THE BORDER is everywhere now...
- Independent Ink
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
The ‘refugee’ is a mythical symbol of hate. The border is in the mind: it’s inside homes, on the streets, inside cafes and market corridors. Whether conscience can still find a place within that space remains uncertain.
By Narendra Pachkhede
The United Kingdom’s Home Secretary, Shabana Mehmood, entered the House of Commons with the air of someone unveiling doctrine rather than policy. Her historic reset of Britain’s asylum system came wrapped in the serene language of administrative clarity and temporary protection. Settlement postponed far into the distance. Support is tied to conduct.
Then came the flourish crafted for the nightly news. Visa restrictions apply to Angola, Namibia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. None of these countries sends more than a negligible number of people across the Channel, yet all were presented as evidence of renewed resolve.
The statistics expose the strategy. In 2024, about 37,000 people crossed the channel, a rise of almost a quarter from the previous year. Six countries accounted for nearly 70 per cent of these arrivals: Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Albania, Syria, and Eritrea.
Zero Refugees etc
Mahmood’s visa targeted countries contribute almost none of them, a fact noted with weary amusement by The Spectatator, which observed that the new bans “have contributed almost nothing to the small-boat problem”.
The policy fills a void of its own making: it tightens rules on nationalities that barely register at the crossings, projecting firmness precisely where no intervention is required. It is a spectacle in the pure sense.
However, in the end, the fight is not over borders, but over who gets to choke the populist Right of oxygen.
Case in point is Denmark’s “zero refugees” doctrine, which has become the lodestar for British strategists because it delivers something Westminster craves: visible results. According to The Local, Denmark granted just 864 asylum requests in 2024, a number described as “historic” and the lowest (aside from 2020). This record has allowed Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen to neutralise her right-wing challengers and govern from a position of strength.
To grasp the scale: in 2014, nearly 15,000 asylum seekers arrived in Denmark; by 2021, that number had fallen to just over 2,000, and in 2024, to 2,333. For a country of almost six million people, these are modest numbers. The notion that Denmark is being overwhelmed collapses under the weight of its own statistics.
It is no surprise, as Sky News reported, that the Far-Right Reform UK fell noticeably quiet once Labour began studying the Danish model. The message is clear.
A hard line on asylum seekers deprives the populist Right of oxygen. The Left warns that such a path is dangerous, even racist, but Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s team sees Denmark not as an aberration, but as the winning formula.
Britain, like much of Europe, is now following it.
Denmark: The quiet blueprint
Mahmood’s performance signals Britain’s full entry into a Western consensus in which asylum is no longer understood as a right but as a conditional allowance. This shift in policy is significant.
The French Marxist philosopher, Etienne Balibar, Professor Emeritus at the Université Paris Nanterre, argues that borders are no longer fixed lines on a map but mobile institutions of control that penetrate everyday life. Indeed, borders no longer sit quietly at the nation’s edge; they have slipped into the routines of daily life, where every ID check, scan, and suspicion turns the mundane into a small frontier where belonging must be proven again.
In our time, as States harden security and outsource migration management, bordering becomes a moralising practice: governments recast mobility as virtue or vice, turning the control of movement into a judgment on who deserves protection, rights, or belonging.
Hospitality, thus, becomes rationed and control becomes moralised.
Mahmood’s move is simply the most recent expression of a broader transformation taking place quietly across Europe, North America and Australia. Denmark provided the political imagination.
The European Union constructed the machinery. Australia supplied the offshore template. The United States offered the mood. Canada refined the practice through curation.
Implying that Canada doesn’t openly shut people out; instead, it carefully selects who gets in. It presents its immigration and humanitarian system as generous, but behind the scenes, it manages, filters, and hand-picks applicants through strict rules and controlled pathways, shaping migration the way a museum curator decides what the public gets to see.
Together, these systems form a new border theology in which humanitarian language is spoken in public while exclusion thickens beneath the surface.
