Bloch, Alice, and Liza Schuster. "At the Extremes of Exclusion: Deportation, Detention and Dispersal". Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol.28, No.3 (2005): 491-512.

Bloch, Alice, and Liza Schuster. "At the Extremes of Exclusion: Deportation, Detention and Dispersal". Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol.28, No.3 (2005): 491-512.

• Mass deportation of people has been relatively rare in British history, with the first modern instance being an aborted campaign to deport Eastern European Jewish refugees from London during the 1920s out of concerns that their presence was lowering wages to 'starvation point' (493).
• The 1905 Aliens Act empowered immigration officers to refuse entry to 'undesirables' but this provision was poorly enforced and the only racial group descriminated against appears to be German Roma. This was greatly expanded under the 1914 Aliens Restriction Act, which allowed for the deportation of enemy aliens, in practice targeted mainly at German nationals (493-494).
• The Aliens Order of 1920 further empowered the Home Office to deport any foreigner 'not conducive to the public good', expansive powers not used due to lack of resources to monitor resident aliens. These powers were used extensively during WWII through the deportation and internment of Axis citizens, including deportation to Canada, although these regime was partially abandoned following the death of 700 internees in a bombing in 1940 (494).
• The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, quickly followed by similar measures in 1968, 1969, and 1971, removed prior protections of Commonwealth citizens from deportation from Britain. Although allowing for deportation, lack of resources still meant that refusal of entry was much more common than deportation. The laws were developed in response to a perceived crisis of immigration from Africa and Asia, particularly Asian refugees fleeing Uganda (495).
• These laws, and the 1971 British Nationality Act in particular, essentially changed the relationship between Britain and the Commonwealth along racial lines, allowing UK-born nationals and those with family in the UK to claim British citizenship, while severely restricting the rights of other Commonwealth citizens (495).
• The 1988 Immigration Act was introduced during a period of increased use of deportations, largely due to domestic labour pressures and to placate supporters of Enoch Powell. It removed the right to appeal deportation before a judicial body, allowing for a more rapid and simplified process of deportation and massively increasing the prevalence of deportations (495).
• Despite the increased use of deportations by the British government, only a minority of those receiving orders of deportation are actually deported from the country. Some receive legal protections, cannot be located, or because the government cannot determine the deportee's country of origin. Oftentimes the government simply gives up in difficult circumstances, although other times severe measures are used including force or deportation to designated safe countries besides the country of origin (496).
• The British government still lacks the resources and information to effectively enforce laws regarding deportation, and enforcement of immigration through deportation is extremely ineffective. Instead, the high visability of deportation serves mainly to reassure domestic audience that the government is doing something (497).
• The only legal protection from deportation exists in the form of the Geneva Convention, which asserts in Article 51 that refugees cannot be deported. As a result, only those not claiming asylum or having been rejected from asylum are deported. Although cases have been noted of deportees being tortured upon return to their home countries (497).
• Detention and internment of immigrants, deferentiated from imprisonment because no specific crime has been committed, has a long history in Britain, notably the internment of citizens of the Central Powers and Axis nations during the World Wars. The practice has mainly been limited to wartime internment, although IRA terrorists and Islamist terrorists have been indefinitely detained on suspicion despite public contraversy (497-498).
• Both of these forms of internment, that of wartime enemy nationals and suspected terrorists are emergency responses to present and immediate threats to the security of the state. The detention of these persons ended after the period of immediate danger (498).
• The power of detention was first granted to immigration officers in the 1920 Aliens Act, although this was greatly expanded in the 1971 Immigration Act, which allowed for the detention of foreigners while their right to stay was being decided. No controls over the length or conditions of this period of detention are provided (499). Actual numbers of detainees were small, as most seeking asylum were either quickly approved or deported (499-500).
• Detainment of migrants increased greatly during the 1990s as a result of the massive increase in asylum seekers from former Yugoslavia. Detention either occured from arrival until permission to stay was officially granted, or after a person had been refused but was waiting for their appeal to be heard by a court. Special detention facilities for migrants were constructed during the turn of the 21st Century (500).
