Category: Blog

‘Find your village’: activating migrant heritage community assets

Posted on by Emily

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

Posted on by Emily

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

Posted on by Emily

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

Posted on by Emily

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?

Posted on by Emily

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

Posted on by Emily

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.

‘El Carrusel’: digitising the US-Mexico border with(out) the CBP One app

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

By Martin Rogard.

Many people had been waiting in Mexico for months to make their asylum claim legally in the US when, at midday on 20th January 2025, all CBP One appointments with the US Border Force were suddenly cancelled. The CBP One app, which was the only legal land asylum route for people arriving at the US’s southern border, was discontinued the moment Donald Trump’s inauguration began.  

The MAGA wing of the US Republican Party had long campaigned to shut down Biden’s controversial CBP One app, claiming it had become a back door facilitating undocumented immigration into the US. I spent two years researching this app – and the various claims made about it – for a chapter of my PhD thesis on the digitalisation of bordering practices, only to realise that it would be discontinued overnight. But how did this app compare to the COVID-era asylum ban that Trump has now effectively reinstated?

The US-Mexico border fence at Tijuana, 2021 (image: Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash)

Far from the open border policy its detractors portrayed it as, the CBP One app – which has previously been used to automate commercial travel processing – became a mandatory pre-registration step for all non-Mexican US asylum seekers arriving by land. This new protocol, which included a 5-year asylum ban penalty for non-compliance, made:

… people who traveled through a third country but failed to seek asylum or other protections in those countries ineligible for asylum in the United States… [except for those people who can reach central and northern Mexico and make an appointment]… through a DHS [Department of Homeland Security] scheduling system (AIC, 2023; see also Federal Register, 2023: 31399).

Since the app was the only such ‘scheduling system’, the protocol effectively forced asylum-seeking individuals and families to wait in Mexico for months by making their asylum eligibility contingent on securing an appointment through a glitchy, geofenced and data-harvesting lottery system.

CBP One has therefore been part of a shadowy binational bordering scheme colloquially known as ‘El Carrusel’ or ‘the merry-go-round’. The majority of people who made their long journeys to the restricted locations in Mexico where the app could function were swiftly targeted by the heavily militarised Mexican migration governance regime, which included parastatal security agencies such as the ‘grupo enlace’, which claims to enforce government contracts. Migrants report being forcibly bussed back down to Mexico’s border with Guatemala before they had a chance to pre-book or attend their CBP One appointments. Others who evaded ‘El Carrusel’ became highly visible targets for extortion, abduction, theft, exploitation and torture. As a Human Rights Watch report (2024: 4) states, ‘The more difficult it is for migrants to cross the US-Mexico border, the more money cartels make, whether from smuggling operations or from kidnapping and extortion.’

Migrants who did manage to attend their appointment on time after clearing the app’s highly data extractive preliminary security checks were subjected to a ‘credible-fear’ interview. Those deemed convincingly fearful of persecution were granted admission into the US under a temporary, criminalised and precarious status known as ‘humanitarian parole’ while they waited for their asylum decisions – the majority of which were denials, expeditiously followed by detention and eventual deportation.

The CBP One policy has recently been replaced with Trump’s renewed ‘Remain in Mexico’ asylum ban (an indiscriminate policy officially known as ‘Migrant Protection Protocols’ or MPP). In the US, as elsewhere, election cycles tend to be punctuated with big promises of ‘fixing’ the broken asylum system and/or finally ‘securing’ or ‘taking back control’ of national borders. Beneath the rhetoric, however, MPP, CBP One and Trump’s recent flurry of ‘emergency’ executive orders only maintain the status quo: they subject racialised people fleeing persecution and violence to further suffering and containment, failing to meet the standards of international law or provide truly accessible, safe and legal routes for asylum.

