By Bridget Anderson.
Hostility to migration and claims about the negative changes that it brings are increasingly being mobilised to fan racism. At the same time, some of the most prominent anti-migration advocates are themselves people of colour. How can we understand the current relationship between the politics of race and the politics of migration?
While hostility towards migrants is growing across all regions of the world, each country has its specificities. In recent years in the UK, the prevention of Channel crossings by people in ‘small boats’ has become a stated political priority of both the Conservative and Labour parties, and the failure to carry this out, together with rising immigration more generally, is regarded as a source of ‘legitimate grievance’.
This was the reason given for last summer’s riots in England – the motivation was thus labelled as ‘legitimate’ even if the violence was condemned. There were arson attempts on hotels where asylum seekers are housed, and immigration advisers were also targeted. However, those singled out were not only asylum seekers; mosques and shops were also attacked. What mattered were not passports and immigration status but the colour of people’s skin: rioters blocking streets allowed ‘whites’ to pass, but not ‘non-whites’. For the rioters, ethnic minority citizens are ‘migrants’ and, regardless of rights or legal status, they simply do not belong.
In migration studies, there is increasing interest in ‘migrantisation’: the legal, social and political processes that turn people into migrants. While this is a rather clumsy and intellectual sounding term, this is precisely what rioters were doing. Giving themselves the authority to decide who were and who were not rightfully present, they ‘migrantised’ British citizens. Crucially, what mattered was not the legal status of citizenship but whether one belonged to ‘the people’, and more particularly the national people (no more a naturally occurring phenomenon of course than ‘migration’).
For migration policy and politics, nationalism and nationality have long been key mechanisms for navigating the treacherous waters that distinguish hostility to immigration from racism. While there is general agreement that racism is a bad thing, nationalism is treated as a far more nuanced phenomenon. Thus, while it is key to the legitimacy of immigration controls that they are not seen as openly racist, they are unabashedly a performance of nationalism. To discriminate or differentiate on the grounds of nationality is ostensibly quite different than to differentiate on the grounds of race.
What is being leveraged here is the ambiguity of nationality. Nationality can mean citizenship in the sense of a legal relation to a state, but nationality can also mean belonging to the nation in the sense of a particular national people. It is possible to be a national in the sense of having citizenship and yet not be regarded as a bona fide member of the nation. To belong to a nation is to make a claim to a history and to (cultural) values, which is why when white people intervened to stop the violence of rioters, they were taunted with the chant: ‘You’re not English anymore’. How one gets to become a part of the nation is, unlike citizenship, not subject to a set of procedures. The mechanism to make such claims is strongly imagined as through ancestry and cultural characteristics, both of which are also imagined as constituents of race.
‘The people’ calls on the class as well as the racialisation of the nation. Indeed, the justification of immigration restrictions lies in part on the representation of the migrant as the competitor with the national working class for privileges of membership. The terminology associated with migration exposes the class dimension of whiteness, which is not a singular identity: the visible whiteness of the ‘Eastern European migrant’ and of the ‘white working class’ both contrast with the invisible whiteness of the white middle class. In contemporary Britain, ‘migrants’ are not imagined as the well-to-do: the movement or presence of wealthy people is not considered a problem; ergo, they are not migrants.
This association between migration, class and race does not come about because the person in the street doesn’t understand who migrants ‘really’ are. Assumptions about migration do not float free of immigration and citizenship policies. It is rather the other way around: that everyday assumptions about who a migrant is make visible the underlying logic of these policies. Immigration controls are aimed at the negatively racialised global poor. A combination of skills, wealth and nationality determines how free a person is to cross international borders. To understand how anti-migration sentiment is being politically mobilised, it is necessary to appreciate the blurred boundaries between race and nation and between race and class and how this blurriness is drawn on in particular circumstances.
Crucially, we do well to remember that while the legal status of citizenship often offers very material advantages, there are exclusions within citizenship as well as from citizenship. Even in wealthy European and North American countries, neither citizenship (as a legal status), nor whiteness, nor the ‘right’ to work, nor even access to the welfare state fully protect people from domination, precarity and exploitation. Indeed, the welfare state itself can force citizens to move within country, that is, can ‘migrantise’ citizens. Finding similarities, parallels and connections and shared interests across differences is necessary to respond to the deeply embedded and highly affective tropes that are powerfully at work in our politics.
Bridget Anderson is Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship, and Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol at the University of Bristol. She is the editor of Rethinking Migration: Challenging Borders, Citizenship and Race (2025), available in paperback (use the code CNF25 for a 50% discount) or via open access here.
This post was originally published by Transforming Society, the Bristol University Press blog, on 3rd March 2025.