How the UK’s immigration detention and deportation system turns
people into monetized, measurable units on a supply chain In the
UK’s fully outsourced “immigration detainee escorting system,”
private sector security employees detain, circulate and deport foreign
national citizens. Run and organized like a supply chain, this system
dehumanises those who are detained and deported, treating them as if
they were packages to be moved from place to place and relying on
poorly paid, minimally trained staff to do so. In Supply Chain
Justice, Mary Bosworth offers the first empirically grounded,
scholarly analysis of the British detention and deportation system.
Drawing on four years of extensive ethnographic research, Bosworth
examines what keeps the system in place and whether it might be
effectively challenged. Told by a senior manager that “this is a
logistics business,” Bosworth documents how the public and private
sectors have built a supply chain in which people’s humanity is
transformed both symbolically and tangibly through administrative
processes and bureaucracy into monetized, measurable units. Like all
logistics, the system has failure built into it. The contract does not
seek to eradicate risk but rather to manage it, determining
responsibility and apportioning a financial value to such
“failures” as delay, escape, aborted flight or death in custody.
Front-line workers and managers depoliticise and normalise their
efforts by casting their duties in familiar bureaucratic terms, with
targets, “service level agreements” and “key performance
indicators.” Focusing on first-hand accounts from workers and
lengthy observation and document analysis, Bosworth explores the
impact of border logistics in order to ask what it would take to build
inclusive infrastructures rather than those designed to exclude.
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The Logistics of British Border Control
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780691259925
Publisert
2024
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter