Author: Emily

Vigilante bordering – implications for immigrant rights protection in South Africa

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Enocent Nemuramba.

In August 2022, a group of men and women gathered at the entrance of Kalafong Hospital in Atteridgeville, a township near Pretoria, South Africa. They were not patients, nor were they staff. They were members of Operation Dudula (hereafter Dudula), a vigilante movement that has grown in visibility over the last three years. Their objective was simple, if chilling: to block access to health care for anyone whom they suspected of being a foreign national (or immigrant) based on the colour of their skin or the language that they spoke. Patients were turned away, accused of ‘stealing’ resources. In some cases, healthcare workers themselves were intimidated for treating immigrants.

This spectacle of exclusion has not ended. In 2025, Dudula (which loosely means to ‘push back’, ‘drive back’ or ‘push out’ in the local Zulu language) extended its activities to dozens of clinics across Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces. As the group explained in a public statement: ‘Our goal is clear, to protect our people’s rights and ensure public services prioritise South Africans first.’ Later, the movement targeted schools, delivering letters to principals in Soweto that warned against enrolling undocumented children. The vigilante group’s de facto leader, Zandile Dabula, was even more explicit: ‘We’re going to be stationed at schools, and no foreign child will be allowed to attend a public school.’

What began as sporadic harassment has hardened into a strategy, to recast public services as checkpoints of belonging. Hospitals and school gates have become borders. Citizens and non-citizens are separated not by officials in uniforms but by self-appointed vigilantes.

Members of Operation Dudula stage a protest against immigrants in Gauteng Province, 10th November 2025 (image: Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism).

From everyday bordering to vigilante bordering

Migration scholars describe ‘everyday bordering’ (Yuval-Davis et al. 2018) as the dispersal of immigration control into daily life, from landlords checking passports to nurses being asked to check who is entitled to care. Dudula takes this dynamic a step further.

The movement’s modus operandi amounts to what I call vigilante bordering, an overt and extra-legal enforcement of access by organised non-state actors who appropriate the logics of the border and re-stage them in ordinary sites. Unlike bureaucratic bordering, which disperses the state’s authority into welfare and work, vigilante bordering relies on coercion, intimidation and public spectacle to impose exclusionary rules of access. This often means operating alongside and sometimes against the law. The concept entails mobilising vigilantism to create everyday ‘border posts’ that confront and, in practice, curtail constitutional guarantees.

Dudula illustrates this phenomenon vividly. Hospitals and schools, spaces meant to symbolise universal rights, are re-imagined as checkpoints. Vigilantes patrol entry, scrutinise bodies and determine belonging. In so doing, they reproduce the aesthetics of border control while producing new geographies of exclusion.

Vigilante mobilisation and the making of vigilante borders

Operation Dudula did not appear from nowhere. It is a culmination of long-standing frustrations by South Africans with unemployment, inequality and weak service delivery, which are frequently channelled into xenophobic scapegoating. What distinguishes Dudula from earlier waves of anti-migrant violence in South Africa is its organised and performative character.

Rather than spontaneous riots, Dudula stages carefully choreographed blockades, livestreams confrontations and issues press statements. While their actions fall within the broader subject of policing everyday life in South Africa, as described by Buur and Jensen (2004), vigilante mobilisation functions as informal social control that blurs with state authority. In Dudula’s case, this control is explicitly redeployed to construct vigilante borders.

The consequences of vigilante bordering can be fatal. A sick one-year-old child died after the mother, from Malawi, was denied access to Johannesburg’s Alexandra Clinic by members of Dudula. The cumulative impact of these tragic events is that, over time, they instil fear in immigrant communities, prompting some to avoid hospitals altogether, which can delay treatment for tuberculosis, HIV or maternal health. Vigilante bordering in the health sector not only reshapes mobility but also impacts access at the most intimate scale.

Rights under siege

South Africa’s Bill of Rights enshrines socio-economic rights and the country’s Constitutional Court has repeatedly affirmed that these extend to all who live in it. The right to basic education (Section 29) is unconditional and the right to emergency health care (Section 27) is explicit. By disrupting access to both, Dudula challenges not only migrants’ rights but the state’s constitutional order.

Before the advent of vigilante bordering at the gates of public health institutions, immigrants had long been subjected to what migration scholars refer to as medical xenophobia. In abstract terms, it ‘refers to the negative attitudes and practices of health professionals and employees towards migrants and refugees based purely on their identity as non-South African’ (Crush and Tawodzera, 2013). These sustained practices of medical exclusion, which are now punctuated by intimidation at facilities, can have outsized effects. They do not simply inconvenience migrants, they also corrode trust in the health system itself.

Civil society organisations, medical NGOs and legal advocates have sounded the alarm on vigilante mobilisation at health centres and schools. Médecins Sans Frontières has documented cases where Dudula intimidation effectively denied care, including reports of security staff and healthcare workers acting in collusion with the vigilante groups. Education rights groups have condemned school gate blockades as unlawful and harmful to child development.

Beyond South Africa

While Operation Dudula is distinctive, its orientation and approach are in no way unique. Across Europe, community patrols have targeted refugee housing. In the United States, volunteer militias monitor the southern border. In each case, vigilantes position themselves as defenders of sovereignty, translating social anxieties into exclusionary practices.

What South Africa shows is how such movements can turn inward, with hospitals and schools, rather than border posts, becoming the stage. The immediate implications are that any site of welfare provision can now be reframed as a border, eroding the universality of rights through the spread of vigilante bordering.

Towards counter-mobilisation

What, then, is to be done? I contend that the state has an obligation to preserve the rule of law and ensure the depoliticisation of hospitals and schools. So far, the timid response by the South African government and law enforcement authorities has only served to embolden vigilante groups such as Dudula. Some of their members are now engaging in open confrontation with immigrants inside hospital facilities. For as long as these vigilante groups are allowed to carry out their unlawful activities with impunity, vigilante bordering is bound to get worse.

South African civil society actors, from the media to NGOs, should be commended for the proactive approach they have taken to record and challenge vigilante bordering incidents across the country. Journalists, NGOs and community leaders deserve ongoing support to ensure that they continue exposing human rights abuses by groups like Dudula. Their advocacy efforts place the spotlight on the actions of vigilante groups and provide the impetus needed to constantly challenge and contest them. Over time, this reduces the spectre of accepting vigilante impunity as the norm.

Public education is necessary to help increase awareness about the dangers of denying healthcare access to a segment of the population. Dudula has garnered public sympathy for its actions by conveniently claiming that they are protecting ‘public resources’ by restricting non-South Africans from accessing public services. What is missing from the ongoing discourse on Dudula’s actions is that health access restrictions not only pose health risks to immigrants but can potentially impact the health security of communities in which immigrants reside, especially if there is an outbreak of a communicable disease.

Conclusion

Operation Dudula’s vigilante mobilisation is a demonstration of how everyday bordering is being appropriated by non-state actors to reshape everyday spaces like hospitals and schools into sites of exclusion. This new form of bordering, which I refer to as vigilante bordering, mimics the state’s control of access while undermining human right protections.

Recognising vigilante bordering matters for migration scholarship because it shifts the analytical gaze from state policy to non-state mobilisation. It matters for human rights advocates because it highlights the fragility of universal rights when enforcement is outsourced to vigilante actors. And it matters for everyday South Africans because it warns how easily the spaces of care and learning can be transformed into spaces of exclusion.

