Introduction: Before the Law

Summary

In early 2002 the minister of state for immigration, Lord Rooker, reportedly answered a blunt ‘no’ to the question of whether there existed any legal avenues by which legitimate refugees might enter the UK.

Matthew Gibney

A scandal for postcolonial studies

To begin with, two scenes (see Figures 1 and 2).

A silhouetted figure flees an on-rushing jeep. He darts off-road towards a steep, dusty slope, and a tall metal fence marking the border between the US and Mexico. The man – an irregular Mexican migrant – is on the US side, and is attempting to evade a US border patrol vehicle by returning to the border he has just crossed. Writing of this image, a photograph by Sebastião Salgado, Salman Rushdie makes a claim for the migrant as a seminal figure: ‘for Salgado, as for myself, the migrant, the man without frontiers, is the archetypal figure of our age’. More afraid, as Rushdie says, ‘of the men bearing down on him […] than of the impoverished life he thought he had left behind’, the running man is attempting to ‘unmake his bid for freedom’. The image provokes questions for Rushdie about the freedoms such border protection measures are designed to preserve, and acknowledges the ‘hierarchy of mobilities’ that characterizes the globalized world. The man's decision to flee to the border is the false agency of the global poor – the impression of choice where none really exists.