Immigration Infrastructure Theatricalised in Illegalised and The Claim

Abstract

February 2019. I’m at a protest, talking to a man outside a grey, nondescript building near London Bridge. ‘My daughter’s had to emigrate, she can’t find work’, he tells me. ‘My factory has closed down’. He looks at the grey building. ‘This is the problem’, he says; ‘they are the problem’. Becket House is empty today; normally a queue forms in the cold early mornings, when people who are seeking asylum in the UK, and others with temporary immigration status, come for their weekly or fortnightly ‘compliance’ checks. Vans parked round the back, out of sight, wait to take some into detention centres indefinitely; the force used by officers has been described as ‘disproportionate’. 1 The man’s pink face is flushed against a grey sky cleft by the Shard, a 300 metre glass and steel tower rising behind him. I lift my hand towards the distant windows of luxury offices. ‘The problem is there’, I say. But he turns again towards the dull concrete of Becket House; sees only the ghosts of Black and brown bodies queuing around the corner. June 2019. ‘Amara’ has taken me to Piccadilly Circus, where she slept rough one night after escaping from abusive employers as a live-in domestic worker, and finding herself undocumented and homeless in London. Now, through a screening procedure named the National Referral Mechanism, she is awaiting a Home Office decision about whether she has been deemed a victim of ‘modern slavery’. While she waits, she has no right to work, and receives approximately £5 per day subsistence. It’s been almost three years. 1. HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, ‘Report on an Unannounced Inspection of the Short-Term Holding Facility at Becket House’, June 18, 2019, https://www. justiceinspectorates. gov.uk/hmiprisons/ wp-content/uploads/ sites/4/2019/09/ Becket-House-web2019.pdf (accessed December 9, 2020). Contemporary Theatre Review, 2021 Vol. 31, No. 4, 409–421, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1969557