Media Storm - Deport. Detain. Deter: The moneymaking anti-migrant machine

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Care about independent and ethical news? Support Media Storm on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! The EU has just passed a controversial law, hailed by the far-right as the start of "the era of deportations". Passed on World Refugee Week, the law allows EU countries to detain migrant families for years, and deport them to countries they have no connection to. This echoes the UK's failed Rwanda scheme, and Trump's existing deals with South Sudan, Eswatini, the Democratic Republic of Congo and more. It also unlocks expansive budgets for surveillance, detention and deportation. This money is likely to end up enriching the same corporations underpinning ICE raids in the US, and notorious migrant containment camps such as Australia's Nauru. Traffickers and smugglers often make headlines for profiteering off the refugee crisis, but the corporate industry that has grown up around it goes largely invisible in our news. These companies are paid billions of taxpayer dollars - not to tackle the roots causes of displacement, but to keep it away from wealthy countries' shores. But is what they're doing even working? How much public money is being directed away from essential services to feed the deportation machine? And what about the human cost? In this episode, Mathilda and Helena are joined by Sudanese refugee Mahamat Daoud, a survivor of EU-funded Libyan detention and the 2022 massacre at the Melilla-Nador border between Morocco and Spain. He describes what 'migrant deterrence' looks like up-close, and why it didn't work on him. Researcher Nathan Akehurst also joins the group, to breakdown the latest border strategy that Western governments call 'externalisation'. It comes as 2026 marks the deadliest year so far for small boat crossings on the Mediterranean Sea. News outlets that report obsessively on dinghy crossings - but how many headlines have you seen on that? Pre-order Nathan's book, Along the Watchtower, here. This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us⁠⁠ ⁠⁠@mediastormpod⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Media Storm is brought to you in partnership with Open Britain. A grassroots campaign group making democracy work for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. The EU is building something they don't want you to know about. Across the US, ICE is shooting people, disappearing people and tearing families apart. Here in Europe, they're taking notes. European governments and institutions are pushing through a new law, which the far right have celebrated as the start of the era of deportations. This is not a fight between people with papers and people without.

It's a fight between the people who believe human rights belong to everyone and politicians and corporations gaining power and profit from taking them away. Media Stormers, it's that time of year again. World Refugee Week. Happy Refugee Week, everyone. Regular listeners will know that every year, Media Storm marks the week with an episode spotlight the latest migration trend peppering our news. It's true, and last year, we looked at community solutions.

So next to that, this year marks a dark turn. Why? Because the biggest rising trend in global migration policy today is deportation. Mass deportation was still a taboo term when we last visited the topic. But since then, Trump's ICE invasions, immigration internment camps, and deportation deals with devilish governments have become a secret prototype for governments all across the wealthy world. If you don't know it's happening in your country, well, whose fault is that? The medias!

Precisely. Today, somehow, despite our media's incessant coverage of immigration, solutions are miraculously no closer. We simply do not have a global infrastructure to deal with displacement. And we desperately need one, because this problem is not going to. away. Since I started researching displacement 10 years ago, the total number of displaced people in the world has doubled in a decade to a record high. More than one in 70 people on earth are displaced. It's doubled. Why is it rising so quickly? I know. I asked myself exactly that when I realized

how different the number that I was staring at was to when I began this work. And the answer to that question is primarily climate change. More than half of the people displaced today are displaced by climate-related issues. Okay, and I can definitely understand that, but I actually saw a headline a few days ago saying that the number of refugees in the world went down last year. For the first time in ages, the article said. Isn't that a good thing? Well, this is exactly the kind of headline media storm loves to unpick, because yes, last week, this. Last week, The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, released its annual report. And for the first time in a decade, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide had fallen.

So queue, lots of positive headlines. But read past the headline and actually read UNHCR's report. You'll hear that there's serious concern about why this number fell. Because the main thing that was different this year is that record numbers of people were forced back to home countries like, Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria. The UN report raises alarm that most of those returns happened under pressure, in danger, or in their words, in extremely fragile contexts. So this isn't a crisis being solved.

