CONTINUITIES

In the previous chapter I examined the policies and practices used by states to prevent Jewish refugees from reaching safety from persecution and extermination in Nazi Germany, and identified what we might call the Carens test, that any policy or practice of exclusion pursued by states today that would have excluded those Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 1940s must be a cause for deep concern. In this chapter we will find many causes for that concern, because we will see continuities with what happened in one of the darkest moments in European history. We can see such continuities in many policies and practices of contemporary global North states in relation to ‘irregular’ migration, policies and practices within which forcibly displaced people, including refugees, become caught as they have little choice but to follow ‘irregular’ routes to gain access to the territory of these states.

But some policies are directly aimed at limiting access for refugees in particular, often under the guise of ‘protecting’ them from the illegal activity of people smugglers. One example is the United Kingdom Nationality and Borders Bill, currently going through the Houses of Parliament. At its centre is a distinction between those who arrive within the territory legally and those who arrive through ‘illegal’ routes, those who are ‘victims’ of people smuggling (UK Government 2021: 36). The latter will only be entitled to temporary protection, not full protection status, and ‘will be regularly reassessed for removal from the UK, will have limited family reunion rights and will have no recourse to public funds except in cases of destitution’ (UK Government 2021: 4). As we will see in Chapter 4, according to international law people are refugees from the moment they are displaced across borders, and so this proposal clearly involves refusing full refugee protection in the United Kingdom for people who are in fact refugees. Indeed, the proposed legislation criminalises refugees themselves, making it a criminal offence to knowingly arrive in the United Kingdom without permission, with a maximum sentence of four years. A clause in the proposed legislation would broaden the offence of arriving unlawfully, so that people intercepted at sea and brought into the United Kingdom can be prosecuted.