No ifs, no buts, no boats!: asylum policy, border policing, and the criminalisation of people arriving to the UK on ‘small boats’, 2018-2023

Thesis

This thesis examines the criminalisation of people arriving on ‘small boats’ in the UK between 2018 and 2023. Through a multi-sited ethnographic approach spanning Westminster, Dover, and Kent's criminal courts, I trace five overlapping elements of criminalisation. First, I analyse how parliamentary and official government discourse constructed people crossing the Channel as a threat to both the British public and ‘deserving refugees’, discursively separating them from legitimate protection-seekers. Second, drawing on interviews conducted with Civil Servants, I examine the policy-making processes behind restrictive legislation that attempted to reshape protection in the UK during this period: the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, Illegal Migration Act 2023, and Safety of Rwanda Act 2024. Civil servants I interviewed understood this as a populist response to the perceived border failures post-Brexit. Penal tools and restrictive asylum policies, they argued, had an important communicative function in the pursuit of ‘control’. Third, drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with Border Force officers within the ‘Small Boats Operational Command’, I examine how rescue, immigration control, and criminal enforcement, were interconnected, transforming rescue into a moment of criminal policing. The fourth and fifth elements consider the substantive aspects of criminalisation: prosecutorial decision making, and their treatment in criminal courts. Notably, the criminalisation of migration was achieved not simply through the direct transfer of penal policies to the migration context, but required a departure from usual standard of justice: a ‘bordered penality’ (Franko Aas, 2014). While existing literature on asylum’s erosion has focused primarily on administrative tools of exclusion - detention, offshoring, removal – the case of ‘small boats’ shows how seeking asylum is being reconfiguring from a right to protection, into grounds for punishment. The thesis contributes to Border Criminologies by focusing specifically on the criminalisation of asylum seekers, and to Forced Migration Studies by highlighting criminal law’s expanding role in states’ hostile responses to refugees.

Authors: Taylor, V

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-gar0nro4w
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: criminalisation; crimmigration; border criminology; asylum; small boats
• Subjects: Refugees; Border security; Government policy; Criminology; Forced migration