On one of the many earlier occasions when desperately provoked people broke out of Campsfield or some other detention centre, the message to the British people was not to approach them on any account because... the implication was.... or was it? ... let's say the suggestion ... that they were violent criminals of an indeterminate but horrendous kind.
No-one would expect a coffee-table book tete-a-tete. But 'Arresting Aram' and some of the other comments made this week about the 'surprising' pleasure and interest some of us have had in meeting the people involved - confirm my earlier suspicion that a much more 'dangerous' outcome, for the authorities at least, and for the militarisation of immigration and asylum which is under way, might be the formation of the kind of bridges that Jenny talks about in her last post: the bridge between the people behind bars and the people who don't know how innocent most of them are.
Of course, there are various bridges in existence already, and not ones we would choose. Both the articles today look at the relationship of supply and demand which - to say the least - complicate the dubious distinctions between forced and unforced or deserving and undeserving that bedevil the treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers today. Rahila Gupta looks at what now might happen if, as seems more possible thanks to an EU Convention, you decriminalise the women trafficked into the sex trade and concentrate instead on the traffickers. There are calls from some pressure groups for a 90 day reflection period further allowing women to 'decide whether they wish to claim asylum'. She also argues that it is high time to criminalise the demand side of the equation... I'm not at all sure. You can agree that prostitution is part of a continuum which reduces all women to sex objects without agreeing that 'emasculation' as she puts it, is the best response. But this is a wider debate about 'criminalisation' as a mechanism...
Saskia Sassen looks at the even wider issues involved in the old colonial links and new economic bridges between the sending and receiving countries in the era of corporate economic and cultural globalisation. She tells us that, "it is far too simple to say that we have trafficking because we have traffickers. The IMF and the World Bank are also actors that have produced the growth of trafficking" and gives us some of the figures involved in this widening gap between rich and poor.
Saskia's argument suggests one bridge that might be built in the face of this challenge: a new solidarity between both middle and working classes in the rich countries and those in the global south eager to benefit from 'genuine people-intensive development' - who have a common interest in closing this widening gap.But first we have to understand fully the 'power' of the powerless people we have been talking about this week, in terms of the impact they have on systems such as that of the nation state - and that is her fascinating starting point.
