Borders and Fences

For the benefit of Frankie the Flat Coated Retriever and her fans, we’re not saying that she will always come second behind her older Labrador sister, but we’re not not saying that, either.

The Guardian article we refer to about the Poland-Belarus border is Jon Henley’s “‘People treated like weapons’: more deaths feared at Poland-Belarus border” (2021).

We quote from Susan Kouguell’s interview with Agnieszka Holland (2024) from the Script website.

For more on Polish politicians likening Green Border to Nazi propaganda, see Philip Oltermann’s Guardian piece (2023). 

For an image of Mexico-US border at San Diego/Tijuana, see this CNN article (2021). We’ve talked about this particular site before, in Episode 1.6 on Border Art, when we discussed Javier Tellez’s One Flew over the Void (Bala Perdida) from 2005. You can watch it here.

You can find Georgia Cole’s piece “Shabana Mahmood is wrong: refugee status was never ‘permanent from day one’” on the Conversation website.

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Transcript

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes, and the Stories They Tell. We are Zalfa Feghali…

Gillian Roberts: …and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands from different countries with multiple passports.

Zalfa Feghali: Hi, Gillian.

Gillian Roberts: Hi, Zalfa.

Zalfa Feghali: How are you? I now get to ask this on the air regularly. Well, semi-regularly.

Gillian Roberts: I'm good. How are you?

Zalfa Feghali: I'm fine. So we're here today thinking about our next keyword. And we're thinking about fences and walls and physical boundaries. 

Gillian Roberts: That's right. 

Zalfa Feghali: And in service of this plan, you have enacted or exacted, I should say, maybe not revenge, payback on the things that I have made you read. You have asked me to watch something in preparation for this episode on fences and borders and walls. And that film is the 2023 film Green Border, which we're going to spend some time talking about today. How do you feel about that?

Gillian Roberts: I feel OK about that. How do you feel about that? 

Zalfa Feghali: Well, I suppose my question to you is, do you really feel OK about that? Yeah, I mean, I think our hardcore listener will understand what we mean, and hopefully our listeners will understand what we mean, when we say that Green Border is a film that is really important, that we both really think should be watched, but one that is not easy to watch.

Gillian Roberts: No, no.

Zalfa Feghali: So why did you make us do this?

Gillian Roberts: Why did you? Yeah. So just to fill in for those who hadn't heard some previous episodes, Zalfa had been the impetus behind our discussion of Paul Lynch's Prophet Song in our first season when we were talking about borders and speculative fiction. 

Zalfa Feghali: You're welcome. 

Gillian Roberts: Thank you. And then earlier in this, our second season, we were looking at the keyword of water by means of looking at the Vincent Delacroix short novel, Small Boat. 

Zalfa Feghali: You're welcome again, everybody. 

Gillian Roberts: Yes. Both very excellent examples of literary expression in relation to borders, both really tough reads. So, yes, exactly, I am exacting a certain amount of, is it revenge? Is it equilibrium? I don't know. 

Zalfa Feghali: Very transactional of you. 

Gillian Roberts: … we talk about Green Border. But I suppose it's something I've been wanting to talk about for a long time since I first saw it a couple of years ago. And I became aware of this film because I was teaching a completely different film by its director, Agnieszka Holland, on a module I used to teach on film adaptation. And I was teaching her adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square. And when I was preparing for that lecture, I was like, oh, Agnieszka Holland has this new film out called Green Border. That's probably something that I should see at some point. And I knew that it had had some success at the Venice Film Festival, having won a special jury prize. And then it came to a cinema near me. 

Zalfa Feghali: You watched it in public. 

Gillian Roberts: I watched it in public. Everything happened in public. 

Zalfa Feghali: That's exciting. 

Gillian Roberts: The embodied experience of watching that film happened in public and I have been wanting to talk about it for ages. I should say I haven't seen it since. Zalfa has had the pleasure and privilege of watching it much more recently when I sent the DVD. I think I physically handed it to you last time I saw you. I actually had thought about teaching it in another module this year and then decided not to traumatize the students. So I had no outlet previously for talking about this film. But I was thinking, again, in terms of our keywords, thinking about the fence. And there is a really important role that the fence plays in this film. So it seemed like as good a time as any to introduce Green Border into the conversation.

