Category: Policy and Practice

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

Posted on by Emily

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.

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.

The nation and its others

Posted on by Emily

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.

Are the UK’s immigration rules forcing couples into marriage?

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 Nicole Hoellerer and Katharine Charsley.

The UK has one of the world’s most restrictive spouse and partner immigration systems. The UK government has long suggested increasing restrictions to the rights of citizens to be joined in the UK by a foreign partner are needed to prevent forced marriages and marriages of convenience for immigration purposes. There is therefore some irony in the fact that our research suggests bi-national couples are now finding themselves pressured into marriage by the UK’s immigration rules.

In the Brexit Couples research project we are working with couples with one UK and one EU partner (without settled status in the UK). Since Brexit, EU citizens come under the UK immigration rules, so if these couples want to live together in the UK, they have to meet various requirements, including a rapidly increasing Minimum Income Requirement.

Illustration by Michael Grieve for the ‘Kept Apart‘ report (2020).

Most fundamentally, they must demonstrate that they are a couple. Couple relationships in contemporary Britain take many forms, but immigration rules tend to be based on more normative models. UK spouse/partner visa applicants must prove they are either in a recognised marriage or civil partnership, or have been living together as a couple for at least two years. This was recently amended to allow relationships in which the couple ‘cannot live together, for example because you’re working or studying in different places, or it’s not accepted in your culture’, but the strongest evidence of relationships remains documentary, such as shared bills and evidence of financial support.

There are a variety of reasons couples may not have lived together or cannot provide evidence. UK-EU couples have been used to Freedom of Movement between each other’s countries (continuing through visa-free visits since Brexit), so one couple told us: ‘Actually proving ourselves as a couple on paper, because we’re not married, it’s not at all easy, and because we’ve lived quite a sort of free, freedom of movement life… we don’t have this neat paper trail that shows that we’ve been living together consistently.’

Some couples did not want to get married at all but felt forced to do so. One participant explained that the institution of marriage was incompatible with her values, but now,

‘I feel like we have to do it… if we are not married then we have to prove all sorts of different things and we thought that was way more complicated… One of the reasons we haven’t got married is because we don’t think that an institution or the state should know who we love or who we sleep with or anything like that. But… all the information we would have to provide to prove that we are in a relationship would be so much more personal than just getting married… I haven’t told any of my friends or anything about it, because to be honest I feel embarrassed because I’ve generally been a bit against marriage, so it’s sort of going against something that I’ve always had as a value. So it’s really frustrating that we’re having to do that.’

Several described their marriages as pragmatic; as simply routes to their visa and life together. One participant told us, ‘we’ve decided we’re just going to get married just because we feel we want to make it more bullet proof, our relationship evidence’, whilst another stressed: ‘We are not religious people. We don’t see any value in marriage other than in practical terms… For us, that’s what marriage is: to get things done and make things work… So, maybe pressured a little bit, but… marriage doesn’t mean anything to us.’ This did not, however, mean the decision was necessarily unemotional, as the stakes are high. Hence one interviewee said, ‘I asked her to marry me out of desperation.’

Other couples may have married eventually but felt rushed into it: ‘We feel like we have to do things in accordance with another person’s timetable, not on your own terms.’ Younger couples in newer relationships (less than five years) particularly struggled with this compression of the timescale for an important life decision: ‘Even though we’re like, “Oh yeah, we want to get married,” we’re not there yet. I’m 25… I’m still very young in my mind in some ways, so I need that time to grow up… I think we want to stabilise ourselves first.’ Another argued directly that the immigration process ‘forces us to get married, which is not what we would do right now, only for the visa. But it feels like that’s the only way.’ Some felt their relationship progressed ‘too fast’: ‘It definitely put some more pressure about making things work, making things official’ [original emphasis]. Couples resented what they saw as state interference in their relationship. One noted that, ‘our relationship has been sort of interfered with by a lot of administration from different angles’, while another complained of ‘someone making these decisions for us in a way, like the situation demanding that we do something, just because it will make our lives easier.’

Some couples resist, fearing negative impacts on their relationship, as this participant put it: ‘I just think we would have both kind of resented being obliged to do things for the sake of bureaucracy’, whilst another was clear that ‘we want to do it on our schedule and our own timeline of our relationship, and the romance, not for the sake of a visa.’