Despite the recent termination of the CBP One app as an asylum tool, much of my research remains relevant because it speaks to broader patterns of border digitisation that are expanding states’ reach far beyond pre-existing democratic and legal limits (see also Albert Sanchez-Graells’ post on AI and MigTech in this series). CBP One was repurposed for asylum processing during the COVID-19 pandemic with little public attention. At the time, humanitarian shelter workers in Mexico were tasked with filling out questionnaires on the app on behalf of asylum seekers under a deceptive US government promise to expedite their claims; in reality the app was introduced alongside restrictive immigration policies ‘that sought to increase penalties for crossing the border unlawfully, even to request asylum, and greatly reduce the number of migrants eligible for asylum’ (Kocher, 2023: 6).

But the CBP One app was never just the efficacious ‘scheduling tool’ that the DHS claimed it to be. It was principally a mass-scale data-gathering experiment that exploited undocumented migrants in order to extract a large-scale, non-cooperative dataset featuring biographic, biometric and live-location information. These data were avowedly shared across an equivocal ‘law enforcement community’, likely to train risk-predictive policing algorithms (AIC, 2025: 6; Longo, 2017: 150-153).

As Matthew Longo explains in The Politics of Borders, contemporary ‘smart’ borders have become increasingly reliant on large risk-predictive algorithms in order to ensure that ‘the good [are] let in quickly, and only the risky are slowed down… a process that depends heavily on data’ (Longo, 2017: 141; see also Travis Van Isacker’s post in this series, ‘Who’s in the fast lane?’). These large algorithms are known as ‘convolutional neural networks’. They work by combining the users’ biometric data (facial recognition, iris scans, liveness checks) and biographical data (travel history, gender, age, recent contacts) to build adaptive and multi-layered ‘risk profiles’. The more data they are fed, the better these so-called neural networks allegedly become at predicting and flagging potential ‘criminals,’ ‘terrorists’ and ‘impostors’ prior to any crime, attack or threat having taken place.

Before the CBP One app, for legal and practical reasons, the US’s physical borders were its primary site of personal data accumulation and surveillance. There are restrictions around the private information states can uncooperatively capture from non-citizens outside their jurisdictions. By requiring prospective asylum seekers to book an appointment via a smartphone while they waited in Mexico, the US decentralised and expanded its surveillance capacity far beyond preexisting limits. Conveniently, the geofenced app – requiring live location and prohibiting VPNs – forced its users to remain in Mexico. Since CBP One users were outside its jurisdiction, the US could shed its accountability for the human rights abuses asylum seekers faced while waiting across the border.

The app required the latest phone technology, updated software and stable broadband, excluding anyone unable to meet these expensive requirements. Its limit of four language options also disempowered those who didn’t read English, Spanish, French or Haitian Creole as well as anyone without good literacy skills. Similarly, the app’s so-called ‘glitches’ and design choices, prevented its users from correcting mistakes, contacting support or speaking to a human. The app automatically deleted profiles flagged as spurious, disadvantaging families and/or people with similar names and/or facial features (see, for example, Kocher, 2023: 7-8).

While this ‘smart’ digitised asylum system promised efficiency, its black box design prevented accountability and transparency for the harms it caused. Furthermore, as Human Rights Watch (2024: 26) explains, the insufficient number of appointments available on the app was presented as being due to ‘limited capacity’. Yet, this limited capacity largely reflected the US government’s prioritising of removal proceedings and hyper-securitised bordering over humanely processing asylum seekers.

By amassing vast archives of personal data from non-citizens, which were then shared domestically and internationally without their informed consent, the CBP One app fuelled a new wave of discriminatory and abusive bordering practices. Sold as a ‘technological fix’ this digitisation only perpetuated cycles of violence and disempowerment while expanding the US’s imperial reach beyond existing democratic, physical and legal limits.

Martin Rogard is a doctoral candidate in political theory at the University of Bristol. His research explores how artefactually mediated practices of memory-making and forgetting constitute and unsettle (b)ordering processes in the North American borderlands.

After border externalisation: migration, race and labour in Mauritania

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New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Hassan Ould Moctar.