Zalfa Feghali: So for those who haven't seen it, the film takes place at the kind of European frontier, we might describe it. And particularly the Polish-Belarus border. And it follows a group of refugees, somebody from Afghanistan, a Syrian family, others as well.

Gillian Roberts: There are some French-speaking Africans as well.

Zalfa Feghali: …young men or young kids. So a lot of them are arriving in Belarus and then crossing over into Europe. And into Poland. Yes, exactly, via Poland, thinking about their experience, the physical and non-physical places that they have to cross over, but also taking the perspective—so it's divided into three parts—taking the perspective of a border guard and taking a perspective of an activist, if I'm not mistaken, who is supportive of refugees and their experiences, which are not, as you might imagine, not very nice, which is why I'm annoyed with Gillian for making me watch this. So what's really interesting is that it's called, I guess I'm just going to ask you a bunch of questions now, it's called Green Border. And a lot of the time, this does happen out in a forest, very marshy. And that description is a pretty tragically important, a quite marshy forest.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. No spoilers. Well, maybe spoilers later. But yeah, the marshy-ness is relevant.

Zalfa Feghali: I guess it's that natural landscape that is not a fence, but it's very much treated as a physical kind of landscape impediment to crossing over and is a place of extreme danger. But the same amount of danger is produced by human beings on one side or the other of this green space. So I guess it's almost this paradoxical imagery of green. Yay, we like green and border.

Gillian Roberts: Green means go, except… 

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, exactly. And so I wondered what you had to say about that sort of juxtaposition of imagery.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, as you know, I always think of the Sound of Music when I think of border crossings. 

Zalfa Feghali: Naturally, yes. 

Gillian Roberts: Just let's have a walk across the Alps and we'll be free. So there's this sense of this natural landscape that, you know, doesn't respect borders, right, that exceeds borders. And yet it is still, well, there are still very much, and we'll get to that, you know, human-made impediment. But, yeah, the sense of sort of using this natural space as a progression from one country to another and the actions of people, you know, the traffickers and the border guards, as well as what the elements are doing. Right? And the risks that people undertake. And it's not just at this place. There's lots of stories as well. People trying to get to Canada to claim asylum and losing fingers because of frostbite and things like that. So the way in which the natural world is in itself a threat, not like a targeted threat, but a threat to people crossing and the vulnerability that is produced by that kind of encounter with the natural world.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. That is very reminiscent. I mean, we can think of lots of examples of border policies that predicate themselves very cynically, of course, around the natural landscape, which is inhospitable.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: So I'm thinking in the US and the US-Mexico border of the Prevention Through Deterrence initiative, which was just like, well, once folks who are crossing understand that they will probably suffer a lot and possibly lose their lives crossing because of the inhospitable environment, then they won't come anymore, which is extremely cynical, cruel, and also doesn't work. And a gross sort of dehumanization of a whole group of people. Thinking about how natural landscapes work one way or another can be inviting. Just thinking, you know, going back to one of our other keywords, hospitality, can be very inviting, but also can be quite dangerous.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, well, and I was just thinking that, you know, the hostile environment in the UK. Quite literally. But it's also metaphorical if you think about environment, right? But then it's both literal and metaphorical at the same time. And then we think about these actual physical, natural environments and what the dangers and possibilities that they present. So, you know, there's an article from The Guardian that's from a few years ago now, 2021, talking about this very border crossing, right, from Belarus and into Poland, and describing the area as a “densely wooded border zone,” and the danger that it presents in this article, primarily to asylum seekers from Iraq, Iran, and Syria, where they are trying to get through this densely wooded border zone, quote, “with no food or shelter in subzero temperatures.” So a lot of what we see in the film, you know, it's just a rendering of what is there. So although it's not, this is not a documentary, but it is very rooted in actual events. And certainly the director, Agnieszka Holland, has spoken about the work that they did to prepare to make this film. And how, you know, they were speaking to refugees and to activists and to border guards. So that kind of tripartite structure of the film is a reflection of the sense that they had to talk to all of these people to understand what is happening in that space. But one of the things I'm thinking about in relation to your question about the natural world is, and Holland said in an interview, quote, “I wanted a metaphorical quality and timelessness. You see the cell phones, but at the same time, it could be 1942. For the local people, a lot of imagery was striking, especially in that area because of the tragic situations that took place there during the Holocaust. It was close to the death camp where there was the uprising of the prisoners who were hiding in the same forest. There are a lot of hidden memories in that forest. To see these similar images in the film shows that it can come back.” Unquote.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, that's really powerful. Right. And I guess my questions about film are always around form as well as content. You know, the film is… 

Gillian Roberts: As they should be. 

