When a formal power only works if you threaten something else entirely

The story

Metro reports that Pakistan could face visa restrictions unless it takes back Rochdale grooming gang leader Shabir Ahmed, with the government indicating it is prepared to use such penalties to secure his removal. Ahmed, jailed for 22 years for rape and sexual offences against girls as young as 12, was due for removal after being freed on 2 July, but Pakistan has given no indication it will accept him back. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood was reported to have previously threatened visa penalties against Angola, Namibia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, with a government spokesperson saying that four months later, all three were co-operating. Pakistan is reportedly demanding the extradition of two political dissidents from the UK in exchange.

The reframe

Deportation is a formal legal power. A court orders removal, the Home Office effects it, and the person leaves. That is how the system describes itself, and it is the description on which public confidence in immigration enforcement rests. What this story shows is that the formal power, on its own, does not actually do anything. A removal order is a piece of paper that requires another sovereign state to agree to accept the person named on it, and if that state declines, the order sits unexecuted regardless of how lawfully it was made.

What makes the power operative is not the law but the leverage, and the leverage is applied selectively, country by country, according to what each state can be pressured with and what it wants in return. Angola, Namibia, and the DRC apparently began co-operating four months after visa penalties were threatened; Pakistan is reportedly asking for the extradition of political dissidents as its price. Chapter 14's argument about the gap between how a system describes itself and how it actually functions is precisely this. The formal framework says removal follows from a court order. The actual mechanism is a series of bilateral negotiations in which a person's removal is traded against visa access, diplomatic goodwill, or, in this case, the fate of two dissidents living in Britain. That the negotiations are conducted case by case rather than under any consistent rule is not a scandal in itself; it may well be the only way the outcome can be reached at all. But it means the confident language of "we will remove him" describes an intention, not a capability, and the difference between the two is precisely where the system's account of itself stops matching what it can actually do.