It's people being pushed back into danger and then that being turned around and counted as good news. In many cases, at least. And I personally have one contact who was sent back to Syria and was murdered. So I can tell you that the only solution here is out of sight, out of mind for the countries forcing them back. But this sudden change in direction embodies what today's episode will focus on. The rise of the deportation machine. Explain. Until recently, the closest thing the world had to a global displacement infrastructure was UNHCR's resettlement scheme.

Now, resettlement refers to the safe relocation of people. people in need of refuge. This involves people actually being given legal pathways to countries of sanctuary rather than having to make those journeys illegally themselves. In 2024, only 0.2% of displaced people were resettled anywhere in the entire world. Zero.2% that's shameful. And you think that's bad. The data just out this week for 2025, so resettlement numbers drop by more than half. You see, the wealthy countries of the world refuse to build a solutions-focused infrastructure to deal with displacement. And it's not because they don't have the resources. Because in its absence, they are rapidly building a sophisticated global infrastructure. But it's not designed to deal

with displacement. It's designed to deal with deportation. Paints me the picture. What does this deportation machine actually look like? Well, let's start in the US, because Trump's ice has become the blueprint. As we speak, 18 people have died in ICE custody in the first five months of this year alone. That was one person every nine days. And as the body's mount, the agency's response has been to quietly stop reporting some of them.

They changed the rules, right? Yeah, their reporting rules were rewritten, basically, to exclude anyone who died having recently been released from custody. They changed this after a blind Rohingya man was found dead when ICE released him miles from his home in sub-freezing temperatures in the middle of the night. Horrendous. Horrendous. It's so sad. And ICE is detaining these people under Trump's plans to deport them.

Increasingly, to deport them to places they have no connection to. Trump's government is paying more and more countries to take in their discarded migrant populations. Some 20,000 people have been deported to at least 23 countries they have no connection. to, mostly it's Mexico, but also Uganda, Iswatini, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo. You literally just told us on the last News Watch episode of Media Storm that migrants in the Democratic Republic of Congo are being forced by militias to work in mines. Yeah, the Trump administration doesn't care what happens to them when they get to this other country. They don't really care about the human cost and frankly they don't care about the financial cost, judging by the numbers,

because a US congressional investigation found the government spent at least $40 million deporting roughly 300 people this way. I was going to say this and I realised that this isn't the point, but that's not exactly good value for money. Well, actually, I would say it is part of the point because someone is getting very rich at those exchange rates. Some individual removals have cost close to a million dollars per person.

Now, we'll get to that. But first, let's continue our tour of this deportation machine. Because here in Europe, as we record, the EU Parliament, which has a right-wing majority, is expected to approve a sweeping new deportation law. It would allow families, families, to be detained for up to two years awaiting deportation, and it would allow European governments to negotiate deportation deals with return hubs all over the world. This follows the model of Italy with Albania. So which countries are they looking at to be return hubs?

So far, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark and Greece have collectively just said that they're looking at Africa. Yeah, not a country. Also, remember when the UK's Rwanda deal was seen as inhumane and ridiculous? I know it's true. Like it shows how rapidly we've degraded our standards of human rights. But even that is like nothing. The EU has just invited the Taliban to Brussels

to discuss taking back Afghans who tried to flee them. Sorry, the same Taliban the West spent 20 years and trillions of dollars fighting. We're now inviting them in to help us deport people. The very same. Because in this machine, the goal isn't safety or rights. The goal is removal. And removal, it turns out, is enormously profitable. There is a whole industry growing up around this.

security firms, detention contractors, surveillance companies, deportation airlines. Border surveillance alone is projected to be a $68 billion market by 2034. So someone's getting rich. Someone's always getting rich. And taxpayers are paying for something that fundamentally doesn't work, not even on its own terms. People don't stop fleeing war and famine and certainly not climate change because a wall gets higher. They just take more dangerous routes. The Mediterranean Sea has just seen the deadliest start to any year on record.

Deportation doesn't make displacement disappear. It just makes it more lethal and more lucrative. And presumably our media is letting them get away with it. Well, what do you think? Despite blanket coverage of human traffickers and illegal immigrants, how much have you heard about the corporations profiting from the problem? That's what Media Storm is here to fix. Today we'll ask why,

is the wealthy world spending billions to avoid the refugee crisis rather than simply solve it. How did deportation become an industry? And who is it making rich? The whole idea about Rwanda is deterrent. Keeping them all here, putting them up in the rich and sending them to Eden. Deaths of people being held by immigration and customs enforcement are now at their highest level in two decades. So those who have been here for years, entirely legally, could be rounded up and deported. People want them sent home. They don't want them to be They don't want them in hotels, they don't want them in their communities.

