Neurotic Frontiers and their Contestations: A Case Study of Border Bureaucrats in UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunals

• In Event: The Moral Worlds of Immigration Bureaucrats III

Abstract

Hostile bordering regimes aim to preserve the material and immaterial boundaries created through historical frontieering. This paper begins by framing asylum as a social and historical phenomenon with particular underlying processes, structures and conditions, out of which contemporary asylum law in the UK has emerged. I then argue that emotions underpin what I conceptualise as a contemporary neuroticism associated with losing control over those boundaries and the foreboding disruption of an unequal bordered status quo.

Asylum and immigration discourse in the UK remains highly contested politically, legally, and socially, and recent responses by the British state to people on the move are characterised by what I describe as a ‘Neurotic Frontier’. This characterisation refers to, on the one hand, the acceleration of emotionally driven processes of dehumanisation, criminalisation, rights erosion, and colonially grounded policy convergence, and on the other hand, modes of contestation that are produced by punitive asylum trajectories.

While these processes illuminate the complex interplay of historical, political, legal, economic, and social factors that shape the public discourse and policy debates around asylum, they may yet yield some emancipatory potential. Using Home Office Presenting Officers as a case study, I aim to explore if, and how, the regulation of emotions within UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunals might foster forms of moral contestation to institutional processes and practice that could be productive and emancipatory.

Author

• Belinda Rawson, University of Warwick