Manufacturing consent to removal via indifference - The case of immigration detention in Hong Kong

• In Event: Violence and Immigration Detention: Comparative Perspectives from Greece, the UK, and the US

Abstract

This paper argues that violence in immigration detention is often culturally articulated, and in the case of Hong Kong originates from the drive to manufacture detainees’ consent to removals. Drawing on interviews with 26 former immigration detainees and civil society organisation members, this paper first lays out the city’s post-colonial and authoritarian context. It explores violence as institutionalised indifference to detention conditions and lengths, and its physical and psychological effects on interviewed former detainees. It further examines civil society responses in the form of abolitionist campaigning and ‘dignified return’ work. This paper suggests that the harshness of lengthy detention in poor conditions, combined with perceived failure of resistance to elicit reforms, encouraged interviewed detainees to embrace their deportability in compliance to the institutional goal of speedy removals.

Author

• Wing Yin Anna Tsui, University of Oxford (DPhil, incoming cohort 2025-26