Welcome to MediaStorm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Matilda Mallinson. And I'm Helen Awadia. This week's Media Storm. Deport, detain, deter. The money-making anti-migrant machine. Welcome to the Media Storm Studio. Our first guest today knows today's topic all too well, but has used his experience of border violence to campaign against others having to say.

to suffer it. Born in Darfur, Sudan, he was first forced from his home as a child in 2003 and has experienced mass displacement camps, detention centres and some of the world's most dangerous borders on his search for sanctuary. He now lives in Italy and campaigns for the rights of refugees everywhere. A very warm welcome to Media Storm, Mohamed Dawood. Thank you so much. Our second guest is a writer, researcher and campaigner working on migration, climate change and geopolitics. He's also a civil search and rescue volunteer who's operated in the Mediterranean Sea. He's currently writing a book tracking a decade of escalating violence at Europe's borders. Welcome to Median Storm, Nathan Aikurst. Thanks for having me.

So today we're looking at the default systems that our governments rely on to deal with the so-called refugee crisis. These include deterrence, harsh, hostile policies designed to put people off coming here in the first place, detention, containing those who come, separately from society, and deportation, evicting them out of the country altogether. All of these are part of a wider strategy called externalisation. Nathan, we're going to ask you to explain that term in a moment. But I just want to make a quick media storm point on language. It's noticeable that the words we use to describe these policies are often highly euphemistic and bloodless,

words like deterrence or returns or closed borders. But in reality, these concepts are often far from. from bloodless. Now, Nathan, what is meant by externalisation and how common is it in migration policy today? Yeah, I guess in very simple terms, it's pushing our border policies out into other countries. I mean, you know, migration is a very contentious issue. We don't stop talking about it, but I think most people have this quite straightforward mental model that is about how open or close the border should be, depending on your political opinion. And I think that misses is the massive systemic complexity of all of this, because we're not just talking about who

does or doesn't get turned back at the entry point to your national border, but this very, very large system and this expanding system where other countries are coerced or paid to act as border guards and enforcers on behalf of usually wealthy Western states. Now, there's a lot of ways in which this takes place. One is funding, training, and operational cooperation with violent armed groups and security forces with the aim of preventing people from moving. There's then this kind of carrot and stick politics, a foreign policy that rewards countries that accept subordination and alignment to European or North American border regimes and punishes those that don't through restricting visa access and things like that.

There's mass surveillance machinery, so deploying equipment, collecting data on people and creating interoperable systems to surveil people migrating, and increasingly just everyone in general. And then there's the creation of carceral infrastructure outside EU borders. For your British listeners, the Raranda plan will probably be the most relevant example. I'm currently in Brussels. The EU Parliament this week is voting on a deportation regulation that would remove legal barriers to these offshore detention camps that would send people to places they've never been, have no connection to, and it's hard to overestimate the scale of this, right? We're talking about deals with dozens and dozens of countries, huge amounts of resources, and usually occurring along

the same lines that traditional colonial hierarchies did. Thank you so much for that comprehensive overview, and it's really important to speak about what this actually looks like in real life. We'll go through this stage by sage. Muhammad, let's bring you in here. During your journey, Europe's externalised border reached you when you arrived in Libya after crossing the Sahara Desert. Libya is one country the EU pays to stop people before they cross into Europe. You were arbitrarily imprisoned there by EU-funded security forces and you saw how others were treated as well. What do you think people in Europe need to understand about what happens inside that system that their governments are paying for? A lot of common European people do not understand why and how their countries or the policemakers are supporting those people in order to manage what they call is migration management.