In March 2024, the Mauritanian government signed a migration partnership agreement with Spain and the European Commission, the stated aim being to address a surge of unwanted migrant arrivals on the Canary Islands. While unprecedented in financial scope, this was just the latest in a long line of border externalisation strategies that have been implemented in Mauritania. In 2006, Spain and the EU adopted a range of military and surveillance measures off West Africa’s Atlantic coasts, opening a new period of migration control cooperation with West African states. Despite two decades of such efforts, the past year has seen both unprecedented sea arrivals in Spain and – more concerningly – unprecedented deaths on the Atlantic route.

For many scholars of migration and border policy, this persistence of deaths and unwanted arrivals occurs not despite the strategy of border externalisation, but because of it. Many have long illustrated how such policy approaches typically create more ‘irregular migration’, and thus more of the social condition of migrant illegality. Building upon these insights, my new book After Border Externalization: Migration, Race and Labour in Mauritania (Bloomsbury, 2024) examines how this process interacts with the social and historical landscapes of the contexts in which EU migration management increasingly operates. To this end, it analyses how externalisation intervenes within pre-existing histories of bordering and population management in Mauritania (chapters 3 and 4). It then takes an ethnographic turn, asking how the condition of migrant illegality interacts with the social relations that have emerged from this history (chapters 5, 6 and 7).

As such, the book is motivated by a desire to overcome the Eurocentrism that necessarily underpins EU border externalisation policies, but which can also seep into the scholarship, as critical migration and border studies scholars have suggested. To this end, I have drawn on ideas of Samir Amin, who coined the term ‘Eurocentrism’ and wrote a short book on the topic. In Amin’s view, the geographic imaginary of the Mediterranean was central to the Eurocentric ideological project; it acts as the source of a Eurocentric universalism which asserts that ‘the only possible future for the world is its progressive Europeanisation.’

Looking at this geographic imaginary from its margins in Mauritania unveils the contradictions of the historical juncture in which externalisation unfolds. On the one hand, externalisation is conditioned by the racial and territorial legacies of colonialism, in particular the division of the Senegal River Valley into the territories of Senegal and Mauritania, and a racialising colonial imaginary dictating who belongs on which side of the Senegal River. These developments were consistent with the ‘define and rule’ strategy of indirect colonial rule that Mahmood Mamdani has analysed, whose logic resonates in contemporary international development and migration management projects, as I show in chapter 4.

 At the same time, however, the form of this colonial legacy is shifting as externalisation unfolds. While Mauritania has periodically figured in the EU’s geographic imaginary of the Mediterranean – through the 5+5 dialogue and the Union for the Mediterranean – it has in recent years become more salient in its capacity as a Sahelian state. Drawing from interviews with officials in the permanent secretariat of the G5 Sahel in Nouakchott, my book argues that the Eurocentric universalising goals of the EU’s Mediterranean geographic imaginary – exemplified in norms such as democracy promotion, human rights and good governance – are giving way to a more security-driven imaginary of the Sahel. At the same time, this region has seen an unprecedented challenge to European dominance in recent years. Together, these facts yield epistemic openings that were not present at the time of Amin’s original writing of Eurocentrism. 

To examine these, the book’s ethnographic chapters foreground migrant agency, detailing from this perspective the social relations in which the condition of migrant illegality is infused in Mauritania. I start in the northern port city of Nouadhibou, detailing a dynamic interplay between Europe-bound migrants and an apparatus of externalisation in the city, before then illustrating how this interplay sits within the political economy of Nouadhibou. While European capital no longer dominates the scene in the city, the EU continues to play a crucial role in facilitating transnational capital flows, as its production of migrant illegality enables the labour exploitation of a precarious and transient workforce.