Enocent Nemuramba is a second-year PhD student in Politics at the University of Bristol and a member of the SPAIS Migration Group. His research interests include the ways in which multi-scalar power structures mediate migrant political economies. For his PhD research project he is using a critical multi-scalar lens to study how Zimbabwean immigrants living in the middle-income suburbs of Cape Town make and establish home.

Coping with protracted migration crises: the role of international organizations in the Syrian and Venezuelan displacements

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By Çağla Ekin Güner and Ana Margheritis.

Two of the most dramatic human displacements in history have taken place in the Middle East and Latin America in the past decade. The civil war in Syria forced millions of people to flee during and after 2011, mainly to Turkey. Excluded from formal refugee status due to Turkey’s geographical limitation to the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees, Syrians were placed under temporary protection. This regime exacerbated their legal and socio-economic precarity and posed mounting challenges for settlement and integration policies. In Venezuela, the deterioration of political, economic and social standards in the early 2000s prompted significant outflows, which have intensified since 2016. When the lack of security and basic services spread throughout the country, emigration massively increased, and the type of flows and destinations diversified. As analysed elsewhere, such large displacement has affected most Latin American countries and, at its peak (2017/2018), has demanded a regional response.

Emergency shelters for forcibly displaced Venezuelans who have crossed the border into northern Chile (UNHCR 2023)

In our project, we have offered two examples of the crucial role played by international organizations (IOs) in the public-private collaborations that have been launched to address the impact of these migration crises. We emphasize the significance of the protracted character of the problem, which highlights its complexity, temporality and scope for policy innovation.

The displacement of Syrians since 2011 has become a central area of tension in Turkey’s political and societal discourse, exposing the limits of centralized migration governance in addressing long-term integration needs. In this context, local governments have emerged as key actors, particularly in cities like Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city and a critical hub for both transit and settlement of Syrians. By examining how local authorities, in collaboration with IOs, have navigated restrictive national frameworks and experimented with institutional innovations in refugee inclusion, our work identifies three main developments.

First, municipal actors increasingly redefined refugees’ access to rights and services beyond restrictive national frameworks. The establishment of the Directorate of Urban Justice and Equality (DUJE) in Izmir in 2020 exemplifies how city governments can introduce inclusive, rights-based approaches underpinned by intersectionality and urban citizenship. 

Second, mayoral leadership was crucial in driving institutional change. Izmir’s intra-party transition in 2019 triggered a shift in political priorities, enabling the foundation of DUJE as a municipal unit to reframe access to services for all residents of the city, including refugees.

Third, the UNHCR played a crucial role in supporting and legitimizing DUJE. Together with the municipality, it developed a dedicated refugee branch within the directorate, an innovative example of vertical cooperation between an international organization and a local authority. This partnership provided resources, strengthened capacity and offered a political shield in a highly polarized national context. Though limited by administrative and financial constraints, DUJE grounded a broader vision of urban citizenship in which participation and recognition transcended legal status. It also reflected UNHCR’s shift from displacement-focused assistance towards long-term inclusion and social cohesion. While UNHCR initially proposed a refugee-specific unit, negotiations led to the creation of a broader rights-based directorate, signalling its growing engagement with local governance and inclusive urban policy.

Such experiments remain fragile, however. After the 2024 local elections and another mayoral change, DUJE underwent a restructuring process, casting doubt on the continuity of its inclusive agenda. The case of Izmir thus highlights both the potential of municipal-IO collaboration to advance refugee rights in the context of protracted crisis conditions and the political volatility surrounding such innovations.

In Latin America, the nature and magnitude of the unprecedented intra-regional displacement of Venezuelans tested the capacity of transit and receiving countries, as well as relatively low-institutionalized and ineffective regional organizations. Inter-state multilateralism faded and was rapidly replaced by ad hoc unilateral measures. A regional approach only emerged in 2018 when the UNHCR and IOM (International Organization for Migration) launched a co-led transnational initiative: the Regional Inter-Agency Coordination Platform (R4V), which today involves around 250 intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, international donors, and national and local governments in 17 Latin America and Caribbean countries. Our work underscores three main implications of this partnership.

First, the R4V constitutes a unique intervention in terms of its large number of partners and geographical scope, intense use of virtual tools and platforms, and formal co-leadership. The nature of the problem encouraged innovation. The Venezuelan case involves mixed flows, continuous outflows, return, circularity, relocation across several countries, and a political controversy around the status of refugees; it affects the entire region, rather than a few countries around the epicentre of the crisis. Therefore, IOs found an opportunity for redesigning old models of humanitarian responses while expanding actions geographically and substantially.

Second, although initially conceived as a coordination role, IOs’ intervention diversified and evolved as the crisis worsened. By facilitating information diffusion and negotiations, the R4V platform structured relations among and within nation-states, between these and non-governmental organizations, and between regional actors and international donors. Being the main source of updated migration data, the R4V increased the IOs’ influence on policymaking. Over time, the platform incorporated new members, channelled inter-sectoral collaborations across multiple policy domains, increased its advocacy and fundraising capacity, extended the timeframe of its strategic goals, and reframed the crisis narrative to include not only Venezuelans but also other nationalities sharing migration corridors across South, Central and North America.

Third, although the transnational partnership is portrayed as a technical, apolitical coordination-focused intervention, complementary to states’ actions, it engages with substantive aspects of migration governance, including aligning the region with the global emphasis on safe, orderly and regular migration. Representatives of the leading IOs portrayed the R4V as an effective response with benefits to all parties – a view that helps justify a continuous region-wide approach under IOs’ leadership. In the meantime, the platform has fostered a new intersectoral and multilevel management of regional migration.

These cases illustrate how IOs can play innovative roles during protracted crises, which not only place great strain on institutions but also create opportunities to reconfigure governance mechanisms. As shown here, IOs may shape new institutional arrangements, whether by enabling regional frameworks for multi-country cooperation or supporting local governments to innovate under political and administrative constraints. In both cases, navigating politically charged environments has required pragmatic strategies and pro-active adaptations that ultimately reshaped migration governance. That said, the results ultimately depend on sustained political will, multi-scalar collaboration and embedded institutional support.

Çağla Ekin Güner is a final year PhD candidate in Political Science at the Central European University (CEU), Vienna. Her academic interests include migration, (urban) integration governance, intersectional vulnerabilities of migrant women and urban citizenship. Her PhD research compares refugees’ integration paths and experiences of belonging in Germany and Turkey within the framework of urban politics and governance.

Ana Margheritis is Research Professor at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Her expertise is in transnational migration, international political economy and foreign policy. Her most recent work focuses on migration policy and governance, diaspora engagement policies and migrant political rights.

Citizen geopolitics: understanding the role of migrant naturalisation in the transformations in the Middle East

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By Paladia Ziss.

Naturalisation is usually seen as a process by which migrants access the rights, duties and passport of their country of residence. They may feel that they belong there and want to be able to stay, have a say in its politics or access better jobs. States also have interests in naturalising migrants, usually because they bring skills or wealth, or because they are already considered part of a nation. In my initial research with Syrian refugees living across Turkey and Germany, however, naturalisation does not seem to be predominantly about the relationship between a state and a person. Instead, in the changing context of the Middle East, citizenship and naturalisation seems increasingly about navigating politics, travel and territory across multiple states – that is, about geopolitics.

