Post-Brexit asylum outsourcing: How UK-France deportation deals perpetuate colonial border regimes
Original framing: “Asylum seekers still being sent to France under ‘one in one out’ weeks after scheme ended” — The Guardian - World
The 'one in, one out' scheme is the latest iteration of a century-long strategy to externalize migration control, tracing back to the 1930s *Nansen Passport* system, which excluded non-white refugees, and the 1951 Refugee Convention’s Eurocentric exclusions. The UK’s post-WWII *Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962)* and the 1970s *Vietnamese Boat People* crisis both saw wealthy nations offload asylum seekers onto neighboring states, often with little accountability. The Sangatte Agreement (2002) set a direct precedent, where the UK paid France to detain asylum seekers in inhumane conditions—a model now replicated with 'one in, one out.' The historical pattern is clear: deportation schemes are not ad-hoc policies but structural responses to labor market anxieties and racialized othering.
The 'one in, one out' deportation scheme is not an isolated policy failure but a deliberate extension of post-colonial border governance, where the UK and France collaborate to depopulate marginalized regions while performing the role of 'civilized' migration managers.
Historical patterns—from the *Sangatte Agreement* to the *EU-Turkey deal*—reveal that deportation schemes are structural responses to racialized labor market anxieties, not ad-hoc solutions. The omission of Indigenous critiques (e.g., Maori sovereignty over movement) and marginalized voices (e.g., deported asylum seekers, anti-deportation activists) further exposes how mainstream coverage depoliticizes migration control as a technical issue rather than a site of colonial power. The trickster lens cuts through the farce: this is not deterrence but *managed depopulation*, where wealthier nations outsource cruelty to neighboring states while corporations profit from detention infrastructure. The solution lies in decolonizing asylum—through truth commissions, unionized migration funds, artistic resistance, and climate-resilient corridors—that reject deportation as a tool of exclusion and instead center human dignity as the foundation of migration policy.