This is a companion piece to ‘Asylum Denial Beyond Borders: The International Dimensions of British Responses to Tamil Asylum Seekers in the 1980s‘ recently published in History Workshop Journal 98 (open access).
In November 2024, dozens of Tamil asylum seekers who had been languishing on the Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia were told that they could enter the UK. It was welcome news for the Tamils who had described their experiences on the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) as “hell”. Since being intercepted at sea and detained in 2021, the UN and other human rights organisations reported on the appalling conditions facing the asylum seekers, such as attempted suicide, sexual assault, and declining safety. As one Tamil explained to the BBC, ‘we are mentally and physically exhausted…We are living a lifeless life. I feel like I am like a dead man’. The worsening conditions were exacerbated by uncertainty surrounding their asylum claims, as fear of deportation to Sri Lanka persisted. Moreover, the BIOT administration went to new lengths to prevent the Tamils from resettling in the UK – including sending some of those detained in Diego Garcia to Rwanda as part of a controversial new agreement in 2023 between the British and Rwandan governments.
This latest story of Tamil asylum seekers reflects Britain’s longstanding history of border violence. Although the Tamils have been immigrating to Britain since the mid-twentieth century, it was not until the 1980s when asylum seekers began arriving that the government pulled new policy levers to deny them protection. From the British courts to parliament, and the media to wider society, Tamil asylum seekers were overwhelmingly denied entry. They were not the only group.
The late twentieth century ushered in an age of asylum denial that saw the government pursue a general hardening of asylum for several groups fleeing from violent regimes under the agenda of border protection and population management. It implemented a range of mechanisms to deter “unauthorized” arrivals, such as indefinite detention, rejecting court appeals, and carrying out deportations. One striking example of this deterrence came in 1987 when the Thatcher government detained over 100 asylum seekers, including around 60 Tamils, on the Earl William ship in Essex.
Understanding why the government enacted such drastic measures against Tamils however requires us to look beyond borders and domestic factors. Longstanding British governmental relations with the Sri Lankan state, which was a British colony until 1948, is one place to begin. The connections between the two countries when war broke out in the 1980s – diplomatic, military, and aid – were not lost on the refugee advocates, including the Tamil diaspora who urged against Britain’s complicity in the war. At the same time, Tamil asylum seekers struggled to convince authorities that the Sri Lankan government was specifically targeting them due to their race. In other words, Tamil asylum denial was not only a matter of domestic politics, but one that crucially entailed international and transnational dimensions. In ‘Asylum Denial Beyond Borders: The International Dimensions of British Responses to Tamil Asylum Seekers in the 1980s‘, I explore these political machinations by considering British relations with the repressive Sri Lankan regime. To give one example, as the British Secretary of State downplayed the violence that Tamils experienced in the 1980s, the Foreign Commonwealth Office approved arms equipment for sales being made to the Sri Lankan army. Any hesitations expressed by officials approving arms exports to a former colony were quickly quashed, in turn brushing off any arguments about Britain directly contributing to the persecution of a political minority in a former colony. Yet, in exposing Britain’s complicity in the war, the Tamil diaspora went further still. They confronted Britain’s role beyond the war – granting independence for the creation of a Sri Lankan state in 1948 – by recovering silenced histories of longstanding grievances about decolonisation.
In many ways, the detainment of Tamil asylum seekers on the island of Diego Garcia demands that we similarly pay attention to the violent histories beyond the current moment – in this instance it is the British government’s historical role in the mass displacement of the Indigenous Chagossian people. After several years of administrative manipulations and agreements involving Britain and the US, in 1971 the Chagossian people were forcibly removed from Diego Garcia and sent to the Mauritius and Seychelles to make way for a US military base. Since then, the displaced Chagossian community have been unable to return to their homeland due to the Britain’s ‘defence interests, expensive costs to the British taxpayer, and the feasibility‘ of doing so. These histories – and legacies – are not separate to the British government’s refusal to grant asylum to the Tamils. Such a trajectory of strengthening relations with powerful and strategic allies shows us that addressing human suffering takes a backseat to geopolitical security.
At the time of writing from Australia where I live and work, dozens of asylum seekers of different backgrounds have been staging a “24/7” protest to seek permanent protection, despite being failed by successive Australian governments whose cruelty has laid bare long term consequences of living in limbo. The asylum seekers have set up encampments outside political offices to encapsulate the plight of around 8,400 asylum seekers who have been waiting for over a decade for their claims to be fairly processed after being rejected by the discredited “fast track” system. While the Labour government abolished the controversial system and made an election promise to grant permanent protection to asylum seekers, those who arrived by boat after August 2012 remain on temporary visas.
Racialised groups from war torn countries have always found it almost impossible to successfully make claims for permanent protection, especially during election periods when immigration becomes the focus of divisive debates. Of course, this mistreatment should not come as a surprise if we pause to question the formation of the settler colonial Australian state – built and sustained through the dispossession, displacement, and incarceration of First Nations communities.
In a world plagued by multiple crises and geopolitical tensions, the number of people seeking asylum is destined to continue. In this context, it is not surprising that scholarly attention towards forced migrations has reached new heights. As asylum seekers struggle to survive under constant pressures of racialised policies and practices that render them “illegal” and “unauthorised”, historians have been showing that there is nothing inherently new about these contemporary protection crises. Instead, returning to the past not only shows us that asylum denial is the norm, but it also offers a way forward for exposing and, perhaps more importantly, reimagining alternative political possibilities. Exposing the entangled histories of asylum denial over time and space can elicit new ways to map, examine, and subvert the conditions that violently exclude certain groups – it is one way to understand the politics of exclusion.