Since 2011, about six million Syrians have been forced to flee the dictatorial regime of Bashar Al-Assad, his brutal crackdown against an uprising and a violent civil war. Most settled in Turkey and Germany. Although most of these continue to hold a temporary legal status, many have tried to naturalise in order to access rights they were denied by their own state. About 500,000 Syrians have become dual German-Syrian or Syrian-Turkish citizens. Holding citizenship of their country of residence is a way to feel more protected against rising anti-migrant sentiment and threats of mass deportation by right-wing pundits. In Frankfurt in 2021 Youssef, originally from Latakia, had just filed his citizenship application when he told me: ‘With the war in Syria, I know how quickly politics can change. At least with citizenship they won’t be able to kick me out.’

The Syrian-Turkish border at Nusaybin (image: William John Gauthier on Flickr, 2018)

With a Syrian passport, which was expensive and hard to get, the refugees I spoke to could rarely travel to see family in other states. The German and (although less so) Turkish passports helped with that.

But research participants also felt ambivalent about their new citizenship. They were often disappointed that, as dual citizens, they still faced racism and discrimination. Citizenship to them was not only about their own relationship to one nation-state. It was also about whether and how they could share lives with family and friends spread out across many different geographies. Dual citizens were even more aware that most Syrians could not travel or use their rights in a context where citizenship, more than anything else, determines life chances and status. Some felt that citizenship stuck them to a territory they had not chosen. Especially for Turkish-Syrians, citizenship meant they would probably never move elsewhere but settle in Turkey, a state in repeated economic crisis and political turmoil. For all, citizenship was embedded in their social networks across Germany, Turkey and Syria.

On 8 December 2024, Assad’s regime was overthrown, changing the lives of the Syrian diaspora overnight. Many Syrians have been trying to return to Syria. They want to visit family: parents or grandparents they have not seen in years, or siblings, nephews and nieces they have never met. They want to check up on their cities and homes, often reduced to mere rubble. Many want to participate in the rebuilding of their country. Again, however, citizenship divides opportunities. Syrians with a second passport can travel and return to their country of residence. Those with temporary refugee papers risk losing their status if they do. The security, economic and political situation in Syria remains fragile and permanent return is risky.

Meanwhile, Syrians have pointed out to me that it is not only them who are using their national citizenship for global purposes. Their states of residence are starting to do so too.

Taha, a naturalised citizen of Turkey originally from Deir Az-Zor in Syria, told me: ‘The Turkish state’s plan is to naturalize 1.5 million Syrians as a belt in the southern region.’ He thinks that giving citizenship to Syrians is one way through which Turkey seeks influence in Syria. It is not clear whether this will actually happen. Naturalisation for Syrians is granted on exceptional grounds. There are no official statistics and the Turkish government hasn’t updated the number of accepted Syrian citizenship applications for more than a year. Yet, for Syrians, naturalisation is part of a pattern that Yassin al Haj Saleh has called ‘liquid imperialism’ to describe the overlapping and opaque military, economic and political ways in which states such as Turkey, Russia, Iran and the US have shaped the Syrian civil war and denied Syrians self-determination. These practices echo older, imperial conceptions of membership that were not about democratic participation, national belonging or rights, but rather about competition for population to secure labour and territory.

Back in Germany, citizenship is also changing from a national to a global institution. The new citizenship law of 2024 requires applicants to abide to the German constitution or values, however vaguely defined. Following a late addition during the parliamentary process, however, it also requires citizens-to-be to swear to commit to the ‘prohibition against waging a war of aggression’ – shorthand for condemning the Russian war on Ukraine – and ‘Germany’s special historical responsibility for the unjust National Socialist regime and its consequences, in particular for the protection of Jewish life’ – relating to Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

In short, both migrants and states increasingly use citizenship not only to access or regulate national belonging but also to navigate a changing geopolitical world order. These insights point to complicated questions about the changing struggles between citizenship, nationality, territory and the state. How do states employ the institution of citizenship not only for domestic benefit but also for global power? How is this embedded in imperial histories? How do citizens and citizens-to-be use multiple citizenships to negotiate the global hierarchy of passports? What do these practices do to the institution of citizenship itself, which is mostly still understood as membership in a nation-state? The case of Syrians naturalising across Germany and Turkey in the contexts of the transformations of the Middle East shows that we need to rethink what citizenship is and does in the 21st century, beyond membership in and to a nation-state territory.

Paladia Ziss is Senior Research Associate at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She studies the politics and sociology of displacement and citizenship across postcolonial Europe and the Middle East.

The carceral economies of asylum: who’s working the border?

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By Eda Yazici.

The UK government’s new immigration white paper, Restoring Control over the Immigration System, promises to ‘surge resource’ into immigration enforcement. But what does this surge look like on the ground – and who is doing the work? This blog draws on a pilot for a proposed research project with people working in the asylum system to explore what their labour conditions and relations reveal about the carceral economies and socialities of asylum.

Labour on the border

Successive governments have ‘surged resource’ in immigration enforcement. In 2023, the Home Office doubled its number of Asylum Decision Makers (ADMs) to 2,400. In 2024 and 2025 plans were announced to recruit 1,000 more officers each year. But who are these new recruits and what does their labour tell us about Britain’s immigration regime?

(Image: Flickr)

This post begins a conversation about the working conditions and experiences of those employed in the UK asylum system – ADMs, Housing Officers (HOs) and Detainee Custody Officers (DCOs). In doing so it interrogates the relationship between the political economy of asylum and labour conditions and explores workers’ (potential) solidarity with asylum seekers.  

Work wanted

In the US, scholars have examined how mass incarceration developed alongside the decline of local job markets. For Gilmore (2007), the US prison system generates jobs and profit and serves as a fix for surplus populations. McCoy (2017) similarly links incarceration to deindustrialisation. While there have been studies that look at the role of market forces and privatisation in the asylum system as well as studies that look at the harm perpetrated by its frontline workers (Kalir, 2023), there has been less focus on the jobs created by carceral capital in this system (Wang, 2018) – and even less on how border workers see themselves and relate to their employers and to asylum applicants.

Who are the workers?

in the UK, Asylum Decision Makers (ADMs) are employed by the Home Office, and Housing Officers (HOs) and Detainee Custody Officers (DCOs) are employed by Home Office contractors. These workers are asylum applicants’ main point of contact with the state during the asylum process. ADMs conduct substantive interviews and decide the outcomes of applicants’ asylum cases. HOs and DCOs determine the everyday living conditions of people seeking refuge.

ADMs, HOs and DCOs are paid little over the national living wage. In 2023, the Home Office’s contractors reported record profits, yet workers saw no corresponding pay rise. In 2022, ADMs went on strike, with their union, PCS, stating that 10% of its members in the civil service rely on food banks and Universal Credit. ADMs, HOs and DCOs are largely based in post-industrial cities with high unemployment rates and limited job opportunities. Many ADMS are from ethnically minoritised backgrounds, with 49.3% of people on the ADM pay bands and working in migration and borders operations for the Home Office identifying as such.

Moral dilemmas and material realities

The labour market realities faced by these workers and their own subjectivities have the potential to reveal a lot about how the asylum system is sustained. But how do people who work in the asylum system and those closest to them see themselves? Among the first set of concerns raised in my preliminary conversations was the moral dilemma posed by the relative security of a job in the civil service in comparison to the potential impacts of decisions that employees had to make regarding asylum applications, highlighting the affective challenges of the role. For the partner of ADM no.2, the ‘evil’ of working for the Home Office is outweighed by the opportunity to leave insecure work in retail. For ADM no.1, the Home Office, with its 26 weeks of maternity leave on full pay in comparison to the statutory 90% of full pay for six weeks available at the call centre she was working for, enabled her to start a family. Despite this, the ADM role did not present a significant pay rise for either.