This Europe-bound transience is key in the context of Nouadhibou, but an exclusive focus on such Europe-bound trajectories also obscures the living legacies of colonialism. For this reason, I am also interested in the Senegal River Valley town of Rosso, which straddles the colonial border between Mauritania and Senegal. Turning my attention to migrants who weren’t on the move to Europe when I met them, I have contrasted their prior experiences of EU border violence with the relative lack of illegality in Rosso. In its absence, a violent history of racialised territorial belonging that I detailed earlier in the book resurfaces. Here, it takes the form of a rice industry that was erected against the backdrop of a spate of expulsions and dispossession in the late 1980s, which acts as the primary employer of migrant labour in the town today.

My final ethnographic chapter moves to the capital city of Nouakchott, where experiences of illegality and border violence are common. But the colonial legacy of racialised territorial belonging means that Afro-Mauritanian nationals can also get caught up in migration policing operations. The line between national and non-national is further blurred by the fact that such operations dovetail with an urban cleansing drive, and therefore often extend to everyone rendered ‘surplus’ and forced to survive on the urban margins. From this perspective, externalisation is the most visible element of a broader regime of spatially managing the racialised outcasts of contemporary capitalism.

It’s important to foreground the agency of those at the receiving end of this triad of illegalisation, racialisation and economic abandonment, and I conclude the book with a reflection on how those encountered in previous pages interpret their own agency. The response to this question opens a window into a non-Eurocentric universalism of the kind Samir Amin envisioned when he first wrote Eurocentrism.

Hassan Ould Moctar is a Lecturer in the Anthropology of Migration at SOAS University of London. Focusing on West Africa and the Sahara, his research examines how the contemporary illegalisation of migration interacts with the racial and territorial legacies of colonialism, uneven development processes, and conflict and displacement dynamics. His recent book, After Border Externalization: Migration, Race, and Labour in Mauritania (2024), is published by Bloomsbury and available via Open Access here or in print with a 35% discount (use the code ABE35 by 24th October) here.

The nation and its others

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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.

Call to arms, but to whom? Conscription, race and the nation in South Korea

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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 Minjae Shin.

Military service is mandatory in South Korea (hereafter Korea). Over the past ten years, one of the main concerns of the Republic of Korea Armed Forces (hereafter ‘Korean military’) is the integration of the country’s so-called Damunhwa (mixed heritage) soldiers into the military. In 2010, the Korean government announced a revision of the Military Service Act to expand the conscription base to all Korean nationals regardless of their ethnic background. It stated that ‘[Any Korean national] wishing to engage in mandatory military service or voluntary military service shall be protected against discrimination on the grounds of race, skin color, etc.’ Before then, the Act exempted men who were not a member of the Korean nation ‘by blood’ from bearing arms in service of the nation, for the simple reason that they were not ‘fully’ part of the Korean nation despite their legal status as citizens.

Due to the country’s unique security environment, in which a significant proportion of the population has at least some role in the military – approximately 1% if counting just the standing army but 6.5% if including the reserve force – every military issue quickly receives great attention in civil society. Public reaction to the concern was polarised. There were positive reactions welcoming the advent of a Korea that embraces different ethnicities, but there were also voices questioning the Act’s impact on unit cohesion, combat effectiveness and the loyalty of these soldiers. This was yet another occasion shedding light on the racialised aspect of Koreanness.

South Korean soldiers stand guard inside of the Demilitarised Zone, June 2024 (Image: Free Malaysia Today)

Korea is a highly militarised society. Under the South Korean constitution mandatory conscription service for men is required of all male citizens. Under this ‘duty to the nation and the state’, all able-bodied men between 19 and 35 are required to serve in one of the three branches of the military. Failure to fulfil this obligation is punishable by prison sentence. Before their military service, men are constantly asked by friends, parents and schools about their detailed plan for the service, such as when and where they will do it; life in their 20s is essentially planned around military service. During their service, men re-establish their relation to the state and nation, as well as their place in society. Completion of the service means not only that one is a ‘normal’ man but also a ‘Korean’ man, who has fulfilled his duty to the Korean nation. The image of an ideal citizen intertwined with the military service is wired into its management of conscripted manpower.

