Suspicious Deaths

In this chapter we discuss instances where illegalized border crossers are believed to have died directly at the hands of others, including state agents, private contractors working for the state, people smugglers, border vigilantes and other private individuals. Although the chains of responsibility leading to these deaths may be more clearly discernible than the examples of ‘death by policy’ discussed in the previous chapter, they must also be understood as products of the social, legal and political context in which they are embedded. Roberts (2008) points out that even direct and deliberately inflicted violence may be mediated by wider ideological structures that shape what could otherwise be interpreted as isolated, individual actions. The real-world example he gives is the killing by a lone extremist of a prominent female politician in Pakistan for refusing to wear a veil, which is clearly a product of the broader sociopolitical context in that country as well as the individual motivations of the killer. With respect to border control, official depictions of irregular migrants and asylum seekers as deviant, dangerous and illegal create the ideological context in which government, commercial and private actors operate, and which sometimes leads to migrant deaths. The attribution of responsibility to individuals for such deaths may satisfy entirely legitimate demands for equity and justice; and this is of course an important part of accounting for these avoidable border-related deaths.

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