‘Look, I know working at the Home Office is a bit evil, but it’s not like she can work the checkout at B&M forever.’ (Partner of ADM no.2)

‘If it wasn’t for the Home Office job, we wouldn’t have been able to start a family; the call centre only paid statutory maternity.’ (ADM no.1)

Alongside these labour market concerns and the power ADMs exercise over applicants’ lives are a set of questions around worker subjectivities and opportunities for solidarity.

‘My neighbour is an Asylum Decision Maker. I was so shocked that someone whose family are migrants would want to work for the Home Office.’ (Neighbour of an ADM)

‘I’m stopping rapists from coming into the country.’ (ADM no.2)

The ADM described by his neighbour is second-generation British-Pakistani. He is in his early 20s and his ADM role is his first fulltime job since leaving compulsory education. ADM no.2 is a dual British-Australian citizen who decided to settle in the UK after visiting for the first time in 2017. ADM no.2’s comments reveal gendered and racialised assumptions about who seeks asylum and her citizenship and legal status point to tensions around privileged migration and mobility as they relate to race and settler colonialism. These conversations highlight the need for engagement with worker subjectivities, working conditions and wider carceral economies.

Is solidarity possible?

I argue that it is important for scholars of migration and labour to engage with the tensions, concerns and trade-offs raised by workers in the asylum system. Their labour market trajectories and decisions can reveal how carceral economies are reproduced.

By asking the question of what options these workers have, we can – following Tierney’s (2012) engagement with US prison workers – consider whether border workers’ unions pit workers in the asylum system against those seeking asylum. Can solidarity exist between those enforcing the border and those subject to it? And how does the British labour movement reconcile its support for border workers with its dedication to ending a hostile immigration regime?

These are early reflections and I invite readers’ thoughts and contributions on how to engage with this potentially exciting and insightful area of research and organising.

Eda Yazici is a Senior Research Associate on the PRIME Project in the School of Sociology Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She is interested in race, migration and labour organising.

‘Find your village’: activating migrant heritage community assets

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By Tom Allport.

Migration to an urban environment in the Global North is often very challenging for families, especially those coming from a culture where it is recognised that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. As a doctor, I see patients from different parts of Somalia who tell me about life in Somali villages where children often go out and play with each other almost as soon as they can walk. The older children look after the younger ones, and any adult who sees a child lost, not going home when they should, or in need of help will come to their assistance. The rhythm of activities across the day and the year, and mutual expectations of established relationships can help provide a structure within which children have the opportunity to grow up together happily and safely. In a connected community, when someone needs to engage with a government agency, there will always be someone with experience who can tell them how to sort it out or go with them. But for migrants to the Global North, living in our atomised, fragmented society, often after a difficult or traumatic journey to get here, it’s much harder to find a solution.

In our research project ‘Find your village’ – a ten-year collaboration between the University of Bristol and partners in community/voluntary, health and local authority sectors – we have heard many stories of fear, uncertainty and isolation among Somali migrants living in tower blocks in Bristol. Our research highlights the multi-layered challenge of this dramatic change in their lives, starting with the cultural clash of moving from a communal to an individualistic society, with multiple sources of stress and impoverished, frightening environments.

Tower block in central Bristol (image: Matthew Gilder on Flickr)

As we wrote in a PolicyBristol briefing about this research, children born in the UK to migrant families, often with poor housing, few resources and a local environment that feels unsafe, may miss out on opportunities to play and interact. This is likely to have serious long-term effects on their development and wellbeing, leading to difficulties with education, employment and risk of crime. Our project therefore has particularly important messages for housing, planning and neighbourhood services, and for early years education and health services. The issues are highly interconnected and require joined-up, sustained thinking and action that builds collaboration and trust. You can hear more about this in our short film ‘Find Your Village’ (2019), made with funding from the University of Bristol’s Brigstow Institute.  

My starting point in this research was my experience as a clinician, working as a community paediatrician in Bristol’s multi-cultural inner-city. In this role I have met many children referred to our child development and disability service with a range of developmental difficulties – language and learning difficulties, and questions about possible autism – whose parents had experienced forced or challenging migration. These families have told me many stories about their situations that create barriers for children to play and socially interact, seemingly interconnected with their parents’ experience of connection or isolation. Having spent time as a young adult in East, Central, Southern and West Africa, noticing the sense of connected community, hospitality and generosity in the places I visited, and seeing children confidently out playing together, I started thinking about the welcome, or otherwise, that people coming from such cultures experience in the UK. This developed into the project ‘Find your village’, which is a programme of co-produced research and advocacy seeking to improve early child development, wellbeing and social connectedness for families with migration heritage.

We have recently published a detailed account of one Somali woman’s experience of pregnancy and the transition to motherhood. Attempting to make sense of her experience of isolation and her lack of wellbeing followed by her growing confidence and engagement in community-building, we identified two overarching themes: a ‘vicious circle’ of lack of wellbeing and isolation, and a ‘virtuous circle’ of gaining confidence and engaging with others that placed her at the heart of a committed and caring community. An experience of ‘alignment’ in social relationships appeared to make possible the shift from ‘vicious’ to ‘virtuous’ circle. This account of transformation – from social isolation to community contribution – underlines the role of community organizations facilitating positive social networks and peer support during pregnancy and early motherhood.

As a result of this research we have developed a flexible, co-produced approach to enabling peer support in pregnancy and the early years (the ‘first 1001 days’) for communities and neighbourhoods with migrant heritage, that we have called Find Your Village. The key transferable functions of this approach to peer support are: 1. proactively engaging, enabling and advocating for families; 2. organising group activities; and 3. advocating for neighbourhood environment improvements.

This approach aims to increase families’ sense of supportive community, improve children’s early opportunities for communication, play and interaction, and enable families to reach the services and resources they need. Projects in Bristol run by Barton Hill Activity Club in partnership with Bristol City Family Hubs service, and by Black Mothers Matter are testing this thinking further, and we are seeking funding for formal evaluations and a national Find Your Village network.

The challenges I describe here for both children and parents in migrant heritage communities, with social isolation perhaps a key common pathway within a wider context of deprivation and marginalisation, needs concerted action by communities and agencies. There are likely to be very substantial mutual benefits from early intervention and prevention actions, both for parents/women’s wellbeing and for children’s early development and later multi-sectoral improved outcomes. However, these actions will need targeting and tailoring, crucially building sustained collaboration and trust, and improving local environments, to work effectively. At the same time we believe that British society, and the Global North more generally, have a huge amount to learn from migrants that have recent experience of communal or collective childrearing, perhaps reclaiming a sense of community and freedom to play that was more possible here in previous generations. Current interest in the UK, in Neighbourhood Health Services and in children’s play, looks promising.

Tom Allport is a Consultant Community Paediatrician and Researcher in Bristol studying and advocating for improved wellbeing, social connectedness and early child development in families who have migrated from the Global South. He is an Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at the Centre for Academic Child Health, University of Bristol Medical School.

Curating Waymarkers – an exhibition visualising mobility, connection and friendship

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By Liz Hingley.

