Security at the Border? The Lived Experiences of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK
Arshia Dutta, Rikke Bjerg Jensen
TL;DR
This study investigates how asylum seekers and refugees in the UK experience border-control technologies and the wider immigration regime, revealing that the initial border encounter acts as a lasting anchor for everyday security and belonging. Using a three-month ethnographic approach at a London refugee charity plus semi-structured interviews with six clients and six staff, the authors show that border screening—especially biometric data collection and automated checks—creates fear, depersonalisation, and a persistent sense of being treated as suspect. They identify three types of caseworker work—explanatory, affective, and procedural—that mediate these experiences and partially restore agency, highlighting the border-processing ecosystem as a distributed sociotechnical arrangement. The paper argues for trauma-informed, multilingual, survivor-centered participatory design that begins before the border and continues into resettlement, while recognizing the political and ethical limits of redesign within a hostile-environment regime. Overall, the work contributes empirical depth to HCI debates on digital borders and outlines design provocations to improve everyday security for refugees and asylum seekers.
Abstract
We bring to light how some asylum seekers and refugees arriving in the UK experience border control and wider immigration systems, as well as the impact that these have on their subsequent lives in the UK. We do so through participant observation in a support organisation and interviews with caseworkers, asylum seekers and refugees. Specifically, our findings show how the first meeting with the border, combined with a 'hostile' immigration system, has a longer-term impact on their sense of belonging. Our observations highlight feelings of insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty that accompanied participants' experiences with immigration systems and processes. We contribute to the growing body of HCI scholarship on the tensions between immigration and (security) technology. In so doing, we point to future directions for participatory and collaborative design practices that centre on the lived experiences and everyday security of asylum seekers and refugees.