If, as Gary Boire has said, ‘law is colonialism's first language’, then in the asylum age postcolonial sovereign power shows itself to be particularly adept at finessing its vocabulary. Early on the morning of 22 September 2009, around 600 French police, many in riot gear, moved in to evict the residents of the so-called ‘jungle’ camps in woods on the outskirts of Calais. Two hundred and seventy-eight destitute Afghan, Eritrean and Iraqi migrants were removed, including 132 children. Bulldozers then moved in to clear the rudimentary plastic tents that had sheltered the (overwhelmingly male) migrants, almost all of whom were intent on travelling clandestinely to the UK. The move was heralded by the French and British Immigration Ministers, as well as the British Home Secretary, as a decisive response to a problem that had lingered since the closure of the Red Cross camp at Sangatte in 2002. The French Immigration Minister, Eric Bresson, claimed that clearing the camps defended impoverished migrants against the people-traffickers who used the camps as a base of operations; his British counterpart, Phil Woolas, argued that many of the ‘jungle’ residents must be economic migrants, as otherwise they would have claimed asylum in France or whichever was the first European country they entered.

The event was presented as an act of cleansing the field, introducing justice and order where the migrants’ presence signified criminality and disorder.

Behind the political and visual rhetoric of ‘tidying up’, however, the move to clear the camps presents stark evidence of the deployment of the apparatus of the camp dispositifagainst those whose presence disrupts the horizon of perception. The French government had issued several advance warnings that the camps were to be closed; as a consequence, the majority of the approximately 800 residents had fled by the time the police arrived, and were visible in large numbers sleeping rough along the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coast or in Calais itself. According to Sylvie Copyans, an aid worker with the Salam Association, many of the detained migrants since returned to the Calais area, either following their release from detention, or, in the case of the children, having escaped.