But in fact, this is a way to fund a lot of detention centers prisons where people torture it and beaten for so many times, so many years inside the detention centers. I personally talked about my experience in Libya from 2020 till 2003. The European people should understand that these taxes are not going to support people or not going to solve any problems. In fact, creating new damages. People are dying. Women are rapid. We receive it so many messages through our hotline videos that people are asking to help, people asking to evacuate. So for me, that's the idea that the common European people,

and people can understand that this money are not going to save people. Actually, it's going to kill a lot of migrants and refugees in Libya. And also something I recently learned that completely shocked me was another militia that was funded by the EU to control migration, besides those in Libya that extort and torture and rape, as you say, routinely. Another one was the Sudanese rapid support forces, which is the genocidal militia that is helping to create such devastation in Sudan, your country, Muhammad, and this is one of the reasons you had to

leave your home. And that militia, the rapid support forces, that paramilitary group used to be funded by the EU to control migration. Hameti, the general in charge, used to parade around boasting about controlling Europe's borders and has been found by most rights groups to be perpetrating genocide in the region. I did not know that the RSF was among those militias and I was really, really shocked to find out. But Nathan, what alarming new tactic have we also started to see Libyan anti-migrant militias employ to block people on the Mediterranean Sea? So yeah, the Libyan Coast Guard, and I say that in heavy quote marks, was created out of

the remains of the Gaddafi era navy. That meant that European money was going in, not to helping Libyans, not to helping refugees, but to building out and equipping this new military force, which had one job to intercept people seeking safety and drag them back to the horrific conditions that you've just heard described. And there's been incidents of them violently interfering with rescues for a long time now. But what's striking in the last year is that there's been three cases in 10 months of them opening fire on civilian rescue ships. In one case, the case of the Ocean Viking last year, I was just talking last night actually to a young crew member who was on his first ever mission

when he was fired out for a full 20 minutes in an attack that shattered the windows on the bridge at head height and caused, I think, over 150 grand's worth of damage to rescue equipment and could have been lethal. And these attacks were carried out from boats paid for by the EU, Italian Guardia de Financer boats. So I think there's an interesting question here, where border control gets framed as protecting Europeans when actually it's handing over money to hostile foreign military forces that put European rescue workers along with everyone else at severe and potentially lethal risk. Amahamat, you also met the sharp edge of European deterrence at the border between Morocco and

Spain. You survived the massacre at the Malila Nadar border in June 2022, where dozens of people were killed trying to cross from Morocco into the Spanish enclave. Almost all were fleeing Sudan. You witnessed it, you lost friends that day. Spanish and Moroccan officials said that their border guards had been assaulted and had to fight back in self-defense. And the Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez, said the incident was a well-organized violent assault by organized crime groups and thanked Spanish and Moroccan security forces for their actions. So that's sort of the version of events that was publicised across Europe. As someone present, how would you characterize the events that day?

Well, the event of 24 of June 2022, as we name it, it's as a racist massacre ever happened in the contemporary of history. As the Spanish and Moroccan police said, they were depending themselves. But actually, that's not because when we came down from the mountains, we already found them ready to massacre. We have been locked to some space where we cannot out. We have been beaten us like animals. People are crying. that we saw, the humanization that we have been through. It is absolutely reveals that this is not defending themselves.

There is a lot of people who date and who also remain missing, hundreds of them. Those who also survived are in prison for over five years. I personally lost my close friend in that situation, and there is a lot of people who also remain not find their relatives, their friends, their family, who has been asking for so many years, also if they're still alive or not. The Europe who is trying to protect its border in those situations, even if it takes thousands of people who died or remind massacres

just to save their borders, it could not be right, because those people also are humans and maybe seeking just for something called peace and protections. When I come to remind such situations, it feels like why this is happening. Is it all about saving borders, or it's also something behind of this? For me, those people who is still seeking for their justice should be recognised it, especially

in the 24 of June. Absolutely. This is the exact point. These are the stories that we should be hearing in the media, but far too often the human cost is going underreported by a media that reports obsessively on the so-called migrant crisis. Nathan, you do search and rescue on the Mediterranean Sea, where Mohammed, you eventually crossed into Europe on a dinghy with over 45 passengers.