Before 2010, this was applied only to ethnic Korean men. This meant that men from mixed heritage backgrounds were considered neither a Korean nor a man in Korean society. Since the concept of race, ethnicity and nation were conflated throughout colonial history, the core of the Korean identity entails physical aspects. Speaking Korean language and understanding Korean culture and history is not enough. One has to ‘look’ Korean, with ‘Korean skin tone’. Being a Korean therefore has a strong racial undertone in Korean society. The entrenched belief is that it is these ‘ethnic citizens’ who bear the duty to defend the nation and the state.

This belief is closely related to an almost unanimous outrage towards ethnic Koreans who do not serve the military. This can be seen in cases where Koreans who migrated abroad came back with children who are of foreign nationality. These children are often referred to as Geom-meo-oe, which literally translates as ‘black-haired foreigner’. As these male children enter their early 20s, they are casually asked by friends when they will apply for the military, as well as their preferred branch. When they identify themselves as foreign nationals, people express their negative view towards them for not serving in the military, even when they are not legally required to do so. It is at this point that Koreanness as a racial concept reveals an interesting paradox. On the one hand, it doubts the capacity of mixed heritage Korean citizens to fulfil military duties; on the other hand, it demands ‘ethnic Koreans’ of foreign nationals to serve the Korean nation.

Korea’s birth rate has been in constant decline since the late 1990s. A shrinking demographic is damaging for all militaries, but the combination of the heavily militarised border with North Korea and maintaining a conscription-based force in a state of constant readiness means that such a demographic shift hurts the Korean military more than most. The government’s decision to expand its conscription pool to all Korean nationals regardless of their ethnic background was its answer to this issue. Many of the new conscripts are the children born of cross-border marriages between Korean men and women from nearby Asian countries, which saw a steep rise since the 1990s. The young honhyol (‘mixed blood’) men had often been subject to discrimination from their childhood. But since 2010, as they have entered their late teens and early 20s, they have been called to bear arms to serve the nation.

As of 2022, the number of mixed-heritage conscripts reached 5,000, making up 1% of all military enlistees. The number will surpass 10,000 by 2030, making up 5%. Although it is a small proportion at the moment, the growth rate is exponential. This is a close reflection of the country’s changing demographic composition, with continuously increasing numbers of foreign nationals entering Korea, including North Korean defectors and multicultural households. In the face of this demographic shift, the government is making changes, such as including and accommodating mixed-heritage soldiers through policies related to their religions and dietary needs. However, expanding the conscription base will lead to more complex issues lying ahead. The mobilisation of mixed-heritage men challenges the historic racialisation of Korean identity and will raise questions about what ‘being a Korean man’ means in the near future.

Recent developments in global geopolitics means that the relevance of these discussions is no longer limited to countries such as Korea. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, European countries are rushing to re-build their military capacity, which has caused a wave of conscription panic. Already, the discussion around a military conscription system has been brought to the table in the UK. However, European countries’ defence policies are formulated in the context of a vibrant political tradition of civic nationalism less focused on ethnic purity. For example, the UK military includes numerous ethnic minorities in its ranks.  Its cultural diversity and officials’ experiences have been already investigated by scholars. By contrast, the Korean military is based on ethnic nationalism and a highly racialised identity. In this context, the conscription of mixed-heritage personnel presents a new set of challenges as it is forced to redefine itself. Will the incorporation of mixed-heritage soldiers in the ranks bring the myth of an ethnically pure country closer to its end, or lead its proponents to dig their heels in deeper?

Minjae Shin works in a teaching support role in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Bristol in 2023 with a thesis on ‘Representing foreign brides: Koreanisation, ethnic nationalism, and masculinity in South Korea’. Her research interest is gendered migration in Asia; discourses and practices of nationalism in receiving countries such as racialisation and discrimination by institutional stakeholders.