S4 E5 The pace of change: MAGA, the US, the UK

Michaela Benson [MB]: Hello. This is 'who do we think we are?' where we debunk myths and misunderstandings about citizenship and migration. I'm Michaela Benson, a sociologist working on citizenship and migration,

Nando Sigona [NS]:  And I'm Nando Sigona, also a sociologist focused on international migration and forced displacement. And we are both interested in borders, how they are constructed, the work they do, what makes some feel welcome, entitled to be in a place, while others get locked out from the chance to safely and permanently call a place home.

MB: In this five part series we've looked at the USA and the role of migration and borders in the MAGA project of Trump and his backers. That project continues apace. Indeed, in the time since we started recording these episodes, we've seen the decision to prioritize refugee applications from White South Africans and limit numbers of incomers over the next year to just 7500 we've seen the victory of Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim US citizen born in Uganda, as mayor of New York, not to mention further shifts and legal challenges around who is and is no longer entitled to temporary protected status or TPS. And there's much, much more.

NS: So, we thought we would pause and spend this, the final episode in this series, looking back at our discussion on sanctuary, the American Dream, liminal legality and free speech, catching up with where things are now. Also looking what resonance can we see with events in UK and Europe.

MB: And we should say we're recording this in November 2025 and we're going to give that caveat that seems increasingly necessary these days, who knows what will have happened by the time this goes out? So you know, just bear with us, because there'll be lots of things I'm sure that have happened between now and when you're listening to this that have changed. Okay, so Nando, we're recording this only a week or so after Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. Mamdani is a Democratic socialist who stood up to Trump and what he's called an authoritarian administration. After his victory, Mamdani firmly declared New York would remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and indeed led by an immigrant. Meanwhile, Trump has branded the new mayor extreme and a communist, and earlier threatened to cut federal funding to the city if the 34 year old took office. And this takes me back to our conversation with Rachel Humphris about sanctuary cities, and the reminder that the interplay between cities and the federal state has a distinct character in the US, and also frames those conversations around immigration, migration, diversity within cities. So I wondered, Nando if I could kind of turn over to you to talk a little bit about cities and migrants and kind of migrant rights, I suppose, yeah.

NS: I guess the politics of migration looks extremely different if you look at it at the national level or at the local level. We know a lot of cases, for example, of countries where cities are really taking the lead in promoting migrant rights. There are examples, for example, from US cities, but also from Europe. From Spain, in particular, Madrid and Barcelona are at the forefront for the rights of irregularized migrants. But also in Italy, we have a very different politics between, for example, the central government, which is very anti-migration, and most cities which provide support, some kind of services, to migrants, irrespective of their legal status. But why is this the case? Actually, I guess is the point. This was very much at the center of the episode we recorded with the Rachel Humphris. And I think is, the point is, it takes us back to some of the work by Saskia Sassen on global cities, the cities as a node of the new globalized economy, as a place where there is a critical mass of migrants coming in, but also where the economy is structured around the role of migrant workers, around migration itself. They need, continuously new energy, new resources, new talent as well. So they become a place where new ideas, new messages, new narratives around migration can be built. But we also need to remember that the city is not a whole or country, and this is was, for example, very visible with the debate around migration, around Brexit. Just to give you an example,

MB: Yeah, I mean, I think that that's been really, really central. And actually, I was thinking, when I was reading about what Trump was saying about Mamdani's election, that there are some kind of parallels with how he talks about Sadiq Khan in London, and the kind of the misinformation that's been circulated about London, which. Is one of these global cities. It's one of the quintessential global cities that Saskia Sassen named in that original work where Trump has kind of claimed, earlier this year at the UN that London wants to go to Sharia law. I mean, this is, this is for anyone who's been to London, that's completely it seems like a parallel universe that that would be the case. But what we're seeing not only in that narrative and rhetoric from Trump, but also in the narrative of other right wing actors with these ideas of kind of no go areas in major global cities, is a kind of almost weaponization of that earlier project of multiculturalism that was established. And I can imagine that that's how we're going to see that narrative play out in New York, through New York, in the narration. If Trump follows that same playbook.

NS:  These connections between cities are also visible. For example, just in the last few days that when we are recording this episode with the attack, for example, on the BBC by the Trump administration, which is unprecedented, you know. A foreign government that actually is putting huge pressure through the threat of legal action on the national broadcaster of an allied state. So this is also tells us about how narrative circulate, and to what extent the American administration is well aware of the importance of narrative that comes also from outside that can challenges the representation of what's going on in America around, for example, the mass deportation that are carried out by ICE. But I think also Mamdani election Michaela, also take us back to our second episode, one with Ernesto Castaneda, around the American dream. You know, there is a lot of this capacity, I think, in Mamdani electoral journey, to produce dreams, aspiration into people. And so I was wondering, how important is the American dream? You think in what's happened now in New York and can be replicated as well?

