There are other echoes, too, other ways the past wraps itself around and shapes the present.
St Helena, one of the islands considered by the Home Office as a potential option for current policy proposals, played a grim role in the slave trade in the Caribbean. In 2012, an archaeological excavation on the island found the bodies of an estimated 5,000 slaves who had died in the custody of the British Navy after being liberated from slavers ships, interred in mass graves.
Australia, too, has a long history of using islands for those it deems ‘undesirable’ – from the creation of ‘leper colonies’ in the late 1800s, to the use of Flinders Island, Palm Island and Rottnest Island – all used to detain Indigenous peoples in the way of settlers’ colonial expansion.
Australia currently uses off-shore detention in its neighbouring islands of Manus, Nauru and Christmas Island as part of the country’s ongoing immigration deterrence strategy, Operation Sovereign Borders. The practice is “an affront to the protection of human rights”, in the words of the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights.
Behrouz Boochani spent six years in the Australian offshore detention regime. He has powerfully described how the supposed deterrence amounts to “a system of torture and banishment”, which destroys mental health with the despair of indefinite waiting, disgust at living conditions, and shame of incarceration. Elahe Zivardar, another former detainee in the system, makes similar points in this openDemocracy article, setting out how “every single element in the centre was designed to torture the inmates” and describes its buildings as “the architecture of evil”.
Deterrence is profitable
Boochani also shows how the Australian government attempts to evade responsibility for inhumane treatment of asylum seekers by contracting out the exiling of undesirable people, using “a system by which the Australian government could control our bodies through contractors and guards but not be held responsible for the horrors that were visited upon us”.
The UK has a long history of ensuring someone makes profits from immigration control. The 1905 Aliens Act allowed the Home Office to charge shipping companies for the cost of removal of migrants. And current day charging regimes (including charges for healthcare and confiscation of wages of “illegal” workers) are at the centre of immigration policy and practice.