Back in 2012, when the rules were first dramatically tightened, the government presented increased restrictions as necessary to prevent both forced marriages and marriages of convenience for immigration purposes. Thirteen years later, it is striking to hear couples use the terms ‘force’ and ‘for the sake of a visa’ to describe the immigration system itself pressuring them to marry when they otherwise would not. This pressure was set to increase again as couples rushed to meet visa requirements before the previous Conservative government’s planned further increase to income requirements for partner visas – which would have raised them to a level at which roughly 75% of working adults in the UK would be unable to sponsor the immigration of their partner. The incoming Labour government put these plans on hold whilst the Migration Advisory Committee reviews the financial requirements for family visas. We (along with thousands of bi-national couples) await the outcome of that review.

Nicole Hoellerer is an anthropologist whose work focuses on migration. She is a Research Associate in the School of Politics, Sociology and International Studies at the University of Bristol, and a researcher for the ESRC-funded Brexit Couples project. Before joining this project, she ethnographically investigated the practice-policy gap in UK refugee resettlement (Brunel University), and as the lead researcher for the ASYFAIR research project (University of Exeter) conducted research on asylum appeal court hearings in Europe.

Katharine Charsley is Professor of Migration Studies in the School of Politics, Sociology and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work focuses on migration, gender and families, with a particular interest in transnational marriages and relationships. She is PI of the ESRC-funded Brexit Couples project looking at the impact of the immigration rules on UK-EU couples after Brexit.

Privatised border regulation, AI, MigTech and public procurement

Posted on by Emily

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

By Albert Sanchez-Graells.

Moving across borders used to involve direct contact with the State. Moving people faced border agents attached to some police corps or the army. Moving things were inspected by customs agents. Entry was granted or denied according to rules and regulations set by the State, interpreted and enforced by State agents, and potentially reviewed by State courts. Borders were controlled by the State, for better or worse.

As States pivot to ‘technology-enhanced’ border control and experiment with artificial intelligence (AI) – let’s call this the ‘MigTech’ shift – this is no longer the full story, or even an accurate one.

More and more, crossing borders involves interactions with machines such as eGates, with increasing levels of automated facial recognition ‘capabilities’ (see Travis Van Isacker’s blogpost in this series). Face-to-face interviews are progressively (planned to be) replaced by AI ‘solutions’ such as ‘lie detectors’ or ‘emotion recognition’ tests. The pervasiveness of AI touches moving people’s lives before they start to move – such as when visa and travel permits are granted or denied through algorithmically-supported or automated decision systems that raise red flags or draw inferences from increasingly dense and opaque data thickets (see Kuba Jablonowski’s discussion of the UK’s shift from border documentation to computation). The movement of things is similarly exposed to all sorts of technological deployments, such as ‘smart sensors’ or drone-supported surveillance.

(Image by Markus Spiske on Unplash)

We could think that borders are now controlled by technology. But that would, of course, conflate the tool with the agent. To understand the implications of this paradigm shift towards MigTech we need to focus on control over these technologies. Control rarely rests with the State that purports to use the technology. Control mostly lies with the technology providers. Digitalisation thus goes hand in hand with the privatisation of border regulation. Entry is granted or denied as a result of ‘technical’ embeddings over which technology providers hold almost absolute control. Technology providers increasingly control borders, mostly for the worse.

There is a rich body of research on the impacts of digitalisation and automation of border control on people, communities and injustice. And also increasing calls for a reconsideration of this approach in view of its harms. At first sight, it could even seem that new legislation such as the EU AI Act addresses the risks and harms arising from digital borders. After all, the EU AI Act classes as ‘high-risk’ the use of AI for ‘Migration, asylum and border control management’. High-risk classification entails a long list of obligations, including pre-deployment fundamental rights impact assessments. By subjecting the technology to a series of ‘assurances’, the Act seeks to ensure that its deployment is ‘safe’. This regulatory approach can create the illusion that the State has regained control over the technology by tying the hands of the technology provider. Indirectly, the State would also have regained control of the borders, for better or worse.

My research challenges this understanding. It highlights how the regulatory tools that are being put in place – such as the EU AI Act – will not sufficiently address the issue of ‘tech-mediated privatisation’ of ‘core’ State functions because, in themselves, these tools transfer regulatory power back to technology providers. By focusing on how the technology reaches the State, and who holds control over the technology and how, I highlight important gaps in law and regulation.

