Devastating to families from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, in particular--countries where US meddling has long stoked the violence and instability that cause migrants to flee in the first place--this and other policies of the Trump era can be understood, as Ananya Roy has put it, as an ideological commitment to, and renewal of, “white power in statecraft”.

Today, the displaced in Calais are campless. Their lives are lived furtively in forests on the fringes of the city while they seek clandestine passage to the UK. Just a few years ago in 2015 & 2016, this border zone was home to the notorious makeshift camp known as the Calais Jungle. The Jungle was visually impressive: home to over 8,000 people at its largest, it was chaotic, sprawling and filthy yet organised, a dense little city of its own. Despite the makeshift precarity of the camp, remarkable places of commerce, learning and religious practice emerged (Mould 2017).

In 2015 our TV screens, newspapers and social media were full of stories about ‘flows’ of migrants ‘pouring’ into Europe, set alongside photos and videos of people packed into boats at sea or meandering in long lines across fields. This vocabulary, and the images that accompanied it, suggested that migration was a natural force: like a flow of water that cannot be stopped, governed only by the forces of gravity. Now, this same language is being used to describe the ‘migrant caravan’ of the thousands of Hondurans leaving the violence of their home country and attempting to journey to the US.

After several days spent visiting hospitality centres for refugees in Serbia, we decide to change our plans and take a detour via Bosnia-Herzegovina on our way back home to Trieste. We have just learned during our meetings with the representatives of the Serbian Commissariat for the Refugees that the irregular refugee route towards the EU is now deflected towards that country, and in particular that in Velika Kladuša, a few kilometres away from the Croatian border, a new set of informal encampments was taking shape.

In 2015 and 2016 Bosnia-Herzegovina received almost no migrants during the humanitarian emergency that saw nearly one million refugees moving north to reach the rest of Europe, establishing an informal corridor along the so-called Western Balkan Route

In the summer of 2018, Trieste – an Italian port city a few kilometres away from the Slovenian border – seemingly overnight became a new arrival point for the informal refugee Balkan Route.

Why are Indigenous children dying in ICE custody? The short answer is that they came with their parents, who did not have the language skills, relationship to state bureaucracies or support of their own consulate that would help them navigate the bureaucracy of asylum.

In December 2014, Australia’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) awarded the AU$32 million contract for refugee resettlement on the Republic of Nauru to the newly formed Australian NGO consortium Connect Settlement Services.

We begin in a small town nestled in the hot, humid lowlands between the mountains of Guatemala and the highlands of central Chiapas – a town near the Mexico-Guatemala border that we call “Santiago.” Here, in this small dispersed community, the national boundaries that define the NAFTA region are worked out and mobilized.

The assimilation of zigenare seems to us an impossible quest.[1] The only possible solution is to get them out of the country in one way or another.

One to two days of every week, a police station in Patchway on the outskirts of Bristol, designates one of its small, windowless offices into a space used by the Home Office, for the ordained purposes of “immigration control”. The police station itself is a large concrete slab of a building, its contemporary glass façade giving it a sleek, corporate feel.

The meanings were multiple; the ironies deliberate and critical. We later learned from a visit to the Kempsons, UK artists-turned-humanitarians who live on the northern tip of Lesvos, that many of these life-jackets are worse than useless. Sold to refugees for a small fortune in Turkey, they often turn out to be fakes filled with foam that absorbs water.

In recent weeks, concerns about the Trump administration’s policies of family separation and child detention have sparked a firestorm of media attention and a powerful public outcry. In response, the administration has become increasingly vocal and radical in asserting the legitimacy of its actions and rhetorically assassinating any claims to refuge or protection individuals and families in detention offer in their defense.

‘Hostile environment.’ This phrase has circulated widely in light of the Windrush scandal. Rather than an accidental glitch, this case exposes how hostility, fear and unease are in fact the intended ‘ambitions’ of border control.

The ascent of Donald Trump to the White House and the frequency with which organized white supremacists have reappeared in western democracies has made it impossible to ignore contemporary white nationalism. Meanwhile, the fact that Trump has hung a portrait of the slaver and Indigenous genocidaire Andrew Jackson in his seat of power serves as a reminder that these politics aren’t so alien to American institutions as many liberal critics would like to think (on Jackson, see Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015: 95-116).