Denmark remains the unlikely architect of this new sensibility. Over the past decade, it has reconceived asylum as a temporary holding space rather than a path to belonging.
Permits are short. Renewals are rare. Revocation is routine.
Family reunification has been reduced to a formal possibility that seldom materialises. What is striking is not the severity but the tone. Danish officials speak in the vocabulary of administrative calm.
End of the welfare state?
What elsewhere would be called deterrence is presented as prudent stewardship. The welfare state is cast as a finite vessel that can be preserved only through disciplined boundaries. The result proved electorally potent.
The Social Democrats neutralised the Far Right not by resisting its logic but by adopting it. Other Western governments studied the method carefully. It produced exclusion without spectacle, severity without noise.
Britain adopted this model but adapted it to stagecraft. The small boats have become the emblem of national vulnerability. They condense anxieties about identity, sovereignty and the uneasy afterlife of Brexit.
Mahmood’s policies mirror Denmark’s, yet the British version is staged for effect. The visa bans reveal the mechanism cleanly. They target states irrelevant to the crossings. Their purpose is not deterrence but demonstration.
They demonstrate a government exercising firmness to reassure a country uncertain about its own direction. Britain governs the border as a theatre. Denmark governs it as an administration. The difference is stylistic, not structural.
The European Union has taken a different route. It has built a vast bureaucratic architecture to fortify its perimeter while preserving the appearance of fidelity to international law. The 2024 Pact on Migration and Asylum expands frontline screening centres, accelerates procedures, and creates new detention-like zones that blur the boundary between waiting rooms and holding facilities.
It allows states to avoid relocating asylum seekers by making financial contributions instead of relocation. It introduces emergency mechanisms that permit the temporary suspension of safeguards.
The European border now resembles a distributed system rather than a line. It is a network of biometric checks, risk algorithms and regulatory exceptions. The construction of a controlled and fortified space outside maintains freedom of movement inside.
UK and the Rwanda scheme
Australia pioneered the most severe expression of this logic. Its offshore processing system placed asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island, far from Australian territory and therefore far from the full reach of Australian law. Arrivals by boat declined sharply. The human cost was devastating.
The suffering, prolonged isolation and psychological trauma of those detained became a matter of international record. The political appeal nevertheless endured. Denmark cited the Australian model while developing third-country proposals, a policy that involves redirecting asylum seekers to a third country for processing.
Britain studied it when designing the Rwanda scheme. The European Union debated its variants. Australia revealed a darker political truth. Hardship becomes easier to justify when it is distant.
The United States illustrates another dynamic: the politics of oscillation. Its asylum policy swings violently with each administration.
Under President Donald Trump, resettlement fell to historic lows, and access to asylum at the southern border was aggressively restricted. Under President Biden, certain humanitarian protections were restored, though deterrence measures persisted.
Trump’s return has ushered in another sharp turn. The United States does not offer a coherent model. It offers a reminder that asylum has become entangled with unresolved questions of national identity.
Canada, bound to the United States by the Safe Third Country Agreement, has been drawn into this oscillation despite its carefully managed public image. Canada now sits uneasily between its celebrated reputation and its tightening asylum regime.
The country continues to be praised for its resettlement programmes and its private sponsorship model, yet its generosity is increasingly reserved for those it chooses abroad. The expansion of the Safe Third Country Agreement to the entire land border has sharply reduced the ability of people to lodge claims on arrival.
As a result, humanitarianism has become a curated practice rather than an open invitation. Protection is still offered, but only on terms that the State defines and controls.
Bill C-12 marks the next step in this shift. The expanded agreement already made it difficult for asylum seekers to reach the door. The new bill now gives the government greater authority to decide who may knock at all.
Asylum is no longer treated as a right that triggers an obligation to hear a claim, but as a discretionary benefit that can be granted or withheld according to political priorities and pressures. Canada is moving from a rights-based approach to one where permission replaces protection, and border management prevails over moral responsibility.