Zalfa Feghali: Indeed. So again, for those who haven't watched it and for those who have, the film is in black and white. It's almost a common sense question, but what is the effect of it being in black and white, building on the passage from Holland that you've just read?

Gillian Roberts: I think that it is definitely part of that timelessness. And it's interesting that it's in black and white, because it's also a film that has a colour in the title that we don't see. It's paradoxical from that point of view. But I think obviously there would have been a lot of films in the ’40s in black and white and then a lot of films that try to render that period, you know, from a more contemporary perspective, also in black and white. And I wonder, too, I mean, are you thinking about it in potentially ethical terms?

Zalfa Feghali: I was, yeah, I mean, there's the literal black and whiteness of the film, but also the way that it bleeds into the morally grey areas that lots of the characters occupy.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, like the border guard, for instance, who is complicit in some of the most horrific acts of violence that I have ever seen on screen and got to watch in public.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. Scene depicted on screen. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

Gillian Roberts: And because the film demonstrates to us we know how messed up he is as a result of the work that he is required to do in his job. I think it's interesting in terms that the film is interested in the context of everyone involved, but it's like also not letting anyone off the hook at the same time.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, I mean, when I started, and this was just my personal response, when I started watching it, and because I think you had probably two or three years ago told me, “I've just watched this film.” And so I knew sort of what to expect. So I initially started watching it in small increments, shall we say. And initially I thought, I don't know how I feel about this. I don't know if I want to see the border guard’s point of view. I don't know if I really care about the activist who's kind of potentially could come off as a bit of a white saviour. And I'd much rather see what's happening with these families, these refugees, but also I think the interconnectedness or the implicatedness and the entanglements of all of these groups demonstrates that none of us are not implicated. And that's where the black and whiteness also appeals to me, because it isn't a black and white issue. But having the different points of view, having it in black and white, I think really foregrounds the entanglement and the complicity of our role as viewers, right? That we can't just sit there and publicly or otherwise, and have a response to it, the response matters. And that is political. And in the same way that the refugees on screen are being depicted to us, we're in there with them. Not literally, but it's part of our story as well.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. And I'm thinking about, you mentioned the activist sort of potential white saviour figure. But it's interesting how she is like an amateur, isn't she? She's an amateur activist. So she gets involved with a local group, and they are very clear in their own kind of boundaries about what they can do, what they will do, what they won't do. And she doesn't follow those boundaries. So we get a sense of like, this is how, you know, an organized group would operate within their capabilities. And she's like going a bit, a bit rogue. So I think there's also a sense of like, well, what are the ideals that people might have or think they have? And also, what are the mechanisms that have been put in place? But also, what are the gaps like people literally fall through those gaps in some instances. So I thought that was an interesting kind of portrait of her, that we see her privilege.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, she's not denying it and nor is Holland, I think, you know, and it certainly didn't, by the end of the film, I didn't think, oh, OK, I'm quite irritated now. I actually thought, well, that was a relatively honest rendering of a complex positionality.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: And we see that throughout. And I think that's what's really effective about the film, that you're not getting, and it sounds trite, but you're not getting black and white depictions. You are getting full rounded characters, at least for the most part. In this last semester, I've been teaching my module, Literatures of Protest, and it's around reading and political action. And we spent the whole semester thinking about is this text a text of protest and is this film a text of protest and what makes it so? And some of the time it was around depictions of something that people otherwise wouldn't read or wouldn't encounter. Is it around something that's really active that a narrator or a director or a character is saying, this is wrong, make it stop now, you know, really blatant, or is there more excavation that we have to do as readers, as viewers? And so I guess my question to you is, do we think this is I mean, we know what Holland's motivation is here. And it is, you know, it's a very well regarded film, but it's also a very controversial film, right? She gets in, she gets in, not necessarily trouble, but… 

Gillian Roberts: Well, I don't know. I mean, Polish politicians called her a Nazi.

