Precaution, punishment, performance - the ambivalent space of immigration detention

Detention is a proliferating international response to mobile populations of undocumented or ‘illegal’ migrants and asylum seekers. Justified as a proportionate measure to fortify the border in a political terrain where immigration control is ever more entangled with efforts to achieve national security, detention produces liminal and exceptional (after Agamben) border zones where political inclusion is placed in question. The spaces of immigration detention are where the limits and meaning of citizenship, securability and belonging are in contested negotiation. They are also where traditional penal rationales and disciplinary practices for managing convicted prisoners become newly configured in confrontation with detention populations. Drawing on ethnographic research among staff in a UK immigration removal centre (IRC), this paper explores the suspicious and watchful practices of detention as they are experienced and embodied by individuals. Immigration detention makes recourse to the penal logic of the prison, but, for staff at the IRC, punishment and precaution blur and assume new meanings in the context of the detention centre as a securitised border zone.