What many listeners may not know is that 2026 has so far been the deadliest year on record in the Mediterranean. Nathan, how much of this death toll does the public never see? And given how much time the media spends reporting on small boat crossings, how do you feel about the level of coverage on these deaths? Yeah, I was flying out of Lamberducar on a small monitoring aircraft about a couple of weeks ago now, we had five people trapped on an oil platform. We had two or three rescues, fortunately, that did take place. We had an interception by the Libyan Coast Guard. We had a

terrible case where, well, 50 people were rescued, but one one-month baby was brought to shore dead. This is routine. It's been happening for, you know, a very long time now. And I think about 10, 11, 12 years ago, I naively thought that all of these horrors would be dead. And I think, dealt with that someone would put a stop to them. And then we normalised it and we stopped talking about it and now worse with the emergence of the far right across Europe. It's becoming actively celebrated in a lot of quarters. As you say, this has been one of the most lethal starts to the year on record. In February, we had Storm Harry, which could have potentially killed up to a thousand people crossing according to some estimates. One of the things that I found disturbing and fascinating

about that storm is that it's taking place in a climate breakdown and the system of fossil fuel dependence and extraction chains linked to it and the conflicts and political turmoil that it causes is a variable in why some people have to leave in the first place and now it's making their journeys more more dangerous as well. I mean, I think it's very telling that we hear these stories almost constantly about arrivals. The image of rubber boats crowded with people is a defining image on the news of our times, and yet the level of cultural and media literacy about who these people are, where they're coming from, and a desire to engage with the text here of their stories is almost non-existent. Now, you know, I believe in solidarity, in compassion, in treating people how we'd

like to be treated in their position. But even if you don't, one of the things that I wonder about the media in all of this is where, where's a lot of their basic curiosity and where's their desire to understand out of rigor, if nothing else, the people, the human being is at the heart of these very consequential stories. Now, Mahmat, you live in Italy today. You speak the language, you work, you have a life. Let's talk about returns deportation, because UNHCR has just reported the first drop in global displacement in a decade. Now this looks like a positive change, but if you look at the reasons behind it, the story becomes a bit darker. Displacement has fallen largely because many thousands of people are being forced to return

against their will to countries like Afghanistan, Sudan and Syria. And now presumably many people would love to return to their old homes, but they also have new homes and they probably want to return when they're safe. How do these accounts of repatriation make you feel? Well, yeah, first of all, I totally agree that when the return home, it is one of the best things someone could have, but when it comes to say returning home forcefully, it of course is something different and difficult. For example, in Sudan, people are returned forcefully to fight with the National Army Sudanese. So I feel that now, absolutely,

the idea of UNHCR, it is to reduce the number of the migrants, refugees, and people who war countries, but people should be more accepted if they want to go back or not. And how wonderful that you now live in Italy are safe, you contribute to their country, you learn a whole new language. I wish that the media could celebrate that. I wish we could change the narrative to turn that into a celebratory thing. Well, I think this is something that so many people like me wish to have it, including European and the other people's. How do you say in Italian, let's take a break? Prendiam a bit of time.

Pretendiamo en poti tempo? A bit of tempo. Welcome back to Media Storm. Before the break, we learned about externalization and its human realities. Next, we'll ask, does it work? And who benefits? This entire policy rests on a logic of deterrence, the belief that if you make the journey dangerous and degrading enough,

people will simply stop coming. Now most articles about asylum seekers fail to speak to a single asylum seeker, which makes it pretty hard for them to get an accurate answer to this question. Muhammad, you literally crossed the Sahara Desert. I don't think man could make a more hostile environment than that. So I want to ask you directly, at any point on that journey, was there a wall, a law, a threat of rejection that would have made you turn back and accept the life that you were fleeing? Sahara Desert, there is no life, no water. Where there's no water, there's no life. It is not only a way of traveling. It is a root of death. And never one can go through that day unless facing a very, very serious situation. I left Sudan in my early days where the genocide is starting, Darfur Sudan in 2003s. And I start asking, wondering myself, why someone could out of his country?

