Racial surveillance and the mental health impacts of electronic monitoring on migrants

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, the government has used outsourced electronic monitoring (also known as tagging) in England and Wales for criminal sentencing and punishment. Under the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants) Act 2004, s36, the use of this technology extended to immigration controls, and individuals deemed as ‘high risk’ of harm, reoffending or absconding can be fitted with an ankle device and subjected to curfew. The tagging of migrants is not authorised by the criminal court and therefore not considered a punitive sanction. It is managed by the immigration system and treated as an administrative matter. Nevertheless, people who are tagged experience it as imprisonment and punishment. Drawing on data from an eighteen-month ethnographic research project, this article examines the impact of electronic monitoring on people seeking asylum, who completed their sentences for immigration offences. It uncovers the psychological effects and mental health impacts of such technologies of control. The article sheds light on how tagging is experienced by racialised minorities, and adds to the literature on migration, surveillance studies, state racism and violence.

Gendering detention: (re)producing vulnerability for migrant women in British Immigration Removal Centres

“…Recent studies have shown the embodied effects of surveillance on people in immigration detention (Briskman, 2013;Radziwinowiczówna, 2020). Moreover, many people who have been released from detention are still subject to the heightened surveillance of the detention regime, imposed through means such as curfews and electronic tagging (Klein and Williams, 2012;Bhatia, 2021).…”

Mental health coverage for forced migrants: Managing failure as everyday governance in the public and NGO sectors in England

“…These findings raise particular concerns in the UK, which has one of the largest immigration detention estates in the world, detains asylum seekers indefinitely and illegally detains those who are deemed mentally ill (Mladovsky, 2020b). The rapid growth of "crimmigration controls" in Britain have also been found to harm forced migrants' mental health (Bhatia, 2021).…”

Immigration Raids and Racist State Violence

“…This form of social order is not only manifested in things such as Britain's participation in the war on terror and their fall out in terms of wholesale death, maiming and the subsequent uprooting of millions. Nor is it merely manifested in things like the outsourcing of border controls, or expansive forms of monitoring and surveillance (Bhatia 2021). It is also manifested in a framework of immigration raids which, as is well established, is racialized-targeting particular groups of people of particular nationalities because they are seen as easily removable, or in order to fill up pre-booked charter flights (Webber 2012).…”