‘A person in any country begins their relationship, adventures and acquires an identity, whether temporary or long, when they put the SIM card of that country in their phone.’
Kacem, from Syria to the Bibby Stockholm Barge, 2020

The words of Kacem frame the door of an old Victorian shop on the Strand in London, which is currently displaying SIM-scale artworks created by hundreds of people as part of the Waymarkers exhibition commissioned by Kings Culture. Waymarkers is a landmark platform for The SIM Project, a programme I founded in 2017 that draws on the smartphone SIM card as an international symbol of connection – one that unlocks local and global networks to bring people with different experiences of mobility together. Combining analogue and digital photographic processes, the project gives material meaning to the ways people curate personal digital archives, and how they visualise and map their everyday lives using the common camera phone.

The SIM Project uses a sensory workshop methodology that has been co-designed over eight years (Hingley, 2022). Participants draw lines with wool to places they connect to on a borderless world map and then select one image to print from their smartphone that gives them a sense of belonging. Using a bespoke 3D printed camera and the chemical ‘magic’ of a miniature darkroom, participants optically transfer the image from their phone screen onto a SIM-scale glass piece. Gathered around a table, the group learns how to polish a metal frame and hand stamp a backplate with a meaningful number, to mirror the International Identification Number on the back of every SIM card. Each person makes one to keep and wear as a pendant, and they are invited to add another to the mobile collection.

The Strand exhibition showcases artworks made in eight countries – from Cyprus to Finland to the USA and the UK – by people with roots in more than 40 countries. Their SIM-scale windows are illuminated daily from 6am to midnight in multiple formats and scales. Mosaic sculptures feature over 1,000 chosen images and portraits of contributors. Through a peephole in the door passersby can view the SIM prints enlarged into a moving projection. In the adjacent window pendants are suspended from a glittering silver shawl inspired by the Portland Global Friendship Group and the international trade of Portland Stone.

In 2024, as part of the b-side arts festival on the Isle of Portland, Dorset, UK, I ran two SIM Project workshops to bring together five residents of this tidal island with five men living on the Bibby Stockholm barge, a container-like floating structure designated as temporary housing for men in the asylum system, moored at that time in Portland Harbour.

During this time, I stayed in the house of a co-founder of the Portland Global Friendship Group (PGFG), whose downstairs rooms were stuffed to the brim with donations of clothes and shoes. The PGFG emerged in response to fear and hostility surrounding the arrival of the Bibby Stockholm barge in August 2023. Originally built for 220 people, the barge’s capacity was expanded to accommodate 506 residents, along with up to 40 staff. The group’s mission was simple: to welcome these men to the island and uphold Portland’s spirit of kindness. When the local Dorset council prohibited members from distributing welcome packs to arriving men and banned them from inviting the men into their homes, the group, in their own words, ‘went maverick’. During the following 18 months, weekly activities evolved in response to the needs and interests of both the men and the local community. These ranged from clothes and SIM card distribution, arts activities and games clubs to grounding pursuits such as walks to explore the island’s distinctive geology and migratory bird life.

Words of the PGFG members inscribed on the Waymarkers exhibition walls highlight the creativity and impact of this grassroots network, which was designed to foster emotional resilience and resist hostile migration policies: ‘Out of adversity, a really beautiful thing has grown.’ The experience also strengthened local ties, bringing many islanders together for the first time. ‘We have become a tight community, a better community because of the men,’ another member reflected. In January 2025, the barge was towed away following the conclusion of the government contract and the ex-Bibby residents were rehoused across the country under the government’s dispersal policy.

In response, the network moved online, with many PGFG members continuing to provide legal, practical and emotional support, primarily through WhatsApp. Seeking to visualise and materialise this ephemeral yet intimate digital connection, I invited islanders and former Bibby Stockholm residents to share five mobile phone photographs that reflected their experience of Portland and the PGFG on their WhatsApp groups. This generated a collection of more than 200 images that captured activities, views, life on the barge, hugs and laughter, a selection of which were printed onto SIM-scale glass and framed in silver to weave into a jewellery piece.

The central core of the jewellery piece is formed by fragments of Portland limestone collected by PGFG members. Highly prized and extensively quarried Portland stone has been exported to construct some of the world’s most powerful landmarks, from the UN headquarters in New York to London’s St Paul’s Cathedral and Bush House, located just opposite the Waymarkers exhibition on The Strand. These ‘waste’ fragments chipped from the valuable stone allude to the lucrative trade of extraction and migration of materials; a wealth that has not profited the island. The monumental Bush House was originally conceived as a major new trade centre by American industrialist Irving T. Bush. Statues symbolising Anglo-American friendship flank the building, which was, until recently, home to the BBC World Service. The building bears the inscription ‘To the friendship of English-speaking peoples.’ In response, the facing Waymarkersexhibition wall is inscribed with the quote, ‘The Portland Global Friendship Group is the biggest family in the world.’

From the stone core of the jewellery piece, I knotted silver into a delicate, net-like structure, evoking the maritime setting and the island’s historic reliance on fishing for sustenance. The numerous photographs of hugs shared by PGFG informed a shape that echoes both the embrace of a shawl and the interwoven chains of protective battle armour. By challenging common sense conventions around the materials used to create necklaces and nets, the piece can be understood as a theoretical ‘body of thinking’ with tangible effects (Culler, 1997). The use of Portland stone fragments disrupts familiar associations between the stone and its histories of ecological extraction, imperial power and cultural influence.

On World Refugee Day, 20th June 2025, an event will reunite the PGFG at Waymarkers. Transport for some of the men to join from around the country is sponsored by Counterpoints Arts as part of Refugee Week. MMB friends are invited to join. Please contact Liz Hingley for details.

Liz Hingley is an artist and anthropologist with a participatory practice shaped by her experiences living across Europe and China. Rooted in the visual arts, her work focuses on tools and rituals of relation that transcend political boundaries and connect the local and global. She is the inaugural MMB Honorary Artist and a Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar on the Programme for Interdisciplinary Resilience Studies. Liz has authored five books, including Under Gods (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2010) and Sacred Shanghai (Washington University Press, 2019). She founded The SIM Project in 2017, which was exhibited at the V&A, London, in 2024.

All photographs by Jack Latimer, on behalf of Kings Culture, 2025.

When theory meets praxis: co-producing with experts by experience

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By Ryan Lutz.

Praxis for Migrants and Refugees has been advocating for migrant rights in the UK since 1983. It collaborates with numerous researchers and charities to promote more humane immigration policies. Its work often mirrors the debates in migration studies around knowledge production—the what and how of ‘scientific’ knowledge being produced. Decades of Praxis experience have now been condensed into its latest recommended guide, Fair Compensation: A Guide by Experts by Experience, aimed at researchers working with migrants in the UK. The guide offers a roadmap for how to make it more possible for migrants to engage in academic knowledge production about the migrant experience.

This comes at an important time for migration researchers as migration becomes framed as the one of the foremost political issues both in the UK and abroad. The empirical work we do with migrant communities has immediate political salience, but we are guilty of not focusing enough on making the research process inclusive for the vulnerable populations we write about (Smith and Wool, 2025). One obvious way to do this is by including voices and perspectives from migrants themselves. This infuses a decolonial agenda into our research (Mayblin and Turner, 2020) and ensures the political salience of our work does not sideline or marginalize the communities we do research with and for.

