Britain's Manufactured Migrant Crisis

Images have become a primary site of contestation in migration politics, weaponised by actors to appeal to what feels true rather than what is factually or empirically true.

Anita Howarth begins the book with a paradox. In 2025, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper released unprecedented footage of a deportation flight, hoping visual "evidence" of enforcement would succeed where statutory power alone had failed to reassure a sceptical public. Critics on the left and right reacted with hostility. Rather than a communications failure, Howarth reads this as symptomatic of a deeper condition: a manufactured sensorium that reduces migrants to voiceless political objects across actors with divergent agendas. The book follows four of them competing to define this perceptual field: the state, staging a sanitised spectacle of docile bodies and orderly control; Nigel Farage, appropriating investigative journalism's credibility through mimicry; Britain First, orchestrating a daily dripfeed of memes, miscaptioned photographs and AI-generated dystopias; and a quartet of left-wing cartoonists straining against the same visual order even while resisting it. Moving between the 2025 flights and a longer history of border imagery, Howarth shows how these strategies interlock into an ecology of dehumanisation: not a conspiracy, but a habitat each actor helps sustain.

Howarth's interdisciplinary analysis, drawing on political communication, visual sociology and the sociology of migration, will speak to students and researchers across these fields, and to NGOs, think tanks and campaigners for asylum seekers' rights.