• Are humanitarian visas the answer to finally solving small boat Channel crossings?

    I was asked to speak to this question at a recent event organised by Patricia Nabuco-Martuscelli, and here’s how I answered.  The UK’s preferred mode of refugee reception has always been to offer safe passage and settlement to particular nationalities during particular conflicts on a case by case basis. These have usually been short term schemes -think of…

  • How much is the UK government spending on contracts in the border industry?

    How much is the UK government spending on contracts in the border industry?

    This article, with the Chanel Crossings team, was originally published in Open Democracy in April 2025. The UK government says smugglers profit off human desperation in the English Channel. But we, a team of researchers, believe they’re not the only ones. Our work has found that private companies have received more than £3.5bn of public…

  • Submission to the Cranston Inquiry

    Submission to the Cranston Inquiry

    The Cranston Inquiry was set up to look into the events of 24 November 2021, when at least 27 people lost their lives crossing the Channel. In summer 2024 the Channel Crossings team submitted the below evidence to the Inquiry, drawing on our knowledge of the relationship between bordering, smuggling, and irregular journeys, the causes…

  • What are Labour’s plans for asylum, and will they work?

    What are Labour’s plans for asylum, and will they work?

    Small boat Channel crossings are one of the big issues of the 2024 UK election. They have been the main justification for radical changes to UK asylum policy over the past three years, and the response of the current government has rightly received a lot of attention. But with the Labour Party likely to win…

  • Has the UK ever managed to control Channel crossings?

    Has the UK ever managed to control Channel crossings?

    This article was originally published in Open Democracy in February 2024. It was part of a report on deaths at and around the UK border in Norther France. Read the introduction to the series here. UK politicians have been promising to crack down on irregular migration for decades. In recent years, that has largely meant…

  • The Illegal Migration Bill Impact Assessment Digested: Read it and Weep

    Yesterday the Home Office Impact Assessment for the Illegal Migration Bill was released. It is 40 pages, so there is a lot to wade through. Many news outlets picked up on some of the headline figures. But headline figures, which sound very costly, hide a much more troubling reality. The Home Office has no idea if the…

  • Explaining the UK asylum applications increase

    A briefing written for the Channel Crossings project in March 2023. Numbers of asylum applications in the UK have more than doubled since 2020 to 74,751 (see Figure 1), nearing the previous peak in 2002 of 84,132. When looked at in isolation, these numbers seem significant and there has been much speculation around what has…

  • Of the Mobile and the Immobilised: Covid 19 and the Uneven Geographies of Disease Transmission

    This is as essay that I wrote during the pandemic for the edited collection ‘Postcoloniality and Forced Migration‘ Introduction This chapter explores the intersection of three vectors: (im)mobility, (post)colonial inequality, and disease. For decades, the international community has problematised what has been represented as the excessive and dangerous mobility of people originating in the symbolic…

  • Article in the Financial Times

    On 17th December 2022 the Financial Times published an opinion piece authored by the Channel Crossings team (Arshad Isakjee, Thom Davies, Joe Turner, and myself). Below is a version of what was published: *** Just days ago, four people became the latest to lose their lives in the freezing waters of the English Channel. We do not know…

  • Outsourcing Refugee Protection

    This is the transcript of a talk given at a EuroMed Human Rights Watch event on offshoring in May 2022.  In April this year the UK’s Home Office announced a new deal with Rwanda. At the same time, parliament passed new legislation which represents the governments flagship post Brexit immigration and asylum policy. The deal…