People walk on Oxford Street in London, United Kingdom, on November 28, 2024. (Photo by Alberto … [+] Pezzali/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
NurPhoto via Getty Images
A PR campaign that has reportedly cost millions of pounds of U.K. taxpayer money has sought to dissuade immigration from Albania by depicting the country as run-down and ecnomically struggling. The campaign – emphasizing material conditions in the country – is a new twist on an old, and ineffective, dissuasion technique.
As reported across the British media, campaign materials have come to light on social media, with people from Albania now living in the U.K. describing their experiences in the country. The stories appear to paint a bleak picture of life in the U.K., with services crumbling, people struggling with cost of living crises and delinquency running rampant.
While the campaign materials do not explicitly say who funds the channel, it is known the funding comes from the foreign office, with a yearly budget of over $4.7m to go toward reducing Albanian immigration to the U.K. The campaign was started under the previous Conservative party government but has been continued under the Labour party.
Such ‘dissuasive communications’ strategies have a long history in immigration policy around the world. Perhaps the most notorious is the “No Way” campaign run by the Australian government in the 2010s. With a heavy military emphasis, the ads told prospective irregular immigrants that “You will not make Australia home” under any circumstance.
Before that, in the 2000s Spain ran its own anti-migration ads across West Africa, from where many people attempt the perilous crossing to the Canary Islands. This considerably more disturbing campaign showed graphic images of people who purpotedly drowned in their attempts to cross.
Less well known in this domain is the more subtle example of the domestic communications and ‘awareness campaigns’ funded by the European Union in countries of origin and transit, particularly around the North of Africa. European partnerships with countries such as Mauritania, Senegal and Morocco often include budgets for internal dissemination of materials designed to communicate the ‘realities’ of irregular migration, ostensibly to ensure the safety of the reader but also potentially serving as deterrent.
Such communications strategies are one part of Western countries’ larger efforts to dissuade or ‘deter’ people from trying to reach their territories in order to seek asylum or shelter. Other more prominent examples of deterrence strategies include the U.K.’s scrapped Rwanda scheme and the in-theory continuing Italian Albania scheme. Such schemes aim to deter people from attempting the journey to Europe if they are convinced that doing so would simply see them wind up in a detention camp outside the EU’s borders.
The problem with all such deterrence schemes, from a purely policy point of view, is that there is scant evidence they work. This is for a range of reasons, not least of them being a misunderstanding among deterrence-minded policymakers about why people choose to leave their home and seek shelter in another. People most often are much more ‘pushed’ into a journey by persecution, danger or deprivation than they are ‘pulled’ by the attractiveness of a specific destination. Such strategies also tend to overestimate their effectiveness in reaching and convincing the people they target.
Indeed, the U.K.’s own Foreign Office appears to understand this, even as it continues to fund such campaigns. According to documents seen by Britain’s i newspaper, an internal review at the Foreign Office concluded that there is “limited evidence on the effectiveness of a dissuasive communications approach.”
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Publish date : 2025-02-17 03:34:00
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