Zalfa Feghali: They weren’t very happy. Yes.

Gillian Roberts: Which, like her dad was Jewish and her stepdad was Jewish and for her to be called a Nazi by her compatriots…

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, less than positive in terms of that.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. I mean, I did not have the privilege of taking your module, so I may not give the correct thesis statement here. However, what I think is really interesting, and maybe especially from the point of view of someone who no longer lives in the EU. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. Oh, yeah. 

Gillian Roberts: Thanks, Brexit. But this is germane, is how the EU is portrayed, right? Because it is the Belarus-Polish border, right? Like that's a national border, but it's also a supranational border. It is a border between the EU and not the EU. And there is a sense from, you know, the really devastating hope from the people who are seeking to cross into the EU is that it's going to be fine as long as we get to the EU. We just have to get to the EU. But then it's like… Is that the EU's not going like, yeah, just come in and we'll rescue you from Belarus. We'll rescue you from that side of the fence. Right? So there's a lot of potential different audiences for this film and it was funded very, à la EU, from, you know, a variety of different national sources. And I should say in keeping, I feel like with an EU ethos, there's lots of different European languages being spoken in the film as well. But I think the lens that it turns on the EU itself as an entity, even though it's looking at one very particular space. And we should say, you know, there are people trying to get somewhere else, right? The Syrian refugees are trying to join family in Sweden, for instance. I thought that that was, I don't know if protest is the thing that I would automatically think of, but it's certainly, I think, a challenge to any idealizing of the EU, where we get this sense of like, okay, this is like Fortress Europe, basically. And the gates are shut.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. And I mean, very early on in the film, you get this group that is travelling together, and they're running through this landscape, and then they sort of stop and they go, we're here, we're in the EU. And they're sort of looking at their phone, but we're in the EU and they celebrate, and they're jubilant for that moment. And almost immediately afterwards, things start going wrong. Well, things had already started going wrong in the film anyway. So yeah, and the sort of welcome, I use that word markedly, the “welcome” that they get is one of violence. Their encounters with border guards when they're being charged for water, like was it 50 euro for water, which the border guard—they take the money and they empty the water out onto the ground. Or there's a thermos of water and they break the thermos so that there's glass in the liquid and then somebody drinks it and is swallowing glass. It's extremely embodied as an experience. There's not just the crossing but the violence that happens when you try to cross that is sort of in addition to the danger of crossing, which, posed by the landscape, but also posed by these political systems. These European values don't come off as, “hey, welcome.” I mean, I don't know that we have ever, ourselves on this podcast, in these conversations, have ever idealized Europe in that way. We would like to live in a country that is part of that system, but we don't think that it's a panacea.

Gillian Roberts: No.

Zalfa Feghali: Europe has taken on a similarly defensive posture to the UK. And then we see this happening in the film as well. While I was watching, two things struck me. They both started with M. So I thought, oh, can I find a third M? And I'm not going to try and go for three, but I was really struck by the role of, and this is the swampiness comes back into things. The way that Holland depicts mud, but mud actually appears several times as a foreshadowing kind of motif through the film. And it's the idea of kind of trudging through mud to get to this place. And the mud is trying to constantly keep our protagonists away from Europe, almost as a warning.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, kind of a sort of stasis.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. And so people are losing shoes in mud. It's a very clear metaphor there. So just thinking about, like you say, that stagnation and the logjam of refugee life, right? And the processes that even if you get across, mud is what you're going to be wading through forever, potentially. And then the other thing that I was thinking of was this idea of masks, that as soon as we see border guards, they're masking up. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. 

Zalfa Feghali: And we're perhaps particularly attuned to border authorities masking up this year in 2026, although it's something that proceeds this year. But Holland kind of captures that really well, that people are walking around and everything's fine as border guards, but then once they are doing their job, they mask up. And I think, a) in the context of a post-COVID film, that's really interesting.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, because the activist’s husband has died of COVID.

Zalfa Feghali: So the mask as something that socially we've been told, like, you don't need to wear a mask anymore, except now this idea of obscuring your face for your own protection from people whom you are ejecting in lots of really violent ways. I thought that was really powerful. So those are my two M's.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Marsh? A little bit similar to the mud. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. Marsh mud. 