The State rarely develops its own AI or other digital technologies. On most occasions, the State buys technology from the market. This involves public contracts that are meant to set the relevant requirements and to complement regulatory frameworks through tailor-made obligations. To put it simply, my research shows that public contracts are not an effective mechanism to impose specific obligations. Take the example of a State buying an ‘AI lie detector’. The ‘accuracy’ and the ‘explainability’ of the AI will be crucial to its adequate use. However, the EU AI Act does not contain any explicit requirement or minimum benchmark in relation to either of them. Let’s take accuracy.

The EU AI Act solely establishes that ‘High-risk AI systems shall be designed and developed in such a way that they achieve an appropriate level of accuracy’ (Art 15(1)). Identically, the model contractual clauses for the procurement of AI that support the operationalisation of the EU AI Act do not contain specific requirements either. They simply state an obligation for the technology provider to ensure that the AI system is ‘developed following the principle of security by design and by default … it should achieve an appropriate level of accuracy’ (Clause 8.1). The specific levels of accuracy and the relevant accuracy metrics of the AI system are meant to be described in Annex G. But Annex G is blank!

It will be for the public buyer and the technology provider to contractually agree the applicable level of accuracy. This will most likely be done either by reference to the ‘state-of-the-art’ (which privatises the ‘art of the possible’), or by reference to industry-led technical standards (which are poor tools for socio-technical regulation and entirely alien to fundamental rights norms). Or, perhaps even more likely, accuracy will be set at levels that work for the technology provider, which is most likely going to have superior digital and commercial skills than the public buyer. After all, there are many ways to measure and report an AI system’s accuracy and they can be gamed.

In most cases, the operationalisation of the EU AI Act will leave the specific interpretation of what is ‘an appropriate level of accuracy’ in the hands of the technology provider. The same goes for explainability, and for any other ‘technical’ issue with large operational implications. Which does not significantly change the current situation, and which certainly does not mitigate the effects (risks and harms) of the privatisation of AI regulation – or, in the context of MigTech, the privatisation of border regulation. The EU AI Act – and other approaches to ‘AI regulation by contract’, including in the UK under the ‘pro-innovation approach’ to AI and the recently announced AI Opportunities Action Plan – creates a funnel of regulatory power that dangerously exposes the public sector to risks of regulatory capture and commercial determination. And, ultimately, exposes all of us to the ensuing risks and harms. A different regulatory approach is necessary.

Albert Sanchez-Graells (he/him) is a Professor of Economic Law at the University of Bristol Law School. He is also an affiliate of the Bristol Digital Futures Institute. Albert’s current research focuses on the role of procurement in regulating public sector AI use, on which he recently published the monograph Digital Technologies and Public Procurement: Gatekeeping and Experimentation in Digital Public Governance (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Ukrainian refugees – the new white Other in British discourses?

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 Magda Mogilnicka.

This year has marked the 20th anniversary of the EU enlargement when eight countries from Central and East Europe, with Poland as the largest accession state, joined the European Union. The UK was one of only three European Union (EU) countries* allowing new accession members to work with almost no restrictions. As a result, many people, exercising their new right of freedom of movement as EU citizens, came to the UK. The freedom to move across European borders without a passport or a work permit became a privilege taken for granted until 2016, when the Brexit campaign put EU mobility in the spotlight, resulting in the UK leaving the EU.

Since Brexit, EU citizens in the UK have had to formalise their immigration status through the EU settlement scheme. For many Western Europeans Brexit unsettled their sense of belonging for the first time. But for the EU’s newest members from Central and East Europe, including Romanians and Bulgarians who joined the EU in 2007, belonging had long been questioned: they had experienced discrimination and racialisation long before Brexit. At first they were welcomed for filling gaps in the growing labour market economy, replacing labour migration schemes of overseas ‘low-skilled’ workers, a policy that raised questions about privileging white migrants over migrants of colour. But soon they became pejoratively labelled as ‘East Europeans’ in media and political discourses. A positive message about working hard and contributing to British economy gradually turned into a negative one as the number of immigrants steadily increased. Represented as culturally homogenous and economically inferior, constructed as ‘low-skilled’ economic migrants threatening British workers, putting pressure on public services, eating swans and being racist, they discursively became the ‘white Others’. While they may have been welcome at first, they soon became a target of hostile discourses that vilified them in racialised ways. We can see similar patterns emerging in discourses about Ukrainian refugees.

(image: UK Government website)

More than 280,000 Ukrainians have arrived in the UK since the Russian invasion in early 2022 under the Homes for Ukraine and Ukrainian Family or Extension schemes, which significantly increased the Ukrainian-born population. Under the former scheme, British families can apply to temporarily host a Ukrainian family in their home and receive some financial support from the government to do so. Ukrainian refugees are allowed access to education and healthcare and have the right to work. The scheme has been extended until September 2026.

