, its history is deeply racially marked in the same way that it is in the U.S and … requires us to understand the way in which borders are constructed and what their purpose has been.” Dr Kapoor notes how the intensification of the use of deportation arose in the 1990s in the UK with the growth in the number of asylum seekers often arriving from countries which had previously been colonised by European powers.

In certain high-profile cases, public opinion can be swayed towards supporting extradition despite the various human rights concerns. In reference to the media and public hostility to the idea of due process and human rights guarantees in high profile extradition cases, Dr Kapoor argues that “a big part of this feeds on racism.” In the era of the War on Terror, “the Muslim comes to be synonymous with the figure of the terrorist in general.”

She goes on to make the point that “you have these particularly unsympathetic pathologized figures that become tropes in the media. So Abu Hamza with a hook for a hand and a patch over his eye. It’s an ideal trope for the media to mobilize a sort of demonic monstrous non-human figure upon which you can carry any kind of measures.” The fact that there has been a “mass mobilization of Islamophobia for the last 20 years” only increases the challenge of encouraging the public to support human rights for individuals such as Abu Hamza who have made the news for the attempts to extradite them. Dr Kapoor further raises her concern with regards to the Home Office denying certain individuals passports that there is “no real transparency” in a process which she describes as being “very much racially targeted”, and threatens to “set particular kinds of precedents and the normalization of how power operates and what’s possible and what we think of as necessary in the name of security.”

In the post-9/11 era, countries such as the UK and the United States have greatly expanded their security apparatus and processes which has come, some argue, at the expense of civil liberties. She strongly rejects the argument that such measures have made us safer from terrorism, making the point that “all it’s done is enhance the power of the state.

“If you look at the kind of statistics around counter-terrorism policing there’s a number of things that show up. One is that most people … who are arrested are not charged. And then the small number of people who are charged, very few of those are charged for terrorism related offences.”

Further to this, Dr Kapoor also notes the variety of acts which governments are classifying as a terrorism offence. She notes that “it could be something like an expression of a political opinion which is deemed to be solicitation or deemed to be potentially a kind of material support which [could be] an action or behaviour which in other contexts would be defended as freedom of speech.” She adds that individuals spend “very long periods of time in prison” due to convictions based upon acts such as “typing up a document for a website … using somebody’s phone and the person who owns the phone is someone who is marked as suspicious … typing a comment on social media about something.”

Dr Kapoor adds that she is not “naïve about violence and it’s not to say that there aren’t some individuals who are carrying out or have carried out violent acts. But we then need to understand the political context in which these things are happening and they’re not separate from Britain’s role or the West’s role in the Middle East in terms of imperialist occupation and military intervention.” Turning back to the issue of counterterrorism, Dr Kapoor contends that the “whole point of this infrastructure of counterterrorism policy is not designed to police or stop terrorism. It’s designed to reproduce it to justify or to sustain the whole security industry.”

Dr Kapoor makes the point that the germination of these structures in fact began in the 1990s, not after 9/11 which is often used as a justification for the existence of such systems. She explains that “when the Cold War was dying down … there was talk by the powers that be here and in the US about where to look, there needed to be a new kind of global threat … a new kind of enemy to the West … it wasn’t communism anymore and Islam came to be a sufficient replacement.” Referencing Arun Kundnani’s book The Muslims are Coming! Dr Kapoor notes the foreign policy shift which took place in the 1990s and how Islam being a global religion with a global population enabled the “rhetoric of the War on Terror to connect all kinds of disparate political struggles that are very different physically, historically, socially.” Whilst the technology of the modern security apparatus is new, Dr Kapoor adds that “there is a big connection between the practices that are used against Muslims in Muslim communities in the US and the police departments and surveillance strategies and techniques that were used against civil rights groups.”

“Liberal states have always had their colonies or their spaces where democratic principles can be suspended”

Muslim communities across Europe in particular have attracted the wrath of far-right groups who often use Islamophobia to advance their authoritarian and populist political programmes. Yet as Dr Kapoor has noted, liberal democracies in the West have themselves become increasingly authoritarian. Reflecting on this trend, Dr Kapoor notes how liberal states have always “had its colonies or its spaces where democratic principles can be suspended. It’s dependent on having those spaces arguably. And so through the liberal centre there has been this whole array of authoritarian practices that have been cultivated and normalized a kind of securitization practice.”

Turning to the appeal of populism which has affected the so-called liberal democracies of Europe and North America, Dr Kapoor reflects on how “the centre has always looked to the far right and then tried to rein it back. But it basically replicated what they’re saying in a more civilised or sophisticated way to try and manage that relationship. And now things have kind of exploded.”

A particular concern for Kapoor is the way in which “this move towards fascism is really dangerous in terms of immigration and it is really dangerous in terms of what it means for people like the Windrush generation.” She adds that “through recognising the violence of the immigration system there is a disconnect between what’s allowed or legitimated through the immigration system and then the broader security narrative. And so there’s a lot of silence around the securitization stuff.”

Perhaps noting the complicity in the securitization of the state from both sides of the aisle, Dr Kapoor noted that “Labour have happily passed through more draconian legislation around counter terrorism” yet she also notes that there is a greater resistance to these types of measures when is it represented in a different way. For example, there is a greater resistance to these laws when “it’s represented in a clean anti-racist narrative.” Nevertheless, Dr Kapoor adds that “the problem is that we need to think about racism more deeply and more critically than you could say is being allowed for in this space and I think that’s what’s a bit worrying.”

Turning to the simple matter of Brexit, I ask Dr Kapoor about the centrality of immigration to the debate surround Britain leaving the EU. For Dr Kapoor, “the Brexit vote was a racist vote. Absolutely it was.

“The discourse about immigration is always deeply racialised … Immigration played a massive part but it wasn’t about Europeans. There was that big picture with Nigel Farage with the floods of Muslim, brown bodies from Syria, arriving in Europe that was key to the vote. Statistics on voting patterns show that support for Brexit wasn’t simply from the white working class, it was as much from middle England.”

Acknowledging many of the problems with the European Union, Dr Kapoor nevertheless notes the importance of institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights which are progressive elements of the EU that Britain would cease to participate in after Brexit.

Dr Kapoor also believes that the Brexit vote “gave licence to a real visceral racist expression” which led to the large spike in Islamophobic incidents immediately following the Brexit vote. Dr Kapoor adds that in many ways we are already living in a post-Brexit reality of “racism on the street” that she expects to continue.

Dr Kapoor was visiting Cambridge to speak at an event organised by the Critical Theory & Practice Seminar Series.