Rebordering Britain & Britons after Brexit
London's deportation apparatus: The ‘administrative removal’ of rough sleeping European Union citizens, 2010–17
Abstract
Brexit brought an end to the free-movement rights of EU citizens in the United Kingdom, but the rights of the poorest Europeans were being actively curtailed even before that. From 2010, street homeless EU citizens were deported through a series of pilot schemes operating in London. In 2016, their ‘administrative removal’ was instituted as national policy. Using process-tracing methodology, we have analysed publicly available documents and others obtained through Freedom of Information requests to assemble an account of how and why a range of ‘stakeholders’ worked together to deport rough-sleeping EU citizens. Our paper addresses two research questions: (i) what actors contributed to these deportations and (ii) through the use of which analytic framework(s) can we begin to understand the deportation of street homeless foreigners? As we find, London's deportation apparatus involved national and local-level state actors, homelessness NGOs and local businesses. The deportation of rough-sleeping EU citizens was a racist biopolitical practice that reflected a concern for ‘hygiene’ at local and national scales, as well as the prevention of ‘harm’ to individual and social bodies. © 2022 The Authors. Population, Space and Place published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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