MB: I think it's interesting. And thinking back to that episode with Ernesto, what he was really keen to highlight was overcoming the kind of the gloom, the despair, and thinking about where there is hope and solidarity on the ground. And he talked about how in 2025 we've witnessed people literally placing themselves, putting their bodies in the way in order to protect vulnerable neighbours from ICE and things like this. And it seems to me that when you kind of take that imagery, so you take the imagery of putting themselves between these federal actors and their neighbors, that you know they're kind of the people who they're seeking to deport, you can also see how Mamdani has put himself in that position too. His position, of his vision for New York seems to ring very, very true with putting himself between the city and the federal state in lots of ways, particularly around those acts against migration, for example. But I think that there's another aspect of this as well, which I think when you asked about the American dream, I was thinking to myself about how, you know, the American dream was very much one that was sold to immigrants, it'ss this idea of the streets paved with gold, all of this, and that you can become whoever you want to be. And there's something extremely powerful about somebody who is actively claiming his migrant position, to stand up to what is an increasingly nativist discourse in the US, and to say, actually, we have a right to be here. And you know, we're claiming this right, and we're not afraid they might be afraid to claim the right, but it's important to state that claim.

NS: One of the things that I've learned from from this series and from the previous episode, it's been very much this idea of how much some narratives have kind of a longue durée. They have a long life that re-emerge and resurface at different points. They they are weaponized and used in different ways by different political actors. I mean, there was a lot of these examples in in our previous episodes, in terms of both of the continuity and discontinuity. It's true that New York is always been in a sense the city of immigrants. In a way the place where also all the myth of the melting pot, you know, was born so as an idea that, basically, you go to the US, to the cities, and then you merge into a big pot and become one thing, the American dream. But we know that that is never been true. I mean, it's been true up to a point. It's been true as an imagination that has attracted people. But we always knew that there is always been a very racialised, polarized society. So I think what we learned was also that there we must be careful, sometimes not to look at Trump as the exception within the American history of how they dealt with migrants and racialised people. And this is something that I think emerged a lot from our previous conversations as well. In a way, I think if we were going to do another episode in the future, what I will be very interested to explore is the American nightmares. I mean, the nightmares for at least some part of one part of the population so and what are its consequences in terms in the medium, long term. You know, the American Dream has had a century of history. To what extent will this new strong political project that is emerging now with Trump and MAGA is going to have reverberation for the next electoral cycles?

MB: I think that's really important to bear in mind. And you and I have spoken about similarly, warning against Brexit exceptionalism as well, and thinking that that anti migrant, migrant moment was particularly exceptional. But I think that we're both very keen as well to continue to highlight that there are things that are exceptional to this moment, but you need to situate them in that longer dur of kind of racialized politics of anti migrant behaviour and action and policies as well. And of course, this idea of the American nightmare is one that also has convergence with some of the things that we're seeing in the UK around us at the moment,

NS: Definitely it's the case. Is not just with, for example, some of the proposals, they are coming from Nigel Farage's Reform party, or from the Tory party, but also from the Labour Party, where at the moment they are, they just open the consultation around the possibility of making indefinite leave to remain, which is the right to permanent residence, probationary. We are seeing the attack on permanent residency was spreading around, not just to the US, but also to Britain, where recent proposal from the Labor Party are actually questioning the permanency of the indefinite leave to remain status.

MB: I think that's really important, and we'll come back to that shortly when we talk about temporary protected status, and our conversation with Cecilia Menjivar about liminal legality. We talked a little bit about hope earlier. And I think it's important not to get carried away, because, of course, you know, there's a kind of a utopian ideal around hope, though, where we could say, okay, you know, all the hope is there, hold on to it. But of course, hope is seriously restricted at this point in time, while Trump is in office, as we've heard from several of our guests, I think. In October 2025, his administration made this curious announcement that they would limit the number of refugees admitted to the US to 7500 over the next year. Now, that bit in itself is not the curious bit. The curious bit is that he was going to give priority to white South Africans. I have so many thoughts about this, but I'm going to first of all remind our listeners of our conversation with Heba Gowayed. Heba talked about how whiteness has long been prioritized through legislation in the US, going right back to 1790 and the Naturalization Act. So could we see this as a further continuation of that Nando?

