Companies are making billions from anti-immigration fears

For many years, politicians have sold the public a simple story: The answer to undocumented immigration is a strong, fortified border. This story has a seductive, common-sense reasoning — but it is also wrong. 

Decades of research has shown that people determined to move, find a way to move. 

And when States respond with border controls, people turn to smugglers to circumvent these controls; and on and on this cycle goes with increasingly militarised borders on the one hand, and increasingly desperate people on the other. 

But politicians don’t want to engage with this research, when it is much more politically palatable to spend billions buying shiny technology from private corporations to prop the myth of strong borders. 

Our guests today have published research that shows the UK government has spent over 3.5 billion pounds in public money to support a sprawling, almost entirely privatised, apparatus to stop desperately vulnerable people from using small boats to cross the English channel and apply for asylum in the United Kingdom.

Listen in to learn more

This research was part of the collaborative Channel Crossings project who are Dr Arshad Isakjee, Dr Thom Davies and Dr Tesfalem Yemane, Dr Lucy Mayblin and Dr Joe Turner. 

We would like to thank Corporate Watch and Tipping Point UK in supporting this work. 

Here is a link to the initial report: https://channelcrossings.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/border-security-contracts-briefing.-april-2025.docx-1-1.pdf

To find out more about the border security economy see here https://corporatewatch.org/category/companies/ and here https://www.tni.org/en/publication/financing-border-wars

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In Solidarity is openDemocracy’s podcast about people, power, and politics. It’s hosted by openDemocracy editor-in-chief Aman Sethi, an award-winning journalist and author of A Free Man. Support the show by visiting openDemocracy.net/donate.

Credits:

Presented by Aman Sethi

Edited and produced by James Battershill, Ayodeji Rotinwa & Carla Abreu

Theme song ‘Odyssey’ performed by Edward Abela

00:00 Introduction

03:30 The manufactured border crisis

06:30 How to understand borders

11:20 The economic migrant 'myth'

15:09 The Borders industrial complex

18:08 Technological underpinnings

22:20 Investigating surveillance contracts

25:09 Companies profiting from war and refugees

28:25 We're all complicit

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