I never knew what does it mean war. I could barely hear the screaming of the people, the falling down of such individuals. I start to understand what does it mean and why people fleeing. But of course, when we face a danger in front of our lives, we would never imagine what in the future would come, whether good or bad for us. The only thing we do is to seek how to save ourselves. So for me, I would never imagine that at the end I would first, Sahara Desert, but this is what it is. It could be possible that human being can do everything

in order to save his life. So I would say if I have been giving away more safe within Sahara Desert, I would choose the other one. Well, Nathan, give us the overview on a macro scale. Is there any actual evidence that deterrence, as opposed to safe legal roots, as Mohamed just described, is there any actual evidence that deterrence works? I mean, I think if you made to anyone audit this stuff for longer than five minutes, it will immediately start falling apart. You can get short-term gains, if you're coming from that perspective,

from enforcement. At a US, for instance, has drastically cut encounters over the last year or so with its border surge. I was just in Texas. I mean, we can talk about the other consequences of that, right? Like, we were driving through a heavily militarised desert where drones were buzzing overhead, and communities on both sides of the border

were split apart from each other and dealing with checkpoints all over the place every day, very, very kind of hostile environment of people that live there, let alone people trying to cross. But the first problem with that approach is that what it's done is just for now push the problem down into Mexico, where you get a lot of evidence of these internal deportations further to the south of the country. And then sooner or later, people have a habit of finding another route, and you can only keep up the operational tempo of enforcement and maintain the enforcement chain down the line for so long, especially when, as in the Libya case,

the militias you're paying to stop people are the exact same people who are also profiteering from incarceration and smuggling in the whole system. So there's a kind of deliberate amnesia in it, almost, I think. I think what captures this whole story best for me is when we had riots in England a couple of years ago, people trying to immolate asylum seekers in their homes. And onto the TV comes a Labour Baroness who says that we need to have a conversation about

migration as if we'd stopped talking about migration at any point in the interview of literally. But I don't really see deterrence politics as border control at all. It's not planning in relation to how people move. It's not managing the flow of people into an area. It's creating chaos. And the purpose of that chaos is not border control. It's dividing people.

It's normalising. authoritarian measures and surveillance and crucially transferring a huge amount of public wealth into the private sector. Right. At a time of a cost of living crisis, we are seeing huge amounts of money directed away from public services towards this deportation machinery. Politics is obviously one reason why, but today we want to talk about the lesser understood and lesser reported part of that formula. We want to follow the money. Nathan, walk us through the industry, that's grown up all around this. The surveillance companies, the detention firms, the deportation airlines.

Who are the corporate winners of the deportation boom? Yeah, I mean, where do you want to begin? The new statesman cover story last week was quite interesting. It's about Circo, this huge bloated outsourcing firm, that among many other things, runs temporary accommodation for asylum seekers in Britain, often at a very high cost of the state, whilst keeping people in very poor conditions, and also, whilst we suffer from a chronic housing shortage across the board. So you just have this system that fails for everyone. You have people seeking safety being held in awful conditions. You have taxpayers

angry about the inflated amount of money that is being spent on migration. And they've also got another 200 million, I think, for GPS tagging asylum seekers, which is a worrying step for a range of reasons. But this is, you know, a firm of a broader record, right, that poured insane amounts of money into a black hole during COVID, has screwed up public services from not just asylum, but across the welfare state and across the NHS. And essentially kind of at this, at this point just exists to rip copper wire out of public services. It's this like parasitic entity that doesn't really make any money other than through state contracts. Now, like, that's not an atypical story, right? As soon as, as you say crisis, and in this case,

migration crisis, you whip up a panic. And suddenly there's little scrutiny on what you're doing to actually handle that crisis. I mean, I bring up a crisis. I bring up a crisis. I bring up a COVID as an example, but there was a genuine emergency at that point, and so you can understand kind of loosening procurement rules for a short period of time, even if it creates potential vectors for corruption. But this migration architecture is structural. It's gone on without proper scrutiny for years. You know, you have all of this money to the Libyan Coast Guard, which is essentially a subsidy to the Italian military industrial complex. You have Pamelucky's Anderil building surveillance towers on the British South Coast that I'm not.

not exactly sure of the cost, but I doubt it's small. And you have the Palantir data grab. You have the flights, the surveillance, the detention camps that you've mentioned. Yeah, it's a, it's a vast mechanism for profiting off the human lives of people crossing borders and also profiting off the paranoia of voting publics largely in the global north. And it's not an accident. It's set up to be that way. I'm going to drop in a plug here, but I write about this quite extensively in my book along the Watchtower, which is coming out in November. and has a chapter on the enforcement industry and kind of how it's grown up and the lobbying relationships it has with particularly the EU but other governments as well.

