Hello and welcome to Navara FM. I'm your host, Eleanor Penny.

In 1877, Archcolonialist and mining magnate Cecil Rhodes wrote in his confessions of faith,

it is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory, and we should

keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of

the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, the most honourable race the

world possesses. In 1909, Judge Rantoul of the King's Council

delivered a speech in Bishop's Gate entitled The British Empire, Its Greatness, Glory and

Freedom, in which he told stories of criminal aliens, the Russian burglar, the Polish

thief, the Italian stabber, the German swindler, people whom this country would be glad

to be rid of and have been practically kicked out of their own. In the matter of alien

immigration, he said, Empire should be placed before party advantage. In 2013, then home

secretary Theresa May launched a campaign to send fleets of vans into ethnically diverse

areas of the country bearing the slogan, In the UK illegally, Go home or face arrest.

The operation was nominally to test the idea that people would depart voluntarily if

they were made aware that there was a near and present danger of being arrested for

being here quote unquote illegally. The following year, the hostile environment plan was rolled

out, suffice to say that the story of migration in Britain is not a simple calculation of

who arrives and who leaves, but how the creation of the border, how the carving out of legal

categories of citizen, subject, alien, migrant, refugee function as a form of state craft

as a way of underwriting the broader goals of the British imperial project. All of this

and more is explored in the book, bordering Britain, law, race and empire, written by

the academic Nadine El Anani. Nadine is a reader in law at Birkbeck School of Law and

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