This article uses a historical examination of internment to contribute to a larger literature that unsettles the official record of detention policy as a natural development in an otherwise functioning immigration and border control bureaucracy.
Immigration detention is cementing into a permanent aspect of border and immigration control in the United Kingdom. This article uses a historical examination of internment to contribute to a larger literature that unsettles the official record of detention policy as a natural development in an otherwise functioning immigration and border control bureaucracy. In so doing, the author presents an original overview of the First World War, Second World War, and Gulf War internments. The author's research findings demonstrate that wartime powers legislated in times of national distress had been repackaged as seemingly quotidian tools of immigration and asylum control. The results of this normalization have included the reinforcement of a false logic of differentiation between citizens and threats, and between "good" and "bad" migrants; and an instrumentalization of national insecurity to curtail the movements and basic rights of all individuals. (Published Abstract)