The relatively generous policy towards Ukrainian refugees that offers access to public services and employment, as well as overwhelmingly positive public reception contrast with policies – and public support for – restricting movement for non-European asylum seekers. With the exception of resettlement schemes for Afghan and Hong Kong citizens, the policy focus has been on reducing migration through the Illegal Immigration Act 2023, which criminalises non-European asylum seekers entering the UK through routes that are not legally recognised. Opening borders to Ukrainians occurred at the same time as the former Conservative government was pushing for the Rwanda resettlement plan that aimed to permanently remove those asylum seekers with no possibility to return to the UK.

Although the Rwanda plan has been scrapped by the new Labour government, the current asylum-seeking process for other incomers is lengthy, complicated and leaves people living in limbo sometimes for years before they are granted refugee status and a right to work and can then start a route to settlement. Hence, the Homes for Ukraine scheme can be seen as a whitewashing policy that privileges white European migrants over people of colour. Indeed, whiteness and Christianity were implicitly pointed at in many Western media reports at the beginning of the war to emphasise the Europeanness of Ukrainians who ‘look like us’. In a similar way, when ‘East European’ EU citizens joined the EU in 2004, their presumed ability to ‘socially integrate’ (Home Office 2005, p.21) more easily (due to their economic activity) had subtle racialised undertones.

However, despite the privileges offered to Ukrainians, the four-year time limit of the 2022 scheme suggests that they are not expected to stay. Their acceptance therefore seems contingent upon them eventually returning home. Most Ukrainian refugees are women and have been employed in ‘low-waged’ sectors, as many face an English language barrier and have issues with their qualifications not being recognised. But even before the war, Ukrainians have predominantly been employed as temporary seasonal workers in the UK, which shows the same ‘low-skilled’ employment pattern as ‘East European’ EU citizens. Moreover, they have been represented as struggling to accept ethnic diversity: in this report by Channel 4 Ukrainian refugees’ crude racist practices are simplistically contrasted with a tolerant attitude of the British majority.

In my own research, I draw attention to migrants’ processes of learning to live in multicultural Britain. Many of my Polish participants, having expressed crude racist attitudes at first, grew to appreciate cultural diversity and made efforts to live in diverse neighbourhoods. The Channel 4 report depicting Britian as a tolerant multicultural bubble that intolerant Ukrainian newcomers struggle to accept, paradoxically excludes Ukrainian refugees while emphasizing inclusivity. Similarly to EU ‘East European’ citizens, Ukrainians’ status is therefore not, in fact, ‘white enough’ in public discourses.

Being contingently accepted is a familiar story, reminding me of discourses about EU citizens from Central and East Europe 20 years ago, which over time changed from welcoming to more hostile. This discursive division between British and ‘East Europeans’ continues a nation-making project that constructs a binary of citizen and migrant. In recent media reports Albanians have also resurfaced in political debates as criminal migrants, a long-known trope of dangerous East European masculinity. The mixed reception of Ukrainians demonstrates that migration continues to produce racialised difference of ‘East Europeanness’.

* The other two were Sweden and Ireland.

Magda Mogilnicka is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Southampton. Until recently she was Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, where she remains an Honorary Lecturer. Magda’s research interests are in the area of migration, ethnicity, lived diversities and belonging.

Read about Magda’s research on how Polish people in the UK were impacted by Brexit and COVID in her previous MMB blogpost ‘Brexit, COVID and stay/return narratives amongst Polish migrants in the UK’.

From documentation to computation: the shifting logic of UK border control

Posted on by Emily

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

By Kuba Jablonowski.

The UK immigration status is going online. Tangible documents issued by the Home Office are set to expire at midnight on 31st December 2024 as the department has been short-dating them for years. From 1st January 2025, status holders will transact through a set of websites called View and Prove to access their status, which is now called an eVisa, and to evidence it to others using share codes. Status checkers will transact through Home Office websites too, verifying people’s right to work or right to rent online as part of the British government’s ‘hostile environment’ policy. Carriers, such as airlines, will rely on automated status checks as part of their check-in procedures. Should these fail, they can resort to View and Prove as well. This unassuming portal warns users it is in the beta phase: feature-complete but not bug-free. And yet, it controls access to a vast network of casework systems and data stores holding information that is used to generate an immigration subject and their immigration status.

