Coloniality and the racialisation of refugee protection: Reflections on asylum law and policy in South America and the UK

The Haitian refugee crisis’ pivotal role in 20th century US asylum policy has been well-documented, but its significance beyond the US has been less explored. This seminar examines the reception of Haitians on the move in South America from 2010 onwards, and explores how the continuing legacies of colonialism were reflected in racialised asylum and immigration policies in the region and their impacts on Haitian protracted displacement. Haitians were one of the first groups, and still are one of the main nationalities, to venture the extremely dangerous Darién Gap, leaving South America to move northwards. Reflecting after over a decade of Haitians in the region, this dynamic highlights the inherent ‘antiblackness’ in protection regimes towards certain displaced groups in South America, and how reception schemes actually works as a way to deter movements, impede integration, and silently provoke further displacement. These themes of racialised legislation and coloniality persist in the relational UK case study focused on the height of the ‘European refugee crisis’ and its afterlives. Departing from a decolonial feminist epistemological vantage point, the UK case study uses affect as both theory and method. It examines the ways in which racialized mythologies about young Black men, and appeals to imperial nostalgia, were central to how British political elites manufactured consent for the imperial border regimes of ‘Europe.’ It argues that the routine production of Black bodies as deathworthy within Europe’s mobile, multiple and proliferating border regime, acutely mark the durability of European and British colonial violences. This tale of two seemingly different contexts explores how colonialism and historical racialised approaches to immigration continue to influence law and policy in different parts of the world today. 

This session is part of the 15th International Refugee Law Seminar Series: Moments in Refugee History and the Development of the Modern Refugee Regime: Understanding refugee law and policy today

This seminar series probes key thematic issues relating to the law and policy of refugee protection today, using important – and often less-recognised – moments in refugee history to further our understandings of developments in these fields. 

By providing a forum for scholars of history and contemporary refugee law and policy to engage, the cross-disciplinary series will explore the enduring legacies of key geo-political events and processes such as nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism, in the evolution of the today’s refugee regime. 

This series is convened by the Refugee Law Initiative in collaboration with Refugee History.