However, like most attempts to make real the transfer of power from migration researchers to migrants, praxis has become co-opted into the newest clickbait term that researchers use for funding and publications (Raghuram and Sondhi, 2023). Some scholars therefore make a point of not engaging directly with migrants in order to avoid the research process being extractive and harmful. But despite these good intentions, academic ‘experts’ making claims about migrant communities rather than with them have, historically, furthered their marginalization (Krause, 2017). It is a delicate balance. Researchers must not avoid engaging with migrant communities for fear of research fatigue or extractivism, but they should also not rush headfirst into working with vulnerable communities before their research process is fully thought through.

The new guide from Praxis is a timely and practical tool for getting this balance right among both established and emerging researchers. Yes, it is true that working with migrant communities can be emotionally challenging and have unintended emotional costs for both researcher and researched. But, thinking of the UK in particular, in an environment where migrants’ right to a dignified life is under consistent and increasing threats, the cost of silence from all of us is too great. This guide on fair compensation, written by migrants, suggests concrete steps for how researchers can support migrants with what they need in order to participate in research.

Participatory research itself rests on a process of respect, mutual learning, reciprocity and personal transformation. By being humble and recognizing where our expertise as researchers ends and that of experts by experience begins, we can unearth truly novel ideas and research findings. When we as researchers value all forms of knowledge—local, experiential and theoretical—we are best placed to truly hear what our experts by experience are saying.

These processes lack a road map and are extremely contextual, which makes them easy to shy away from. But if migrants’ needs are met so that they can reasonably participate in research, the messiness and effort is always worth it. To offer a granular starting point, researchers’ engagement should account for: travel, food, data costs, childcare, reimbursements, event access, clothing and accommodation (if necessary). These are all things the Praxis guide recommends. However, to show how complex this can be, here is a brief story from my own PhD research for which I co-produced a study with migrant communities in Bristol.

I tried to make sure everything I did was fair and commensurate with the migrants I worked with. In many ways, my approach was considered best practice in social science research. I offered meaningful ways to be involved, let their feedback inform my study’s research questions, reimbursed people for expenses and thanked them for their time, incorporated multiple rounds of feedback and involved them in the findings and dissemination of my results (Van Praag, 2021). However, it still fell short in several ways from what Praxis is proposing as the minimum.

Praxis’s recommendations are the new standard for engaging with migrant communities precisely because they come from migrant communities. The authors have worked in research projects and advocacy efforts, and through their knowledge they are telling researchers what we need to consider and build into our future research proposals. Many of these recommendations are along the lines of reimbursement policies.

Offering financial support is just the beginning, though. Each person’s experience is unique so simply asking individuals how they would like to be paid for their time is a human step that gets glazed over in the bureaucracy of research projects. For example, I thought that giving high street vouchers for my participants’ time would work best. But I didn’t account for the barriers they encountered with these vouchers. Whenever I had a co-production meeting I had to spend extra time with each participant to make sure they understood and had successfully redeemed their voucher. University rules prevent us from giving cash directly, which many told me would be more helpful.

When I began my co-production work in Bristol, I thought that by following the guidelines in the academic literature I would glide through the research process. It wasn’t until I stepped out of the ivory tower and into people’s real lives that I realized how much is missed in academic theory and practice. Working with migrant communities is a relational process, and relationships don’t follow a straight line or framework. But taking the time to hear what individuals need—whether it’s paying for childcare, providing reimbursements before an event not after, offering compensation discretely, or having one single point of contact—researchers can truly learn about the migrant experience. And if we learn to look beyond the myriad theories we engage with as academics, we will be able to see how much more fruitful it is to relate to migrant communities not as an ‘other’ or a ‘subject’ but simple as people.

Ryan Lutz is a PhD student in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. He is completing a co-produced mixed methods thesis on migrant integration in Bristol, titled ‘Harm, Hope, and Hybridity: Examining Migrant Integration in the City of Bristol’. Previously he was an Assistant Manager of Research and Strategy at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC.

From surveillance to solidarity: the political implications of digital monitoring in conservation and migration

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Migration, Mobilities and Digital Technologies – a special series published in association with the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.

By Naomi Millner.

During the mobilisation of migrant solidarity and anti-racist protests in the UK last summer, digital technologies – particularly smartphones – played a pivotal role. These devices became lifelines, with group chats buzzing with updates about far-right activities, tactical advice and legal guidance. The same platforms were also used by far-right groups, with live TikTok feeds and other social media channels attempting to galvanise ‘protests’ and reinforce anti-migrant narratives. Such use of digital technologies is clearly mediating new and contrasting forms of collective political action in relation to migration and mobilities.  

The mobilisations were part of a broader wave of unrest across the UK in late July and early August 2024, following a tragic killing of three girls in Southport. Misinformation quickly spread online, including claims that the perpetrator was a Muslim immigrant. This sparked violent riots, where mosques, migrant centres and hotels housing asylum-seekers were targeted.

The events illustrate how the internet and social media are transforming the way people receive information, form opinions and engage with others. Some describe these new forms of connectivity as a series of interlocking echo chambers where opinions carry rapidly along social networks without entering meaningful dialogue, fostering polarisation and extremism. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in this context, and the incorporation of algorithms that prioritise engagement in social media over accuracy has further intensified the spread of sensationalist and often false content.

On the other hand, notions of echo chambers and even polarisation have been called simplistic, relying as they do on conventional ideas of the political left and right, a glossing of what information individuals are exposed to, and an easy dismissal of populist views as being naïve and/or manipulated.

Emerging technologies in migration and conservation surveillance

The impact of new digital technologies is not limited to social media reporting on migration. As this blog series has already explored, governments and corporations increasingly employ advanced technologies such as satellite monitoring and AI-driven predictive policing to control migration flows and enforce border security.

The world of environmental conservation is sometimes imagined as being separate from migration, the former configured by a geography of protected areas and wildlife reserves, the latter linked with state borders, administrative processes for legislating il/legal movement and asylum seeking, and the configuration of associated rights. But today, the two are far more entangled, especially where biodiversity is a major subject of international geopolitics. As I have shown in my own work (Millner 2020; Millner et al. 2024, the definition of the borders of protected areas is increasingly used to control groups considered ‘risky’ by the state – including Indigenous groups and ethnic minorities – while conservation technologies such as drones can be turned on people for surveillance purposes as well as wildlife. In these areas, migrants, Indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities and political activists are frequently collapsed together to portray an abstract threat of ‘global terrorism’ and thus authorise special military powers and actions.

Drones are used to maintain a regime of fear in Corbett Tiger Reserve, India (image: A. Pawar and T. Simlai, 2022)

In the world of global conservation, we have seen a trend of what political ecologists call ‘green securitisation’, where agendas of historical racism and Indigenous genocide are greenwashed to justify them to a global audience. In countries from Guatemala and Colombia to India and Tanzania, state exceptional powers have been enabled for protected areas, based on claims that national biodiversity is threatened by poachers or ‘potential nature destroyers’.

In South Africa’s iconic Kruger national park, for example, militarised methods and technologies have been used to control illegal migration from Mozambique by the coding of migrant groups as potential poachers. State-of-the art military technologies (including helicopters and drones) combine with media interventions that cultivate hysteria over the peril of individual animal species (rhinos, in Kruger) to legitimise strong-handed interventions.

