The Age of the Borders Bill

Guest post by Julian Molina and Tomas Percival. Julian is a lecturer in public administration at the University of the West of Scotland. His work focuses on histories of government research work, large-scale projects, and forensic borders. Thomas is an artist and researcher. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture (Goldsmiths, University of London), artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie, and visiting fellow on Security Vision, a European Research Council project at Leiden University.

If you progress to level 2 of the ‘mock’ platform videogame, “The Tories”, players face a difficult challenge. Once aboard a gunship patrolling “The Channel”, players must navigate varied risks. Once you have passed Dominic Raab holding a sign that says, “sea closed”, Bozzy will suddenly see something. “‘Ere, what’s that?” He will ask. “Refugees,” Mike will reply. “Refugees have puppydog eyes, they’re economic migrants!” says Jacob. At which point, a klaxon will sound: “Clandestine Channel Threat”. Players can expect a deduction of five point in the polls. And, so it goes.

Viewers of this video may have come to expect this scenario. Institutionalised scepticism about refugees, the militarisation of border patrols, a government perpetually anxious over Channel crossings and how to distinguish real refugees from migrants. The scenario has been well played out. And so, away from game player mode, and less than a year after the government introduced their Nationality and Borders Bill into Parliament, this law has received Royal Assent, though to no great fanfare. A Home Office tweet announcing “Borders Bill: now law” resembled the iconography of a spin-off crime drama TV series.

Despite the Home Office’s self-congratulatory statements that the Bill will break criminal people smuggling networks, that those who “arrived illegally in the UK […] can be considered ‘inadmissible’ to the UK asylum system”, the public mood about refugees seemed to have already changed. This January, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants cited an estimate that 20,000 single male asylum seekers are expected to be detained each year. For Easter, the Archbishop of Canterbury described plans to send refugees to Rwanda as unable to “stand the judgment of God”. The Government are being hit in the polls over the Ukraine Resettlement Scheme, with YouGov reporting in late March that 31% of the public thinking the government is “doing the right amount to help Ukrainians come to the UK”.

Lower down the list of the Bill’s accomplishments are new powers to “crack down on adults pretending to be children by introducing scientific methods for age assessment.” In this provision, we can find a relatively innocuous indicator with which to understand longer-term trends in reforming the UK asylum system. In brief, the government will legitimise the widespread use of forensic techniques to estimate the age of unaccompanied asylum seeking children. Prior to the Bill’s passage, the Home Office appointed an interim expert panel in December 2021 to advise on the use of these techniques. These techniques, used by most European countries, could include psycho-social assessments, as well as the assessment of skeletal structures in the hand, dental examinations, or through testing DNA or saliva.

Some key players in the refugee spectacle have long banged their drums for such a reform. The Daily Mail, Migration Watch UK, and other characters wading into the immigration debate, have stoked fears of adult refugees pretending to be children for years. The regularity of articles exposing so-called ‘bogus child refugees’ had become predictable. Articles with revelatory headlines like ‘Truth of child refugees’ and ‘More than 2,000 adult asylum seekers have been caught lying about their age and pretending to be children’ tell their own story. Filled with quotes from concerned parents and schoolchildren, the refugees in question are never not Middle Eastern or African. One photo caption reads, “The school pupil who recently moved to Britain from West Africa looks more like a 40-year-old man and has a receding hairline, parents claimed last month”.

And so, in stoking these fears, these players have brought about a strange new arrangement. Dental anthropologists and paediatric radiologists are being put to work to develop best practice guidance on existing and scientific methods to quash these bogus claims. A new national age assessment board will be established to coordinate these procedures. Home Office officials are in ongoing dialogue with government officials in Sweden, Norway, France, Germany and the Netherlands, to develop and review current age assessment policy options. Trans-European policy networks continue to facilitate the UK government’s efforts to develop proposals for border reinforcement. And yet, these developments are just the latest iteration of a longer tendency to utilise colonial ways of seeing, forensic techniques and biometric modes of scrutiny towards the management of UK borders.

Before the Hostile Environment, the UK Border Agency set out in 2009 to test the possibility of using forensic techniques to assess the veracity of asylum claims. The Human Provenance Pilot Project (HPPP) aimed to use genetic ancestry and isotope testing to determine the national identity of a refugees in the asylum adjudication process. Though short-lived, the HPPP aimed to evaluate the potential of using DNA testing to corroborate or invalidate asylum seekers claims of national origin. The project was scrapped after it came under significant scrutiny by scientific groups and migrant rights organisations once it was made public in September 2009.

Throughout the 2000s, forensic dental assessments were used across several English local authorities. Led by researchers at UCL Dental Age Assessment group, over 500 dental age assessments were conducted on asylum seekers by 2009. Court records indicate the continued use of forensic methods in several English local authorities in the 2010s, including in Ealing, Kent, Croydon and Solihull.3During this same period, the European Academy of Paediatrics’ Advocacy & Ethics Group strongly recommended that all paediatricians do not participate in age determinations of asylum seekers and issued a statement that it “also recommends all paediatricians to convey this opinion to all other physicians”. In 2009, the Children's Commissioner for England wrote a public letter in the British Dental Journal, arguing against the use of dental x-rays for age assessments of asylum seekers.

The Bill and the administrative transformation of bodies into evidence – or teeth into age – is an attempt to navigate varied risks. Some of the risks are produced by the “bogus asylum seeker” spectacle, some are produced by border securitisation practices, some are the products of the aftermath of empire. Achille Mbembe, writing in ‘The Futures of Life and the Futures of Reason’, notes that the body on the move is understood by security practices as potentially risky which, therefore, must be managed and controlled. The emergence of a biometric paradigm has extended the territorial border beyond the cartographic demarcation into “multiple realms of social life and, in particular, the human body”.

No longer will it be left to Home Office or local authority assessors to determine the age of an asylum seeker. Their biological identity will be revealed through science. And the gameplay continues: from establishing new offshore processing centres to place ‘undesirable’ racialised others, to coordination of European scientific and policy communities to refine assessments of migrant bodies, to using gunships to patrol territorial water borders, to expansive use of immigration detention facilities. Beyond the spectacle of so-called ‘bogus asylum seekers’, this is our new Fortress Britannia.

Any comments about this post? Get in touch with us! Send us an email, or post a comment here or on Facebook. You can also tweet us.