ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ideas in relation to one of the myriad sites at which security and the state are produced in the United Kingdom (UK): Lunar House in Croydon, the headquarters of what was at the time of research known as the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND). It indicates a number of critical insights can be derived from place-based research into the constitution of security and the state around the management of asylum and immigration which extend the ideas developed by Bigo. The chapter illustrates the ways in which anxieties shaped by security fears, bureaucratic dysfunction and the media circulate through individual human interactions and encounters that can have profound consequences. It examines the ways in which the workforce, including security guards, asylum caseworkers, interviewers, backroom government employees and immigration system managers are induced to exert power over asylum seekers in ways that lead to their exclusion from national territory.