Meanwhile, satellite technologies, especially GIS systems, have long been celebrated for their potential in environmental conservation, enabling the early monitoring of forest fires and quantification of forest loss. However, such imagery has been significantly co-opted for state control in conflicted places such as the Amazon rainforest. In Brazil, satellite data intended to monitor deforestation is often manipulated to favour corporate interests and counter-activism, with enforcement actions disproportionately targeting small-scale farmers and Indigenous communities.

Social movements and digital resistance

Despite the potential for digital technologies to be abused, social movements and activists have found innovative ways to use these same tools for resistance. In the Amazon, Indigenous groups from across Péru, Ecuador and Colombia have harnessed GPS devices, drones and smartphones to document illegal logging and land grabs, providing tangible evidence to support their claims and rally international support. Through such forms of monitoring, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) may create counter-narratives to official state reports and highlighting the agency of marginalised groups.

In my own research in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala, I have seen forest-based organisation ACOFOP foster a new kind of expertise focused on RGB sensors mounted on drones. In conjunction with tablets or smartphones, images collected by drones are used to monitor forest cover and potential fires but have also been used to evidence effective management by rural communities in the face of false claims.

Community drone users from across Latin America share new skills to manage and protect forests in a workshop in Guatemala led by Naomi in 2023 (image: C. Doviaza)

Historical continuity or new power relations?

The deployment of digital technologies, particularly AI and drones, clearly represents a significant shift in the global exercise of power, especially in the governance of migration. These technologies enable states and other actors to predict, monitor and control migration flows with unprecedented precision. This capability not only strengthens traditional border enforcement mechanisms but also introduces new actors – such as private tech companies – into the complex power dynamics surrounding migration. As monitoring technologies are deployed in contested conservation spaces, private interests often collaborate with states to develop and deploy surveillance technologies, blurring the lines between public and private interests in migration governance.

Yet, digital technologies also offer avenues for resistance. Marginalised communities and social movements are leveraging digital tools, from smartphones to drones, to challenge dominant narratives and expose the underlying agendas of state and corporate actors. Just as indigenous groups in the Amazon have utilized GPS devices, drones, and satellite data to document illegal deforestation and land grabs, so NGOs and activist networks use social media and real-time communication tools to assist migrants in distress and document human rights abuses at borders, thereby contesting the biopolitical control imposed by states.

In this sense, the example of drones in conservation resonates with the ‘autonomy of migration’ perspective, which has long been active in critical migration studies and critical geographies. To assert the autonomy of migration is to assert the primacy of migration, which is to say, it is an originary and creative force, which precedes all forms of state-based citizenship and state-making. Rethinking anticipatory technologies of migrant tracking, for example, places clear imperatives on states to keep up with migrant movements to maintain a sense of sovereignty. But digital technologies also have the potential to mediate infrastructures of connectivity, affective cooperation, mutual support and care by people on the move. This shows the possibility of (re)claiming digital technologies into alternative productions of knowledge and more-than-human creativity.

Naomi Millner is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Bristol. She works at the intersection between political geography and political ecology, focusing on rural environments undergoing transformation in Latin America. She has recently been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to develop PEATSENSE: Diverse Knowledges and Sensing Practices in Peatland for Inclusive Climate Futures.

Bolsonaro’s paradox: a far-right leader’s pro-immigration strategy?

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Maeli Farias.

Immigration is a highly politicised and election-defining issue. Across the Global North, conservative, liberal, left-leaning and far-right leaders alike typically adopt hostile, dehumanising stances toward immigrants and refugees, as most explicitly exemplified by Donald Trump’s US presidency and what has become known as ‘fortress Europe’. Similar anti-immigrant policies and attitudes exist in the Global South. However, far-right rhetoric on immigration in this region often follows a different model. This blogpost explores one such case, that of President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration (2019–2022) in Brazil.

Although Bolsonaro’s far-right government was retrogressive on many human rights issues, it maintained and even expanded entry programmes for immigrants and asylum seekers, diverging sharply from the practices of many far-right leaders in the Global North, including his ally, Donald Trump. Despite often expressing xenophobic and hostile rhetoric toward immigrants and refugees, Bolsonaro strategically leveraged Brazil’s progressive immigration framework, developed through the early 21st century, and a generally favourable public perception of immigration to advance his political agenda both domestically and internationally. His case highlights how border controls, as a naturalised and widely accepted feature of modern statehood, are employed across the ideological spectrum to serve specific political interests.

Operation Welcome Shelter Rondon 1, Boa Vista, Brazil, January 2020 (image: author’s own)

Since 2015, a severe shortage of essential goods, widespread socio-political unrest and deprivation in their country have triggered mass displacement of Venezuelans across Latin America, including Brazil. Instead of closing its borders or clamping down on the new arrivals, the Brazilian government, then led by President Michel Temer, launched Operação Acolhida (‘Operation Welcome’) in 2018 to receive Venezuelans arriving at the northern border. It is instructive to note that the crisis in Venezuela did not meet the conceptual frame for asylum under the Geneva Convention of 1951. As such, requests by Venezuelans fell outside the normative international framework for refugee status approval. Strikingly, instead of refusal and deportation, the Brazilian government used the Cartagena Declaration and MERCOSUR residency rights to create legal pathways for Venezuelans to enter and settle in Brazil. Operation Welcome also offered voluntary relocation to migrants once admitted to the country, helping them to move from remote border areas to cities where they would have greater employment and public service opportunities.

Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right nationalistic politician, was elected president a year after the launch of the Venezuelan humanitarian response. Given his radical rhetoric during the campaign, fears grew among those working in humanitarian, civil society and migrant support circles that the programme response would be dismantled. Indeed, one of Bolsonaro’s first acts as President was Brazil’s withdrawal from the UN’s Global Compact on Migration. Yet, to the surprise of many, his government maintained and expanded the Operation Welcome initiative. It committed significantly more resources, further easing entry and migration status regularisation pathways for Venezuelan migrants in Brazil. Furthermore, the administration did not revoke or alter any regulatory measures that facilitated the migration and regularisation of other nationalities in Brazil, such as Haitians, Afghans and Syrians.

Whenever I share my experiences working with immigration in Brazil during Bolsonaro’s administration, people are often surprised to learn that a far-right government supported pro-immigration policies and facilitated the regularisation of immigrants who otherwise would be considered ‘illegals’. It is important to emphasise that Bolsonaro is not a pro-immigration president – far from it. His rhetoric on immigration often aligns with the violent stances and interventions of other far-right leaders.

His seeming pro-immigration approach can be explained in three ways. First, it was ideological. Bolsonaro leveraged the Venezuelan migration issue in support of his opposition to socialism. He often referenced the fact that Venezuelans were ‘fleeing socialism’ to support anti-leftist narrative. In effect, he supported Venezuelan migration to Brazil because in his eyes it vindicated his political messaging that conservative, right-wing actors were the humanitarian actors and ‘socialists’ were not. Second, the Brazilian welcome programme was strongly supported by international agencies such as UNHCR, IOM and EU Humanitarian Aid. The US government also funded the scheme to the tune of USD 46 million. Thus, far from being an exclusive national programme, it had financial benefits and international dimensions that made continuation politically and diplomatically advantageous for the Bolsonaro administration.

‘Brazil shelters Venezuelans fleeing socialism.’ President Bolsonaro tweets about his visit to Operation Welcome in Boa Vista, 30 January 2022.