NS: We definitely can. I mean, all we can see a resurfacing of a strong theme in American migration governance, what we also seeing the other side of the story is something that we're seeing in Europe as well, and it's the attack on asylum. Because one of the victories that Trump is claiming at the moment is the fact that the number of asylum application has collapsed, and irregular crossing in the southern border have never been so low. So what he's using as a evidence of his victories are this idea that sort of we only give the protection to a few people, and we choose which one we want, which is really interesting about this idea of choosing who are the good refugees versus the others, at the same time really locking the door for people seeking asylum from other places. And in Europe, we have seen similar process. I mean, UK, there is clearly an attempt, for example, to to create a global sponsorship program for refugees, in which we pick and choose which refugees deserve to come to Britain. But at the same time, we are criminalizing the regular crossing into Britain and making it as a reason for not granting asylum to people. This is the direction travel that really very much started with Boris Johnson, and Priti Patel just a few years back. But this government has not really moved that much away from that sort of direction of travel.

MB: Yeah, the politicization of asylum is something that I observe as well. But I suppose my kind of curiosity beyond that, as well as the fact that they would choose a state which is not in a situation of open conflict, where you know they're offering humanitarian protections, I assume on racialized grounds. So the underpinning narrative, and that underpins this, is that white South Africans are somehow discriminated in South Africa. And of course, there's a long history of the US' relationship with South Africa that also plays into this. So there is, again, we're seeing a really strong kind of, I suppose, the role of narrative again, an ideology there influencing this particular offer to to white South Africans. I think that there's something interesting as well here about the kind of weaponization of asylum and the weaponization of asylum within the context of global geopolitics. So this is not just about an internal conversation in the US, but very much about the US, or the representatives who are for this particular approach, trying to kind of strong arm on the world stage. And the particular story that underpinned this was this idea that there is a kind of a genocide taking place against white farmers in South Africa, which is something that South Africa itself has debunked repeatedly, actually, that this is, this is actually taking place. So you can see that there's something there going on to do with the amplification of a particular narrative. But from my point of view, what's what's particularly interesting about that is very often, when we talk about issues relating to asylum, we talk about their significance for national politics. We don't necessarily talk about the way in which, I mean, I'm saying this as a sociologist, obviously, our colleagues in international relations are a bit hotter on this, but we don't necessarily recognize the way in which a country's engagement with an international, global asylum regime is actually used in the context of those kind of shifting geopolitics, those shifting relationships between states, often to broker some kind of other outcome in many ways. So I think that that's quite, quite an interesting side of this, isn't it?

NS: I think we've got a number of example of this dynamics. One is like the granting privileged access to the white South African for example. But there is also the negative side of the same kind of policy, which is, for example, now threatening Syrians, Ukrainians, which had the temporary protection to be then sentback home. So this idea that I have a tap on, top off approach to asylum policies, which was exactly what we didn't want to happen when the refugee regime was created with the Geneva Convention in 1951 and the protocol of 1967, this idea that asylum and granting international protection was based on shared, agreed International principles, not on calculation of political convenience.

MB: So really, it's also then a threat, isn't it, to that international order that was established around asylum. And this is something that you and I have written about in the case of the UK as well, and how this kind of pushback from some quite major players on the world stage to try and shift the narrative about refugees and asylum, to allow them some greater control over who they permit to enter their countries under those terms, alongside, of course, all of the offshoring. So the US already does quite a lot of its asylum processing in places like Panama, so that prevents people from arriving in the US in the first place. So that's what we're seeing, too. A common thread, I think, in some of our conversations that we've already started to highlight today is this idea that people with uncertain immigration status have their daily lives, and not only their lives in the labour market affected by immigration policy. And we've seen this in our conversations with Rachel Humphris on sanctuary cities with Cecilia Menjivar on her concept of liminal legality, and Ernesto also mentioned this, and it came across too in our conversation with Heba. So there's really something quite fundamental about this understanding and why we need to take it seriously, isn't it?

NS: Definitely, it's a basic sociological point, but it's clear that anti-immigration policy and discourse that comes from the top and from senior public figures legitimize racism on the ground, on public transport to work in their service industries, or people working in school, etc. I wonder if we can reflect on this with regards to our own understanding of what is happening in UK.

MB: Yes, I think, I think that that's definitely something that we should take seriously. I mean, what we've seen in the UK has been protests outside hotels used to house asylum seekers, the spraying of St George's flags on public infrastructures like roundabouts, reports of increased racism on public transport. And all of this seems to be increasing in many, many ways. For me, when I think about it sociologically, I think about what this is doing in terms of the structure of feeling. So what this makes basically the feeling of everyday life, of navigating these spaces, if you're racially minoritized, if you're a migrant in this country. And I think that this links us back to that earlier conversation about politics and rhetoric and narrative, because, of course, you could say all of this is narrative, and it has no no real implications for people, but it's very clear that what we're seeing around us is that, all the while, while politicians are kind of hashing it out between them on who can be more hardcore on immigration, it's had very real effects for people on the ground. But I suppose for me, the question here is really to do with the relationship between what's happening on the ground and the kind of narratives that we're receiving from the top. And I think Nando, you've kind of, you've done some research through the i-Claim project that you're working on at the moment that kind of looks into this relationship a little bit.

