The Go-Home Office: border forces since 1962

Speakers include Juanita Cox (Institute of Historical Research), Liam Liburd (Durham University) and Bobby Phe Amis (independent scholar)

How does the Home Office do border control? For this free public event, three historians of UK immigration politics take us inside the workings of the Home Office and its immigration service. From encounters with the bureaucracy of status checking and deportation orders to the culture of the immigration officers tasked with policing the nation’s borders, we will think about what border control looks like in practice, how it has changed over the last sixty years since the introduction of controls on colonial and Commonwealth citizens, and how the Home Office and its workers participate in the politics of immigration and race-making.

Our speakers are experts in the history. Dr Liam Liburd, Assistant Professor in Black British History at Durham University, is writing a history of institutional racism and the British far right. Dr Juanita Cox, Black British History Community Engagement Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, is an oral historian and expert on the history of the Windrush Scandal. Dr Bobby Phe Amis, an independent scholar and operations and curriculum lead at Revoke, is a historian of UK border control and its political cultures.

This event is free to attend (booking required). Presentations and discussion will be followed by a reception serving drinks and snacks.

Speakers and paper titles:

Juanita Cox (Institute of Historical Research), 'Delegating Racism: The Home Office and the Bureaucratic Exclusion of Windrush Britons'

Liam Liburd (Durham), 'Meet the Institutional Racists: Immigration Officers and Powellite Solidarity, 1968-1976'

Bobby Phe Amis (independent scholar), '"A creature of management": the creation of the Immigration Services Union in 1981'

For information contact Katy k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk

The Raphael Samuel History Centre is a collaboration between Birkbeck, University of London and Queen Mary University of London.