Gillian Roberts: We'll think of any other M's. 

Zalfa Feghali: Music, I suppose, is the third M. 

Gillian Roberts: Oh, say more.

Zalfa Feghali: You have music towards the end as a sort of broad unifier for young people. So you have a group of French-speaking African young people who are kind of taken in in this really partly awkward, partly heartwarming, extremely wholesome way. And they make friends with the teenagers in the home that they've been taken in with, and they just start rapping, in a totally different language. All of them are rapping in a language that is not their own. And, you know, do you know this song? Oh yeah, I do know this song. And then, you know, oh, I'll beatbox it. And they just, it's great. That's very heartwarming. A moment that is. 

Gillian Roberts: That's sort of like a borderless moment. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, absolutely. 

Gillian Roberts: In a film that is all about borders.

Zalfa Feghali: And they're sort of standing in the kitchen being teenagers while the adults sort of look on slightly confused, as we tend to, you know. 

Gillian Roberts: Oh, the kids these days. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. Oh, yeah, their music.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, I think we can go with music as the third. I mean, I suppose it's interesting, too, that sort of moment of hopefulness that the film generates is through these borderless youthful moments, primarily, but we also see terrible things happen to other young people in the film. And the worst, is it the worst? The moment that has stuck with me, I suppose. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, we're not ranking. 

Gillian Roberts: We're not ranking. But the point where, because one thing that needs to be stressed is that there is no singular border crossing. There is border crossing after border crossing after border crossing because they keep getting sent back to Belarus. And at one point it is so violent that they actually throw a pregnant woman over the fence.

Zalfa Feghali: In the few places where there are actual fences.

Gillian Roberts: Where there are actual fences. And I think that it's worth talking about the way in which the fence appears in the film, because you have this massive hostile landscape in the forest, the very muddy forest. But then you've got the moment of demarcation, which is the fence that people are, of course, trying to get through. And it's not the most substantial fence perhaps. It could be. But it's certainly a huge barrier.

Zalfa Feghali: We've seen fences that are bigger. 

Gillian Roberts: We've seen bigger fences. But it is such a location of extreme violence. Which you know that's what borders are in so many ways. But the way in which that has been illustrated really powerfully and palpably in this film is … years later it's really seared into my brain for sure. But I mean of course the fence isn't just something that exists in that location in relation to borders. It's, as Zalfa alluded earlier to, you know walls more generally, is a feature of borders. But I think the fence is interesting in distinction to a wall because we think of a wall as something that is far more impenetrable, I suppose. 

Zalfa Feghali: Materially.

Gillian Roberts: Whereas a fence can be made of all kinds of different things, but there's this sense of being able to see through it.

Zalfa Feghali: It's a different kind of permeability between a fence and a wall.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Whenever I'm looking at or showing students images of the Mexico-U.S. border, especially when you get to California and the border, you know, the physical borders extending into the water.

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, yes.

Gillian Roberts: But there's also these slats. You can see through the slats. Yeah. And there's so many things, I think, to say about that border. And we have said many things about that border before. But the fact that it goes out into the water, which is another sort of… I mean, you know, there are, of course, other spaces where the water is the kind of border, right? The Rio Grande or further north, the Great Lakes. But the arbitrariness of it is rendered so palpable, I think, by the fenceness of it, right? The ability to see through and see that on the other side of it looks exactly the same. So there's something about this fence that you can see through that's running through this forest. I don't know. It's just it's sort of underscoring everything that is ludicrous about borders.

Zalfa Feghali: Borders as ludicrous.

Gillian Roberts: Borders as ludicrous. Our next keyword will be “ludicrous.” Do you know what I mean, though? Does that make sense?

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. No, I do. Partially because of the artificiality, the artifice, the interruption of a natural landscape and the kind of arrogance of that interruption. I suppose we could link that up to lots of anthropocenic ways of thinking about borders and their implications on the environment and climate and natural resources and extraction. But yeah, I completely see what you're saying in terms of the way that that turns up in the film. I'm trying to go about this without creating more spoilers, but then the hardest part you've described already, I think, again, picking up on that idea of, I mean, it's a fairly obvious idea, but the idea of futurity, you know, pregnancy being discarded in that way, being disposed of in that way.