NS: Yes, I think it's a fundamental relationship. But we, what we did as part of the i-Claim project, which looks at the process of irregularization, of migration in Europe, is to try to understand, first, how the politicians and media talks about irregular migration, and we carried out a very large corpus analysis, which covered about over 10,000 articles and statements in a number of countries in Europe. But then we also carried out a public survey on public attitudes towards irregular migration. We wanted to see who looks like an irregular migrant from the perspective of the European public. The main finding, which is important, I guess, is that, from the perspective of the European public, the irregular migrants are those who cross the border irregularly and those who claim asylum while they wait for asylum. What is interesting in this that both these facts are wrong in most cases. What I mean is that if you cross irregularly into Europe, then you may be applying for asylum, and then you are regularly resident in the place until you wait for your decision. So definitely as an asylum seeker, so you are not an irregular migrant, definitely having crossed the border without authorization alone is not enough to make you an irregular migrant, because it's more complicated than that. The interesting bit is also that, from research, we know that the people that lives in Europe irregularly, a lot of them came on regular visa. They overstayed the visa. They may be, you know, they came as a student, they then stay a bit longer than they should be, or they came as tourists and stays longer, but those groups are invisible in the public perception of irregular migration. The second point is that when we looked at the narratives in the media and by politicians, we see exactly the same thing happening. We say basically that a lot of this obsession with the regular migration that we see in the currently in the public discourse is very much focused exactly on those in the criminalization of asylum and the criminalization of border crossings. You could act well, is this catch-22 situation? Is it a chicken and egg? The point is that a lot of the public in Europe, has never met an asylum seekers lives far away from borders, so the only way for them to learn about the risk of the border and asylum seekers is by listening to the media or listening to their politicians. So I think this somehow clarify the importance of top down messages and narratives on how this shapes the conversation on the ground. And the other element of this story is actually how these stories affect people that are irregularized, even if they have documents. I think that's a really important point that we're trying to show that the racialised minorities, racialised citizen as well, sometimes are treated as irregular migrants because people think they are. And the legal status alone is not enough to determine how they are treated within a state a country.

MB: Yeah, so even if you're not directly intended as a target of these kinds of policies that can affect you in a day to day way, in terms of how people interact with you, as well as how it makes you feel living in a place where those things are happening. And I think that that experience of being racialized, of being migrated, is one that has been reported to be on the rise in the UK, and I think that that's quite important. And so this kind of links to that broader conversation that's going on in migration research at the moment. Around de-migratization, of migration research to recognize that even citizens may find themselves caught up in these processes of migrantization, whether it's because they have family members who are subject to the things that are happening, or because they're wrongly assumed to be the people who those kinds of policies, those narratives are targeting. So I think that gives a sense of how the media, the politicians, influence and shape the feelings of everyday life, the affect of everyday life in that respect. So yes,. I think we should move on now. We've mentioned temporary protected status at various points in this episode, and this was the central topic that we discussed with Cecilia Menjivar. And just a little reminder, this was created by the US Congress in 1990 and for a set of very complicated geopolitical reasons, it was intended to give temporary sanctuary, typically of just a few months, to people from countries deemed too unsafe to return to, whether for reasons of war, unrest or disaster. But even at the time that we recorded our episode with Cecilia, the US administration was seriously rolling back TPS for many groups, and that's continued, there have been so many developments around TPS, even since that episode that I'm not going to list them all, but we've seen legal battles over the rolling back of TPS for many Venezuelans, Haitians and others. Now what I wanted to do Nando was think about how this might be related to the earlier point that you made around the proposed changes to indefinite leave to remain, which, as you said, was a kind of a way of prolonging people's journey on their way to becoming permanent, and making permanence conditional as well, and always contingent. So open subject to change that I thought maybe you could reflect a little bit more on this here.

