For many years, politicians have sold the public a simple story: The answer to undocumented immigration is a strong, fortified border. This story has a seductive, common-sense reasoning — but it is also wrong.
Decades of research has shown that people determined to move, find a way to move.
And when states respond with border controls, people turn to smugglers to circumvent these controls; and on and on this cycle goes with increasingly militarised borders on the one hand, and increasingly desperate people on the other.
But politicians don’t want to engage with this research, when it is much more politically palatable to spend billions buying shiny technology from private corporations to prop the myth of strong borders.
Our guests today have published research that shows the UK government has spent over 3.5 billion pounds in public money to support a sprawling, almost entirely privatised, apparatus to stop desperately vulnerable people from using small boats to cross the english channel and apply for asylum in the United Kingdom.
Listen in to learn more.
