Asylum Seekers and the Politics of Punishment and Control in the UK

Abstract This article explores the UK asylum system as a multifaceted punitiveness regime, challenging the view that punishment is limited to criminal justice. Drawing on Carvalho, Chamberlen, and Lewis’s (2020) four-dimensional framework, the study analyses 30 semi-structured interviews with asylum seekers and refugees in Glasgow, a key dispersal city within the UK asylum system. The findings demonstrate that punitiveness operates across interconnected subjective, symbolic, political, and structural dimensions, shaping how asylum seekers are governed and positioned within the system. The analysis advances debates on the punitive character of migration by showing how these dimensions operate in combination to produce punishable subjects: asylum seekers come to experience themselves as inherently punishable (subjective), as this condition is reinforced through discourses that frame them as undesirable or threatening (symbolic), institutionalised through governance practices that organise restriction and dependency (political), and sustained within broader racialised and postcolonial hierarchies that reproduce inequality (structural). By foregrounding the lived and internalised dimensions of punitiveness, the article extends existing scholarship beyond institutional and legal analyses, offering a more comprehensive account of how punitive migration regimes operate. It argues that the power of such regimes lies not only in their capacity to restrict and exclude but in their ability to shape subjectivities and sustain inequality through everyday practices of governance.