NS: I think two points I would like to make. One is directly related to what you said. What we are seeing is migration governance moving away from what has been until recently, at least in Western Europe and US somehow the main narrative. So you come as a migrant after a few years that you live in the country, you will settle permanently. And then the culmination of this journey is you becoming a citizen through naturalization. So especially in America, this was really very much part of the of the dominant narrative, you know, this process of becoming American as the culmination of the migration journeys. This is part of what the country is about. You know, the there was no America before the migrants were coming. And we know, obviously that is wrong, but this narrative is now under pressure. We are seeing the fact that initially what was questioned was the idea that you can become a citizen in a country where you move. Now the idea of earned citizenship has become very well established. You need to prove your worth. You need to prove to be a good citizen before becoming a citizen, etc, etc. The new step that has been introduced recently is actually to make also settlement for migrants. So this is what we have seen in the emerging is this idea that, well, the normality is no longer that you come here. You can build your life here, if you contribute to the to the economy, to society after a number here you can feel settled and plan your future, get old, get your pension, etc, etc. The point is that we want you only, almost exclusively, as a migrant worker, for as long as you work, then when you are no longer workers, goodbye. So this is the idea that seems to be becoming dominant in Western Europe, in particular, in UK as well. The second point was instead related to, in particular, to asylum and refugees. Now we mentioned this temporary protection as a tool that has been in the system for years. Is not, is not that they didn't exist. I mean, obviously Cecilia made the case of the US, but also in Europe and elsewhere in the world, we use temporary protection to address specific crisis. What we are seeing now and but this has always been in parallel with an asylum system that was based on the Geneva Convention on the refugee status as we know it. What we are seeing now is an attempt to replace. Is an attempt to get rid of the refugee protection of the asylum system, as we know from the Geneva Convention, and only have a system which is based on temporary status, on ad hoc measures that privileged some group against others. And this is where so I think some of the challenges in the future going to be.

MB: Thank you, Nando, I think you've laid out really, really well that kind of increasing use of temporariness as a permanent status. So being temporary as permanent is really clear in what you've said, but also you get a sense of what that actually means for people's lives. And imagine this situation where your right to be somewhere is permanently conditional and contingent. It does create that, that sense of not just, it's not just about, you know, are you a 'good' or a 'bad refugee' in inverted commas, but it also produces, doesn't it, a kind of, a particular type of migrant subjectivity where you're potentially constantly worried about how your actions and how your behavior will be judged in respect to what it means for your right to stay in a country. Now I think that this brings us around to the conversation that we had about free speech with Heba Gowayed and she reflected on the arrests of students, particularly students who were international students in the US protesting genocide in Palestine. Now, since her recording, there's been technically a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, but the issue of free speech on campus continues, and it is, I think, related to this conversation about migrant subjectivity and the good migrant,

NS: Definitely, Michaela. And it's not just about students, but it's also about member of staff with migrant background. What we have seen, and we discussed with Heba, is this idea that migration status is weaponized against academics to silence them and their opposition. I mean, we have seen for some restriction to the right to strike, to support the Palestinian cause, for example, very much. We have seen threats to funding by larger donors, so they also affected the research, not just teaching. We have seen attacks on on academic curriculum, you know, the attempt to change the syllabus, or from courses, etc. So what I guess we may take away point here is that free speech and the restriction of the rights of migrants, so this shift in the governance of migration towards temporariness are very closely, closely related, and they're creating a much more docile environment within Universities,

MB: Definitely, and we could see how that might extend more generally into public life. So I think that our role as sociologists here is quite critical, isn't it, in kind of drawing attention to those to those issues, and it's one of the reasons we do this podcast is to demonstrate the public value that sociology might bring for making sense of some of the things that we're seeing around us. So thank you very much. I think that all of the things that we've heard from our guests about in this series offer perfect examples of why we need sociological thinking on these issues related to migration, but also, more importantly, why, in a context of misinformation, for example, that sociology needs to reach a public audience and we need to find ways of packaging it up for those audiences. Just a little recap. In the series, we heard from Cecilia Menjivar, who showed the importance of looking beyond these kind of black and white boundaries between migrants and citizens, encouraging us to think about that understanding of liminal legality. We heard from Ernesto Castaneda, who showed us the value of looking beyond headlines and shock social media clips to engage in people's experiences and beliefs on the ground. Rachel Humphris, our first guest, reminded us of how the meaning and use of terms such as sanctuary city shift over time, and in this way, she revealed the relationship between language and power that's become so important to many of our conversations in the series, and Heba Gowayed showed us how sociology and sociologists are capable of exploring both continuities and ruptures, and how sociologists can be important voices speaking out against injustice.

NS: Thanks for listening to this series of Who do we think we are? On MAGA and migration, the season has been made as part of the research project re bordering Britain and Britain's after Brexit migzan, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Learn more@mignon.net

MB:  And as ever, please do follow and rate us on the app you're using to hear this. You can also find us on Instagram at Abt citizenship.

NS:  Thanks for listening. Bye.