At no serious risk? border control and asylum policy in Britain, 1994-2004

In the post-9/11 era, the British government's formulation and administration of policy relating to immigration controls is increasingly organized around the notion of 'risk', and mobilized through the state's technologies of inspection and measurement (see Scott 1998). This paper considers colonization of asylum policy in Britain, between 1994 and 2004, by the concepts of risk and risk management. It then modifies the thermostatic model of policy-opinion responsiveness (see Wlezien 1995, 1996, 2004) for empirical analysis of the interactions of policy, bureaucracy and public opinion in the control and administration of asylum by the Home Office in Britain, over the period between 1994 and 2004. This paper draws upon methods of time series regression and intervention analysis to estimate responses of specified policy outputs to (i) changes in public opinion and (ii) interventions by government. These enable discussion of the co-existence of responsiveness and risk in this particular policy domain.