Gillian Roberts: The pregnant woman is Black as well. And I think that is absolutely relevant to the racist violence that's happening at that moment. And not just at that moment. Right? But that's a symbolic moment as well as a very physical and specific moment. I'm circling back with a spoiler to your question about protest.

Zalfa Feghali: Okay.

Gillian Roberts: And I want to talk about the end of the film.

Zalfa Feghali: Okay.

Gillian Roberts: Because what we see at the end of the film is a different border crossing. 

Zalfa Feghali: This is why I asked about protest. 

Gillian Roberts: Where Ukrainian refugees are walking. 

Zalfa Feghali: Rightfully. 

Gillian Roberts: Rightfully walking in a very peaceful way with no opposition whatsoever, into a much more hospitable nation space than what the other refugees we've seen have been encountering. And the thing that stands out again years later for me is the pets that people have brought with them, right? And the care that they are allowed and enabled to take of their pets. Isn’t there a woman with a bird in a cage crossing the border and like, I love my dogs, if I had to escape my home, I would want at least one of them with me. 

Zalfa Feghali: Ooh! Threw some shade! Poor Frankie! Goodness gracious!

Gillian Roberts: I would take her to, but, and you knew that it was Frankie, though. That's, that's the other thing you knew it was Frankie. But I don't know, for me, it's such a clear articulation of the distinction of who is the right kind of vulnerable subject? Who is the acceptable refugee? Who is the acceptable person who we will welcome into our space? Right? With no, like, it doesn't even look like they're providing any documentation. Like, everything that we think we know about the policing at borders is suspended. And again, rightfully so. But it's just such a stark contrast, again, in black and white, right?

Zalfa Feghali: I mean, I think it's really interesting at universities where, you know, we both work at universities and I know lots of academics will be really familiar with various schemes, like sanctuary schemes, that universities tend to be supportive of. But processes are always, because any big organisation is always really slow and like change is really difficult to make happen in this particular context, of course. So you have situations where you want to make a case for a certain kind of national context that is experiencing war or conflict or difficulty. And we have students coming from there and all of those processes are really slow and, oh, we have to see and we can understand that. But then in the Ukrainian context, it just became really easy to do all of those things that before had been very difficult. And so I'm really glad that it was very easy, because it now means that we have precedent to do these things in much more streamlined ways. So there are positive ways to read this opening up for Ukrainian people, not in the sense that it was a good thing that they had to leave in the first place, but there are useful institutional languages that we can now learn to dismantle those different, I mean, there's different sorts of fences, but different barriers to education or, you know, people's rights and people's kind of continuing to live a livable life, a good life.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: And I think a lot of this film is around that idea of how do fences make our lives better? How do those borders, whether they are physically visible to us like in a fence or whether it's just, oh, I'm in Europe now in a forest. How does that make anyone's life more livable? How does that make anyone's life better? Do people in Poland feel more protected? Do people in Belarus feel less or more protected? Who is at stake except the refugee or asylum seeker, here, and that kind of weaponization of this group of people, these individuals who, you know, it's a group of people, but they're also individual people who are complex and beloved and annoying and all the things that human beings are. There is no satisfactory answer. And, you know, we're both border studies scholars. There's no satisfactory answer that I've found. And maybe I'm just really difficult to please where a border fence has been like, oh, yeah, that's a great idea. Let's do that. But I don't know. I speak for you. Should I not speak for you in that respect?

Gillian Roberts: No, by all means, speak for me. Yeah. Because we see in the film, it's certainly not good for the border guard.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. Who's gaining from this except of a specific kind of dog-whistle politics? 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, absolutely.

Zalfa Feghali: That benefits, again, nobody who ever comes in contact with a refugee or an asylum seeker, including the refugee and asylum seeker. So, I wonder if that leads us on to our border in the news, actually.

