Post by Samuel Singler. Samuel is a DPhil candidate and ESRC Grand Union Scholar at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford.
On June 24th, 2016, I woke up in Jormua, Finland, expecting the BBC app on my phone to confirm that the people of the United Kingdom—in spite of the political theatrics that had occupied the country for months—did not actually choose to leave the European Union. I was shocked to find how badly I had misjudged the Brexit referendum. Of course, the Brexit debates had highlighted some valid concerns relating to EU politics and the disconnect between a ‘Brussels elite’ and the citizens of the EU. Nonetheless, I thought, most British people would surely still recognize the practical and ideational value of staying in the EU.
I was mistaken, and also confused. I’d moved to London from Finland two years prior, in order to pursue an undergraduate degree. The ease with which I’d been able to move to the UK, combined with the warm welcome I received as a university student in London, had made me feel like I understood the British attitude toward the EU: just like Euroscepticism in Finland, at times fair criticism is directed at the European Union, yet ultimately most people enjoy and support the broader political project the EU represents.
The result of the Brexit referendum forced me to re-evaluate this understanding and, at first, I adopted an extreme interpretation: Brexit must mean that the British people do not want me, a migrant, here. During the Brexit debates, I read comments in the media that seemed uncharacteristically xenophobic—at times marked by bizarre and worrying echoes of British exceptionalism and empire—and began to think that I’d gotten it all wrong.
During the past three and a half years since the referendum, personal discussions and debates about Brexit and Britishness have moderated my initial emotional response. These conversations have not consisted of the xenophobic, hostile rhetoric I expected, and indeed most Leavers I know do not wish to see me leave the UK. The polarized accounts of this debate in the media stand in significant contrast to my lived experience in the UK.
Reflecting on this disconnect has resulted in an increased awareness of my own positionality within British society. I have only experienced living in the UK in the context of relatively privileged university environments, first in London and thereafter at Oxford. Not only have I been much more likely to encounter Remainers than Leavers within these contexts, but my personal background also factors into my experiences of hospitality in the UK. As a white, Northern European doctoral candidate, I am not the typical figure against whom inflammatory rhetoric during the Brexit debates was directed.
Conducting research into immigration detention and deportation practices in the UK have only heightened my awareness of the relative privilege I possess among migrants in British society. While speaking to individuals facing deportation from the UK after decades of living and working here, I still found myself remarkably nonchalant when thinking of whether and when to apply for ‘settled status.’ Clearly, I enjoyed a level of flexibility and safety that few are lucky enough to have, and I did not feel targeted by potential post-Brexit migration control efforts.
As a critical scholar of migration and border criminology, I certainly recognize the significant normative shortcomings in, for instance, the European Union’s migration control practices. Moreover, it remains to be seen how exactly the European project can achieve a deeper sense of inclusion within the EU without simultaneously reinforcing processes of exclusion at its external borders. Nonetheless, the EU represents an important political project in its attempt to promote mutual recognition by acknowledging and respecting difference while simultaneously coming together in order for such differences to enrich and reinforce, rather than undermine, processes of political cooperation.
It seems that adopting a juxtaposed attitude of disagreement and acceptance toward Brexit is most true to this project of mutual recognition. The EU would undermine its own principles should the UK not be allowed to leave, and so the acceptance of this decision has, in my view, only served to strengthen the credentials of the European Union as a political project.
Ultimately, my personal experiences of hospitality in the UK have moderated the initial shock that I felt following the referendum. Nonetheless, an awareness of the unequal effects of Brexit and my views on the European integration project still makes me unable to fully understand or agree with Brexit. Though I no longer feel shocked that the UK will leave the EU, today will still be a sad day indeed.
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Post by Francesca Esposito. Francesca recently completed her PhD in community psychology at the ISPA-University Institute of Lisbon and is currently a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford.
My ‘Brexit story’ begins long before I arrived in the UK. In 2016, I was in the middle of my PhD and living in Lisbon, the most western outpost of Europe. Yet, even if geographically so far away, I remember the shock of getting to know the result of the June 2016 UK referendum, especially being living in a country like Portugal where the sense of belonging to a common European project is quite widespread. I remember the disappointment and the difficulty of many friends and colleagues to make sense of this result; none of us was actually expecting it. What I could not imagine at that time was that Brexit, which I used to follow through newspapers and newscasts, would affect my personal life so deeply.
I arrived in the UK on March 25, 2019, four days before Brexit was originally meant to happen. I have been lucky to get to live and work in Oxford, which is definitely a privileged and progressive environment where the majority of people I know are critical against this development. Yet, even inside this ‘privileged bubble’ I haven't been immune to the impact of Brexit. I have heard sad stories from my EU friends who have been living in the UK for a long time. I was particularly struck by the story of a friend, who told me about the sense of bewilderment and anguish he and his partner felt after the referendum. They used to live in Northamptonshire, which turned out to be a pro-Brexit area. My friend told me that immediately after June 23, 2016, most pubs in that area hoisted the English flag in a sign of support for Leavers’ victory. Seeing these flags and experiencing the sense of hostility in public spaces in their neighbourhood was extremely painful. They suddenly felt unwelcome and not belonging to a place where they had decided (and struggled) to re-build their life. Recently, I have witnessed several of my non-British friends - Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Brazilians - dedicating their efforts to an election in which they could not vote, but which they felt was extremely important to support. This was their way to contribute to a world of diversity, justice and rights for all. Again, when the results confirmed the will of the majority to go ahead with the Brexit project and with a new conservative government in place that favours anti-immigrant policies, anguish and sorrow resurfaced.
Having worked for several years as a researcher and an activist in the field of migration and immigration detention, I have become used to the concept of ‘hostile environment’. In the UK, it was 2012 when the then Home Secretary Theresa May argued: “The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal migration.” Of course, state-sponsored hostility to so-called undocumented migrants began well before this. De facto hostile environment policies, designed to limit people’s rights and deter them from accessing services such as housing, healthcare, education, work, and banking have operated for decades in the UK and other Western countries. The Brexit project is evidently part of all this: it rests on years of hostility towards racialised and migrant others and, in turn, it reinforces racial and nationality-based segmentations in our communities. Research has demonstrated the numerous detrimental impacts of migrant hostile environments and repressive immigration-enforcement policies on individuals, their families and communities at large.
Although in a privileged position because of my citizenship status and my academic affiliations, I’ve started to feel unwelcome and not belonging for the very first time. This makes me think about the experiences and feelings of the people I work with, the women and men I meet in detention sites. How much unwelcome and rejected can they feel? How distressing can be the hostility and institutional violence they experience on a daily basis? In the midst of our differences, I feel emotionally closer to them now. I can better relate to their sense of vulnerability and fear. And, in spite of all this being terribly worrisome, I can’t stop thinking that it can hold transformative potential. Maybe this can make us, privileged White Europeans, more aware of the role of migration control policies have in creating and maintaining structural power relations and inequalities. More importantly, maybe this can make us aware of the fact that border control is fundamentally at odds with aspirations for a diverse and just society. In doing so, we can maybe get to realise that the struggle for migrants’ rights is actually a struggle for us all, because, in different ways, we all paying a price. Sadly, this realisation will probably take a long time. Let's hope Brexit day is the beginning of that process.
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