Why refugees? Why now?
This shared transformation raises the question that Mahmood’s performance obscures.
Why has the refugee become such a charged figure in the politics of societies that receive relatively few of the world’s displaced?
The scale of arrivals does not explain the intensity of the debate. The explanation lies elsewhere.
Indeed, three interconnected crises have reshaped Western political culture: a crisis of capacity, a crisis of identity and a crisis of the legal imagination.
The crisis of capacity is visible everywhere. After years of austerity, public institutions operate near the edge of collapse, with hospitals rationing care. Housing is scarce. Municipal budgets hover near insolvency.
These pressures are the result of political decisions, yet refugees often become their symbolic carriers. They are invoked to account for shortages that existed long before their arrival.
This is where centrists and conservatives begin to move together. Both present restrictions as a form of responsible management. Both frame narrowing access as a means of protecting strained institutions.
The politics of control becomes the politics of reassurance.
The crisis of identity is more subtle.
The national imagination feels fragile.
The cosmopolitan optimism of the post-Cold War period has receded. In its place has emerged a guarded nationalism that is easily unsettled by demographic change.
Refugees become symbols in this landscape.
They are made to bear the weight of cultural anxiety.
Centrists promise order. Conservatives promise defence. Although the rhetoric differs, the trajectory is the same. Both present the border as the last perimeter protecting a coherent sense of national self.
The third crisis concerns the authority of the post-war legal order. The Refugee Convention and the broader human rights architecture once served as the moral foundation of Western politics. They were understood as obligations that could not be modified by domestic sentiment.
That settlement has weakened. Governments now reinterpret or suspend their obligations when politically expedient. Denmark designates unsafe regions as safe. Britain considers redefining its relationship to the European Convention on Human Rights. The European Union drafts emergency clauses to circumvent its own safeguards. The law remains in place, but its authority has thinned. It is treated as a guideline rather than a foundation.
These crises converge to produce a political landscape in which the refugee becomes a figure burdened with vast symbolic weight. The convergence between centrists and conservatives is not the result of shared ideology. It is the product of a shared insecurity.
Refugee policy becomes the site where societies negotiate their own doubts. It becomes the terrain on which governments display authority in a moment when authority is scarce.
The result is a striking collapse of old distinctions. Centrists speak of managed capacity, calibrated fairness and responsible protection. Conservatives talk of sovereignty, cultural preservation and decisive action. The vocabulary differs, but the movement remains the same.
Both narrow the circle of belonging. Both treat the border as the stage upon which political competence can be demonstrated. Both use restriction to create the appearance of control without addressing the underlying causes of disorder.
Refugees and national identity
Refugees reveal the direction in which Western societies are travelling. Denmark reveals a welfare state defended through exclusion. Britain reveals a polity that appears firm, yet masks its internal fragility. The European Union reveals a fortified community whose openness is maintained by pressure placed on its outer edge. Australia reveals the convenience of exporting suffering.
The United States reveals the unresolved conflict at the heart of its own historic identity. Canada reveals the comfort of curated virtue.
The refugee is not the threat. The refugee is the mirror.
In that mirror, Western societies encounter their own contraction of ambition, their retreat from universalist ideals, and their growing suspicion that the post-war moral settlement may no longer be sustainable.
Mahmood’s proposals do not solve the deeper dilemma. That dilemma concerns the purpose of the political community. Is it merely a mechanism for allocating resources among insiders? Or is it the institutional expression of a belief that the vulnerable should not be refused protection?
The post-war generation answered one way. The present generation answers another. Yet the question persists. Each narrowing of the border narrows the idea a society holds of itself.
The border is everywhere now.
Whether conscience can still find a place within that space remains uncertain.
Narendra Pachkhede is a critic and writer who splits his time between London, Geneva and Toronto.
Courtesy Open Canada