Rebordering Britain & Britons after Brexit
Towards a new politics of migration?
Abstract
This paper reconsiders Stephen Castle's classic paper Why Migration Policies Fail. Beginning with the so-called migration crisis of 2015 it considers the role of numbers is assessing success or failure. It argues that in the UK public debates about immigration changed with European Union (EU) Enlargement in 2004, when the emphasis shifted from concerns about asylum to concerns about EU mobility. Concerns were exacerbated by the government's failure to meet its promise to reduce net migration. This policy is hampered by the general problem of definition of migrant and the gap between statistical measures and popular usage in which migration signifies problematic mobility. In fact, concern about migration has become a placeholder for concerns about globalization and democratic accountability. A new politics of migration must make connections between migrants and citizens, but also between migration and other global processes, particularly outsourcing and the exploitation of labour and resources in the global south.
You might also be interested in :
British migrants in Berlin: negotiating postcolonial melancholia and racialised nationalism in the wake of Brexit
World War II nostalgia in the UK is mired in a postcolonial melancholia that not only fuels Brexit nationalism, but carries implications for how the UK relates to the European Continent.
Do they need to integrate? The place of EU citizens in the UK and the problem of integration
This article aims to provide empirical evidence against the theory and practice of immigrant integration through the experience of EU citizens in the UK around Brexit. We demonstrate that, in the case of EU citizens, the outcomes of presumably successful “integration” have been achieved while - and…
Methodological nationalism and the Northern Ireland blind-spot in ethnic and racial studies
Northern Ireland (NI) has been one of the central issues in Brexit. Yet, it barely featured in the discussions in the run up to the EU Referendum in 2016. This blind-spot regarding NI has been a long-standing feature of social science research on the UK. This article examines the NI blind-spot…
Superdiversity's backstory
In Superdiversity: Migration and social complexity, Vertovec returns to the concept of superdiversity and reviews its uses in different disciplinary fields. Importantly…