The new Government has quickly turned its attention to deterring people from the Global South from coming to the UK.
At the same time as announcing the Border Security Bill that would embed an oppressive counter-terrorism approach to ‘preventing small boats crossings’, it is also seemingly taking measures to tackle the “root causes” of displacement. This includes the Foreign Office stating that £84m of funding would be rolled out over the next three years to address the factors driving people into small boats, as well as new programmes to “help” Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon (as well as more generally, people across the Middle East, North Africa and East Africa) to access education, improve skills, find employment opportunities, and “integrate”, in order to deter people from moving to the UK. Other measures include initiatives with Slovenia and Slovakia to tackle organised crime, “humanitarian aid” to Sudanese people (including displaced Sudanese people) to “help people to stay within their home region”, and funding to support the IOM’s work in Libya, including for “voluntary humanitarian returns”.
The running theme across all these new measures is the UK offloading its huge responsibilities (huge given its role in creating displacement) towards people seeking safety onto Global South nations. Acknowledging and addressing the root of why people are forced to move is vital, yet the Government is not actually doing that. They are reducing the root causes of displacement to “conflict, climate change, and humanitarian crises”, without acknowledging the role of Western colonialism and imperialism and capitalism in creating or exacerbating conflict and humanitarian crises. The Government would be wise to familiarise itself with the famous saying: “we are here because you were there”.
The promises of UK funding that will be provided to “help” people in the Global South improve their quality of life ring hollow, especially given that our Government continues to engage in violent foreign policy interventions, as well as arms sales with genocidal entities that drive displacement in the first place. This funding also falls short of meaningful reparations, which involves an end to neo-colonial and imperial control in the Global South, and also reproduces existing power structures. Make no mistake, these measures are not about redistribution of wealth from the Global North to South, or about putting power in the hands of communities in the Global South. Funding employment does nothing to make Sudan or Palestine or any other country suffering the effects of Western imperialism safer.
These measures also rely on the premise that people migrating from the Global South must be reduced; this is problematic and racist. Measures to primarily limit movement therefore miss the point around the purposeful limiting of migration routes and how that means people take criminalised routes to the UK.
These new measures will do nothing to alleviate the suffering of displaced people.
Meaningfully addressing displacement is about decolonisation. It involves genuine systemic change, and reparations for looted wealth and deliberate underdevelopment.