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Hidden in plain sight: the UK’s extraterritorial management of immigration

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posted on 2023-06-09, 20:44 authored by Nicole Ostrand
The UK, like most countries in the Global North, seeks to regulate immigration and travel in advance of its physical border by projecting their interventions outward and cooperating with sending and transit states. These extraterritorial practices vary widely in their application across different countries, national populations and individual profiles. The UK, for example, requires restrictive visitor and transit visas for nationals from Jamaica, India and Turkey while waiving them for people from Botswana, Malaysia and Mexico. The UK’s extraterritorial interventions in countries like Ghana and Egypt also differ greatly. How do we explain these variations? What are the conditions influencing the UK’s choices, and who are the actors involved in the process? Which countries and groups of people are targeted for greater exclusion and control? The thesis sets out to answer these questions by examining the UK’s visa system and liaison network in relation to Ghana, Egypt, Thailand, the US and France. By comparing the UK’s actions across such diverse contexts, this study provides an in-depth analysis of the conditions shaping the Home Office’s choices. The goal is to shed light on the way extraterritorialisation manifests in practice and the reasons it takes the shape that it does. Or, to put it another way, the study aims to better understand how, where and why the UK intervenes from abroad. Drawing on original evidence from interviews with Home Office officials, freedom of information requests and documentary research, this thesis demonstrates how the Home Office balances the government’s interests in encouraging and excluding particular flows by making judgements about levels of so-called “immigration risk.” Equally important, it shows the UK’s international relationships and the behaviour of foreign state actors too are necessary for explaining the state’s actions. In doing so, the study reveals more complexity to extraterritorialisation than is often depicted in the literature.

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File Version

  • Published version

Pages

159.0

Department affiliated with

  • Geography Theses

Qualification level

  • doctoral

Qualification name

  • phd

Language

  • eng

Institution

University of Sussex

Full text available

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2020-02-28

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