Gillian Roberts: Quite possibly, quite possibly. The UK listeners will probably be familiar with this and those from further afield may not know that our Labour government has some thoughts about refugee status and changing it. And there's a really interesting article by Georgia Cole in The Conversation that goes through some of the changes that were laid out by the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood about making changes to support for refugees, including, quote, “removing financial and housing support for asylum seekers who break the law, offering incentive payments for asylum seekers whose claims have been rejected to return home” unquote, which Mahmood says is a, quote, “firm but fair approach,” unquote, to asylum. So one of the main and very contentious points of this new approach is, again, I'm quoting from Cole here, quote, “to make refugee status temporary subject to review every 30 months,” unquote. So according to this policy, someone who has refugee status would be required to prove every 30 months that it's still unsafe for them to return home. Now, one of the things that Cole points out is actually some of the things that Labour have said they're going to do, they've always had the power to do. Like, for instance, ending refugee status, making it a temporary thing. But that is much more difficult in practice to do, because it's all about how do you assess the safety of the country of origin. But the thing that Cole points out is that it's against the Convention to put the onus on refugees themselves to prove that it's not safe for them to return. And going back to our discussions, well in a particular episode, but they're always with us, aren't they? About hospitality. How do you feel, how can anyone feel at home if they know that 30 months or less later, they're going to have to make their case, re-traumatize themselves to stay. And also, you know, in practical terms, you think of kids and schooling, and if they are going to have to go back, then you know, learning in a completely different language. And I mean, there's all kinds of practical difficulties that aren't just practical, like, oh, you just it's like a hurdle that you overcome. But like the ways in which people would be traumatized, of course, but completely discombobulated and their lives that have already been so massively disrupted and that facing that possibility of disruption over and over and over again. When we first started this podcast, the Home Secretary, when the Conservatives were in power, was Suella Braverman. 

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, I remember her. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, Suella Braverman. The ecstasy. And it's really disappointing that Labour, ever since they took power, really, have primarily been interested in attracting votes from Reform and trying to be as “tough,” in inverted commas, on immigration as, you know, in order to attract a certain kind of xenophobic right-wing voter and to see it happening all over again is deeply uncool, I think, is the technical phrase we're after.

Zalfa Feghali: There's so much more to say on how refugee claims are processed.

Gillian Roberts: How long it takes.

Zalfa Feghali: How long it takes. The misconceptions around what rights you have as, you know, refugees and asylum seekers are not the same thing. So your rights as an asylum seeker are not going to be the same. And thinking about that backlog and one of the ways that we've learned over the last years is that that backlog is often addressed through or processed using AI.

Gillian Roberts: How could that go wrong, Zalfa?

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, I've been thinking about this and I've been wondering what is more desirable for a person seeking to, again in scare quotes, “renew” their refugee status based on facts and reality, or an AI tool making that determination. And given that recently the government announced, I think it was 500 million pounds?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, also, I mean, which couldn't possibly be spent better somewhere else.

Zalfa Feghali: … 500 million-pound investment in AI. Yeah, it's all bound up in a whole range of issues around ethical government, ethical governance, and the way human beings crossing borders figure in that sort of ethical governance, which unfortunately we do not often see in the news.

Gillian Roberts: And just also people's own experiences reduced to something that would be AI-legible. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. 

Gillian Roberts: People's experiences of migration are often already horrifying, but to then be relying on AI tools to assess them. It's interesting because I want to use the word inhuman. And haha, it is. It is indeed. So as ever, worrying developments.

Zalfa Feghali: But I think going back to the film for a moment and thinking about the way that this film is really carefully used to depict complexity is really important that it ends with, you know, it's not I don't think it's important that things have a, I don't know, like a happy ending, but it ends acknowledging complexity, with an acknowledgement of it's not all working out okay, but you know this now. So whether or not we want to describe that as a call to action, I think it's more like a call to thinking or a call to paying attention. You've watched this film that isn't a documentary, but that is mimicking lots of documentary conventions that have the effect of leading viewers down a particular route in terms of suspending their own disbelief.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. And also demonstrating, just to recap what you've said before, what we are capable of, what we have the capacity to do, both individually, but also structurally, like we can let these refugees across, even with their pets. That can happen. And if it can happen once, it can happen again.

Zalfa Feghali: Which is not to say it doesn't have to be regulated in some way. It's simply to say, try and remember that it's people who are crossing.

Gillian Roberts: Yes.

Zalfa Feghali: Mostly, unless pets are coming as well, and that's fine too.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Well that’s a good note to end on.

Zalfa Feghali: What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.

Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.