Serco, by the way, the first company you mentioned there, their own annual report actually frames conflict and climate change as drivers of future demand for its services. But look, Mahamat, when our media covers the dark money of this displacement machinery, they point to traffickers and smugglers as the villains here, the exclusive sort of evil profiteers of exploiting vulnerable migrants. Meanwhile, this corporate machinery stays almost invisible in our news. Do you think that the corporations and the CEOs legally getting rich

off of this deportation economy, do you think that their profits are ethical? No, because this is a system where connected all, when we said mafia in Africa, it is not a mafia or. of African itself, but also a mafia of European, because you cannot go and sign agreements when you well understand that these people are exposed to torture and extortion crimes. So under these agreements, people can, or the politicians,

can take whatever they want from natural resources, whether from Libya or from everywhere in Africa. After the deportation, people would be put it into the detention centers. What is happening in detention centers? The European know this is a system where we may think hundreds of years had been almost done. But this is a slavery mechanism which is work. For me, I have witnessed so many people who paid money to get out. People who don't have had been beaten and torture it. People who have called their family to sell their homes in order to get out from this

campus. Who construct this campus? It's from Europe. Millions of, you know, hand-shed. Under every hand check, there's people who are dying. So the story gets circles every time again. When people intercept it, return it back, put it into prison, and then pay it and get out. So let's imagine this mechanism. It's a way of profiting. It's a way of trading. It's a way of getting millions of euros.

After I also experienced this situation, I totally understand that this migration management, it would never stop because people... are profiting from this. You often hear that we can't support more refugees due to finite resources. Let's address that. Nathan, how cost-effective is externalisation as a response to the refugee crisis? We had a very early example of this around over a decade ago now in Nauru in Australia, which was kind of the canary down the coal mine for these externalisation deals. Terrible place. Children in cages, suicide in the camp, all of the things that.

we then kind of mainstreamed later down the line. And the total cost of processing a detainee in the Nauru camp was $500,000 Australian dollars per detainee. I mean, again, it's just an absurd figure. And the minister who was responsible for building up this system then becomes the independent reporter in Britain on the Rwanda deal that's cut a few years later. So again, none of this is happening by accident, right?

to then cut things the other way, to the extent that reception and looking after people would be a logistics challenge. And of course, you know, it is, of course it would be. But we managed it with Ukraine. And, you know, you could easily deploy all of those resources that we're currently putting into locking people up, intercepting them, dumping them in deserts and go a long way towards solving the problem and ensuring people are being processed and given access to safety in a fair and managed way. And that's kind of what I was saying earlier, right? There is no point at which anyone's checking this. There's no point in which anyone is auditing and saying, you know, not just is this moral,

but are we even getting value for money out of this, asking the basic questions that you would ask of any private or public enterprise. And now hearing that, I think it's interesting because we often think we can't afford as countries to do more than we're doing. But in reality, the world's poorest countries bear the bulk of the burden. 68% of people in need of international protection, get that protection from low and middle-income countries, not the wealthy world. Mahamat, you spent years of your displacement in one of the vast refugee camps in eastern Chad, which hosts some of the largest proportion of refugees in the world. How do you feel hearing phrases like, we can't afford this or we can't take everyone common phrases in the European immigration debate? Well, this is selfishness because I have been in Chad. Chad is one of the countries where there is no such opportunities of lives, for example, education and so on, but also afforded to accredit millions of people who fleeing the war in Sudan. So for me, I guess Europe could also able to afford such people, individuals who are really vulnerable, individuals who are subjected to situations like in Libya. So for me, I guess Europe could also able to afford such people, individuals who are really vulnerable, individuals who are subjected to situations like in Libya. So for me, me, maybe the only stories need to be told it where these people are coming from, because now

the policies has manipulated the stories of migration politically, leading us in a way that maybe to believe these are criminals who are coming to enter to our Europe countries, and we cannot afford this. But when we understand these people are vulnerable, these people are coming from war places, these people are seeking only for safety, I guess we would accept them. So, That's why we continue making awareness events in order to say that we are migrants, but we're also good people. So in that case, we will make a good society to accept everybody. And on that point, let's turn finally to the alternative.