A third factor is Brazil’s relatively positive public perception of migration. Unlike other countries shaped by settler colonialism, Brazil has continued to embrace its multiethnic identity and history, making immigration a less politically contentious issue. Although xenophobia persists – particularly at the local level and toward specific groups – it has not become a dominant theme in national discourse. This comparatively open and progressive stance has gradually been institutionalised in governance frameworks, reflecting a broader shift in South American migration policies that began at the close of the 20th century. Brazil’s 2017 Migration Law-13.445/17 exemplifies this trend, emerging from a participatory legislative process grounded in a strong human rights orientation, emphasising the non-criminalisation of irregular migrants.

Within this context, Bolsonaro was able to navigate and utilise an already-established, inclusive legal framework, even as his public rhetoric remained openly anti-immigration. Preliminary findings from my ongoing doctoral research further indicate that, despite the progressive design of programmes such as Operation Welcome, these initiatives often reproduce patterns of marginalisation, particularly for immigrants and asylum seekers who are racialised as non-white. In practice, Brazil’s ‘welcoming’ approach remains selective, failing to guarantee dignified integration and leaving these populations to confront systemic obstacles in accessing rights and settling in Brazil.

In conclusion, taken at face value, the Brazilian case challenges simplistic assumptions about far-right politics and immigration. However, Bolsonaro’s approach reveals how immigration policies, far from being purely ideological, are often strategically contextual, shaped by history, public opinion, geopolitics and vested interests. It invites broader reflection on the complex realities behind human mobility, migration management and how power structures often shape humanitarian responses to fit particular narratives rather than being purely about doing the right thing.

Maeli Farias is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol. She previously worked for two years in the humanitarian response ‘Operation Welcome’ in Brazil and most recently served as a Research Associate on the MMPPF (Modern Marronage: The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World) project at the University of Bristol. Her research explores the anthropological dimensions of narratives and everyday experiences to examine critical issues in contemporary migration, such as colonial legacies, belonging and social inequalities.

To read more blogposts on migration and mobilities in Latin America visit the MMB Latin America blog. And to see the full SPAIS Migration Research Group blog series visit the group’s webpage on the MMB website.

On mobility and ‘meetingness’ in academia

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By Charlotte Lerg.

In July 2024, Charlotte Lerg (University of Munich, Amerika-Institut) and Charlotte Faucher (University of Bristol, School of Modern Languages) were able to meet to work on a grant application thanks to the support of MMB. The project looks at the relationship between diplomats and the media in Europe (including Britain) and the US. As they began shaping this research project between Bristol and Munich they exchanged e-mails, logged onto video calls and co-wrote texts in shared documents. They also involved colleagues from our various research groups, including MMB and Manchester’s Culture of Diplomacy, which gathers (online!) academics from the UK, Europe, North America and Asia. However, it was their in-person meeting over the summer that really propelled the project forward. Having two uninterrupted days to bounce ideas off one another, ask questions to each other about how we envisaged certain aspects of the proposal, and also keep ourselves motivated over coffee and meals was priceless.

The following text was written by Charlotte Lerg after this July meeting.

 As I was waiting in transit at Heathrow Airport on my way back home, I reflected on the role of such in-person meetings for academic culture.

Thinking about this historically, we could ask ourselves how medieval and early modern scholars were able to maintain detailed academic discussions, often over years, entirely based on the exchange of letters, sometimes never meeting in person. However, while a letter certainly does not substitute an in-person encounter, these ties could be a lot stronger than the modern-day networks that are often mediated by technology. In fact, epistolary practices in early modern culture often involved a considerable commitment to an imagined co-presence in a republic of letters.

(Image by Rodrigo Pereira on Unsplash)

The perceived value of in-person encounters for academic discourse can be seen in the way the so-called transport revolution, that came with industrialization, very quickly led scholars to congregate on a regular basis. Around the year 1900 there were about five times as many international academic conferences as just two decades earlier. World exhibitions became convenient occasions for the newly emerging and professionalizing academic associations across the Western world to hold international congresses. Peter Burke has termed this development the ‘steam age in the republic of letters’. Academic gatherings in person remain central to how higher education works and yet, in most other areas of life thinking has begun to move away from steam-age disregard for natural resources. We are also increasingly questioning the social hierarchies of travelling for leisure or edification. Why is the republic of letters struggling to fully embrace the digital age?

In 2003, when the internet was still relatively young and the turn to user-generated content and multi-directional online communication was only just on the horizon (MySpace was founded in 2003 as was Skype; platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Zoom were still a few years away), sociologist John Urry contemplated the role of travel in increasingly transnational social network-formations. He observed an intriguing correlation in the growth of travel (both in frequency and distance) on the one hand, and advances in communication technology that could potentially replace in-person contact on the other. He posited that the larger but looser networks facilitated by technology were made up of weaker ties than previous networks, because they required less commitment in their creation and maintenance. In order to be meaningful, therefore, they had to be periodically shored up through in-person meetings.

The emergence of social media has proven that point: the difference between ‘knowing’ someone digitally or in real life has become more pronounced. Dwelling on this issue, Urry introduced the notion of ‘meetingness’ to discuss the added values of physical co-presence for professional as well as personal meetings. He also underscores two other components: the flow of in-person conversation and the impact of mutual commitment to the meeting. Even if bracketed by small talk, it remains extremely challenging to create a digital conversation space that enables an organic exchange of speech and gesture cues or the collaborative development of ideas as can occur face to face. Moreover, there is something to be said for the difference in our mindset depending on whether we just log on to a meeting and then off again or, instead, plan, arrange, fund and undertake a journey. In short, putting ourselves physically into a different place also puts us into a different headspace. In academia, especially, these two components of ‘meetingness’ can hardly be underestimated – even if they remain somewhat elusive – whether the potential for innovation in a free-flowing conversation or the value of co-presence in body and mind.

When Covid 19 hit and we were suddenly all conferencing online, some suggested this could ring in a new phase of academic exchange, no longer dependent on the ability to travel. There were indeed several arguments in favour of this vision. Logging onto a video call certainly requires less time and less money than taking a trip. Consequently, it is also a lot less disruptive to family life and more compatible with care commitments. Moreover, while it requires some technological equipment and ideally a stable internet connection, it is also more inclusive socially and geographically. Finally, in times of climate change and environmental crisis, fewer academics flying around the world just to deliver a keynote or say a few words at a panel must seem like a good idea.

And yet, as the pandemic ebbed the academic circuit soon resurged. Many rejoiced in finally meeting colleagues again in person and argued that, after all, the most productive moment of a conference was the coffee break, which despite some efforts in virtual reality, could not be recreated in the digital world. But is it really just the social side of these intellectual gatherings that makes them so fruitful or is there indeed something to the unique quality of ‘meetingness’ in academic practice? And if we conclude that the digital world remains a limited alternative to co-presence for academic networks, how can we seek ways to make academic mobility more inclusive and sustainable?

Charlotte Lerg is Managing Director of the Lasky Center for Transatlantic Studies at Munich University. Her second monograph considered the multilayered intersections of the academic world, the diplomatic milieu and the public sphere (2019) and she has also published numerous articles and edited volumes on cultural diplomacy from the late 19th century through to the Cold War.

Charlotte Faucher is Lecturer in Modern French History at the University of Bristol. Her first monograph Propaganda, Gender and Cultural Power (2022) examined French cultural diplomacy in Britain through the lens of gender. She has also published on global soft power, as well as the French resistance during the Second World War.