No Borders activists work in solidarity with migrants who struggle against the border regime. We want to strengthen links between this resistance and the wider discontent seen on Britain’s streets against commodification and police harassment.

Stop and search – racial profiling
In the 3 months before the August Riots, the Met Police stopped and searched black people almost 5 times more often than white people. Despite this, the arrest rates following a search were almost identical [i].

Racial profiling by Police is also a major problem facing migrant communities living in Calais. Many refugees try to cross covertly from this French harbour to England. Calais Migrant Solidarity (CMS), part of the No Borders network, has spent over two years monitoring police behaviour there. Riot and border police are stationed in the town to harass migrants continuously. They raid camps and squats, often at night or early in the morning, and patrol the streets to stop and search migrants found there. Both raids and patrols may lead to arrest. There were 17,000 arrests of migrants in Pas-de-Calais in 2007 (with many of the same people being arrested repeatedly); yet only 41 of these were deported back to their countries of origin [ii].

The effect of this standard practice has been to create a climate of fear for refugees in Calais. Nowhere is safe: a migrant can be picked up at any moment, whether sleeping, eating, going to or from meals at the charity distribution, at the medical clinic, just walking in the street or sitting in the park.

Deaths in Custody
The stabbing of reggae-star Smiley Culture in March and the shooting of Mark Duggan in August have forced more people to recognize that police brutality is alive and kicking. Local communities kept these events in the news by taking to the streets for sizeable demonstrations and/or spontaneous rioting.

As a movement, we can stress how similar this is to the deaths of migrants held in Immigration Prisons, during deportations, or at the border. Only two days before Mr. Duggan was shot dead by the Met, a detainee at Campsfield immigration prison died, driven to commit suicide hours before a deportation attempt. Indeed, this was just one out of three deaths in immigration detention in the month leading up to the August Riots. These deaths followed that of the Angolan asylum-seeker, Jimmy Mubenga, who died in October 2010 from asphyxiation while being forcibly deported by G4S guards. CMS have also documented deaths of many migrants at the French/UK border.

The abuse of migrants in these situations rarely makes headline news, even though detainees may react with protests inside the detention centres. A quick look back on resistance by immigration detainees suggests a microcosm of what was seen more openly in the August uprising. Rioting erupted at Yarl’s Wood in 2002 and Harmondsworth in 2004, 2005, 2006 (twice), 2007 and 2008. A detainee commented recently, after watching rioting in London on the TV news and having spent almost 2 years in detention: “Bring the fire here!”

Commodification…and corporatism
The purpose of government spending cuts is to turn public services into commodities – things that can be bought or sold to make profit. The vibrant anti-cuts movement shows how unpopular their program is.

This is a process of “commodification” – and migrants detained in the UK have seen the consequences of this already. Instead of Removal Centres being run by HM Prisons, the operating contracts are awarded to major multi-national corporations, like Serco and G4S. This gives big businesses a financial interest in more detention centres being built and more people detained, so they can profit from it. Now government policies are handing these same companies more involvement in our hospitals, schools and for the Olympics. Resistance towards austerity and action against companies that profit from detention should be linked more closely.

Commodification blurs the line between big business and the State, suggesting they need each other to survive. Talking about a clear divide between ‘the state’ and ‘capitalism’ is unhelpful because their power is not arranged like two distinct pillars. Mussolini said that: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power”. Perhaps this is not far from what we are seeing now. It is especially visible when you look at how immigration controls are managed.

Charities have also merged into this corporate-state power concentration. Barnardo’s, the UK’s biggest children’s charity, has collaborated with the UK Border Agency and G4S to provide services at a new detention centre for families with children. This secured jobs for 29 Barnardo’s staff in difficult financial times [iii]. But Barnardo’s role is funded by the UKBA, so we doubt their willingness to speak out against the government when it inevitably sees people harmed by the border regime.  The first mother to be detained at the new centre was dawn-raided from her home and then assaulted on the way to the airport – and Barnardo’s have so far said nothing [iv].

With these elite groups supporting each other through uncertain times, it’s more important than ever for migrants and citizens to question the borders that keep us apart … and struggle together for more accountable power structures and a fairer share of the world’s wealth.