The thesis of this whole episode is that the rich world is pouring more resources into avoiding this problem rather than solving it. And the proof is in one devastating, stating pair of numbers. Nathan, last year, the entire wealthy world resettled just 81,800 refugees. The UN estimated 2.5 million people need resettlement that year. Legal solutions are at their lowest level in decades. Nathan, what would it look like for governments to take a constructive approach to asylum and is anyone actually doing it? Yeah, I mean, we've touched on this climate displacement question a couple of times briefly. And at the moment,

most climate-linked displacement is internal, and that may change. But also, interestingly, you know, it gets framed as a southern problem. The US is one of the most significant places where climate-related displacement is taking place. It's going to be, and it is a reality all over the world. And I think those countries that have spent the last few decades building up ever more violent enforcement structure may wish to be careful what they what they've wished for, as, you know, migration routes may not always be what they are now. To come back to something a bit more practical, creating safer routes is the obvious point. If you want to stop the boats, if you want to end irregular crossing and people making

dangerous decisions about the routes that they take, then you have to give them a viable route to actually being accepted, which doesn't require dangerous crossings. and also then to make faster decisions and to ensure that people have the rights to work while those decisions are being made, so they are able to start to integrate into the societies that they've joined. And there's a big question about labour law enforcement as well

because you get resentment among domestic populations because of migration taking place under exploitative circumstances and pain conditions being driven down but through the exploitation of migrant labour. and then migrant labour is feeling unable to report violations because they don't understand the law or worse, they might be deported if they raise anything. So there are some, there are quite a few of the solutions here where you have to look outside of just migration policy and think what else is going on. But also, you know, it's not ideal that so many people are having to or feel they have no other choice

than to flee to seek safety in the wealthy and powerful world in the first place. and a foreign policy that stopped flooding places with weapons and that addressed the climate emergency rather than ignoring it, that restores rather than slashes aid budgets, and that tackles extractive and exploitative international economic systems that push people into poverty and needing to leave would go a long way towards protecting the right to stay as well as the right to move.

Now finally, and starting with you, Muhammad, a question for everyone listening at home. Is there anything that you would like to ask our listeners to do to help be part of the solution here? Yes, thank you. I always ask these questions, what we can do together. The only thing we can do is having willing to understand the other person. We never understood the people who are coming

because of the so much untruth information that we received through media, through politicians. So for me, this is the only one thing that I also will demand is please listen to stories like this. Try to understand the realities. The stories that are coming from people who exposed and experienced such situations. Nathan, same question to you.

Is there anything you would like our listeners to do to be part of the solution and also anywhere that they can follow your work to stay up to date with accurate information? I mean, I think it can often see. all very daunting, right, how bad things have got. The riots a few days ago in Belfast being a good example of that. And for the last decade or so, Europe or the European Union, you know, this power that's once referred to as the standard of civilisation rooted in the post-war liberal idea of

universal human rights has been abrogating all of those rights in the shadows, all to deal with numbers of people crossing, the absolute maximum constituted a couple of percentage points of the European population, much less than other countries were holding, an order of magnitude less than those displaced around Europe after World War II when the refugee convention was created. And then, you know, I think you have to talk at this point, talk about the elephant in the room, and the way in which degrading human rights in that shadow space paved the way for European behavior on Gaza and being willing to ship arms into a genocide. And so, you know, we're already in this state of economic decline, but I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that we're in a stage of

profound civilizational moral decay as well. But I think the good news is that most people aren't happy about this. Most people aren't cheering it on. A lot of people just don't know about it and would be appalled if they did. And yeah, I think that people can. can talk to people around them and persuade them where they're able. I'm still perhaps naively, but still a big believer in the power of conversation. You can vote, obviously, organize and and canvas for candidates that stand up against this, this horrific direction of travel. And yeah, if you have time on your hands, you can volunteer. Not everyone can go to the Central Mediterranean, let's say some people can. But also, there will be probably some form of community solidarity or

charity activity, there will be something you can do to help make people feel welcome and supported when they arrive near you. I guess I'll just come back to the book, which is out in November along the watchtower and dispatches from Europe's war on migration. And I write for, I guess, Jacobin and the New Mediterranean and various places quite frequently. And so I will be continuing to cover migration, border violence and externalisation and all of these issues. Thank you for listening. you want to support Media Storm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month. The link is in the show notes and a special shout out to everyone in our Patreon community already.

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