• The most contentious element of detainment has been the detainment of children, which is allowed under the 1971 Immigration Act, but was never used for more than a few days prior to a family being deported. Government policy under the Blair government expanded the practice, and families with children are no detained indefinitely (502-503).
• Some European countries have limits on the length of time that migrants can be detained. Italy and France have a maximum period of 30 to 60 days during which a decision on asylum must be made. Germany has a maximum time limit of 18 months of detention, although a period of six months is more common. The UK maintains no limits on detention periods, although the majority of migrants are released within four months; cases of three years of detention have been reported, however, in cases where identity is difficult to prove (500-501).
• Detainees in the UK have the right to request bail, however the impetus is on the detainee to request a bail hearing and they are not informed of the right, meaning that almost all migrants remain in detention facilities (501).
• Beginning in 1999, the UK built special detention facilities, or 'removal facilities', to house migrants whose cases were being decided. Despite these purpose-built facilities, 15% of migrants are still held in regular prisons (502).
• The immigration of Black people to the United Kingdom from the Empire following the end of WWII caused a racist backlash in White urban areas where settlement was concentrated, particularly over large Black populations in schools. In 1965, the Department for Education and Science order local school districts to limit Black students to 30% of any school population through busing to other White-majority schools. This policy was abandoned during the late 1970s (503).
• The British government used 'dispersal' tactics of preventing migrant populations from settling together during period of large uniform migration, like Ugandan Asian refugees in the 1970s or Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s. Local bodies were created to prevent these groups from settling in areas with large minority populations, where social services were limited, or where ethnic tensions were high (503-504).
• The policy of dispersal failed for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was poorly enforced until the late 1970s, meaning that migrants like the Ugandan Asians simply left their designated areas and moved to larger Asian communities. When migrants did respect dispersal policies, they resulted in social alienation and diminished employment opportunities because family and friend networks were not accessable (504-505).
• The British government again employed dispersal policies to settle refugees from Bosnia and Kosovo, on the argument that this would distribute support costs evenly among local governments. This policy was later institutionalized by the Blair government in the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, which also forced migrants to stay were they had been placed by limiting provision of public housing to the areas were they had been settled (505-506).
• The continued failures of this policy are demonstrated by the high proportion, slightly less than 50%, of migrants who chose to sacrifice public housing rights in order to live elsewhere in the UK closer to ethnic communities or friends and family (506-507). 
• Dispersed populations continue to diminish in areas were they constitute a small minority, because their status as an extreme minority makes they visible and more likely to be targets of racist or anti-migrant violence (507).
• The cost-orientation of government dispersal policy following 1999 led to the placement of migrants in the cheapest possible public housing, often complexes which had been deemed unsafe, violent, or insalubrious. This exposed migrants, especially when they constituted extreme minorities, to violent attacks by other residents (508).
• Deportation, detention, and dispersal have been elements of British migration policy since the turn of the 20th Century, however these provision were usually designed to respond to particular crises, either during wartime or in response to large numbers of migrants. In recent decades, however, these tactics have become consistent parts of state policy during normal periods of peacetime (508).
• These changes have mostly occured during the 1990s, a phenomenon the author blames on the increased public fear and uncertainty following the end of the Cold War and the rise of international terrorism in the late 1990s. In circumstances of increased uncertainty and unconventional threats, states are attempting to control migration to a greater extend to reassure freightened citizens (509).
• "Deportation, detention and disperal are employed in spite of the vast expense involved and of their inefficacy in controlling entry. [...] their function is primarily symbolic. [...] Where this treatment is normalized it signifies that this group represents an extraordinary threat and is to be feared. This fear enables the distancing and alienation that reinforces the legitimacy of the measures used, strengthening the crisis spiral and offering [...] justification for further extraordinary measures" (509-510).