Screenshot from the UK Government’s View and Prove website (accessed by the author on 5th November 2024)

Borders, once firmly on the ground and often imagined as cliffs and rivers, walls and fences, are about to be governed entirely through online computing. It is hard to overstate the significance of this seemingly technical change. It does not just transform who enacts borders and how. It also transforms the way the subject of immigration control is administratively constructed by the border bureaucracy.

Immigration status was traditionally inscribed into a token that would represent the person as a subject of immigration control: a visa sticker, a biometric residence permit, a permanent residence card, and so on. What makes these into tokens is not the material quality but the inscribing of multiple types of information such as biographic, biometric, and immigration records into a single and stable medium. This medium then remains in the hands of the person who holds the immigration status inscribed into it. There are also digital tokens of status, such as machine-readable codes used in boarding passes and vaccine passports. They give their holder a similar level of autonomy as residence cards or visa stickers. They can be downloaded onto a personal device or printed on a physical medium, and they grant access as long as they remain valid.

The online system designed by the Home Office replaces such stable tokens with online transactions. Each time the holders want to check or evidence their status, they must transact through the View and Prove portal. They first log on with the document they used to create their online account. They are then sent a verification code to the email address or phone number held for that account. Once logged on, users have the option to view their status or generate a share code. This code, which is valid for 90 days but which can glitch for a number of reasons, then needs to be shared with the status checker – the landlord, the employer, the airline, and so on – who in turn enters it into the relevant status checking website along with their own details to verify the holder’s right to work, rent, travel, and so on. Status holders and checkers use different portals but they are all hosted on the gov.uk domain.

Screenshot from the UK Government’s View and Prove website (accessed by the author on 5th November 2024)

However, the View and Prove portal is merely the front end of a complex network of upstream services that store and compute data at the back end. This network includes legacy services and novel systems developed incrementally as part of the Immigration Platform Technologies programme since 2014, at the cost of around GBP 500 million to date. In total, there are more than 90 different casework systems that feed data into this network. Two central components amongst them are the Person Centric Data Platform, which holds historic records from legacy systems and live records from new applications, and the Immigration and Asylum Biometric System, which holds the facial image and finger scans.

As we show in a paper recently published with my colleague Monique Hawkins in the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law, this design proved to be prone to glitching when originally rolled out for the European Union Settlement Scheme. Our paper argues that glitching, albeit marginal in the sense that it affects the minority of users, is nonetheless systemic because it results from the design and configuration of digital status services. This argument is built on hundreds of cases reported by status holders and legal representatives to the3million, a civil society organisation and a strategic research partner on the Algorithmic Politics and Administrative Justice project.

Based on that evidence, we outline a typology of glitches. They include problems with service availability or user login, as well as errors with profile maintenance or status sharing. In the most serious cases user profiles can become entangled with each other due to problems with data linking. When viewing or sharing status after login, such users see someone else’s photo, name or visa in their own profile. A whistleblower report earlier this year suggested this type of glitch, which the Home Office refers to as a merged identity, was affecting more than 76,000 people in early 2024. The Home Office later disclosed that it had identified around 46,000 ‘records with an identity issue’ and managed to fix some of them, but not others. And that was earlier this year, before the estimated four million users with expiring biometric residence permits were added to the millions of those who have to rely on digital services to prove their status.

Fundamentally, these problems stem from the specific design of digital status services. The Home Office insists the system must reflect the current immigration status of the status holder. In 2023 the department reaffirmed its commitment ‘to a digital system of real-time checks’ and said it ‘will not compromise on this principle’. This necessitates ongoing computation of identity and immigration data processed on different systems that handle immigration transactions: applications for grants and upgrades of status, reviews and appeals of caseworker decisions, updates of images and documents linked to the user’s account, and so on. There is always a risk this computation will go wrong – and that if it does, the holder is locked out of their status as they are trying to evidence it.

This is why View and Prove should not be seen as a digital immigration document. Rather, it is the online interface of a transactional system set to replace immigration documents. This system does not swap tangible tokens of status – residence cards or visa stickers – for digital tokens. Instead, it mandates online checks of immigration status in real time. This system does not come with any document that can be stored on a personal device or reproduced on a physical medium. The proof of immigration status is produced on the screen in the moment of the check – and it vanishes into the cloud of Home Office servers as soon as the check is done.

Kuba Jablonowski (he/him) is a Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. His research investigates the design and operation of digital identity systems in the context of governance, and he approaches the border as a site of identity production rather than a device of mobility control. To generate and disseminate research findings, Kuba collaborates with civil society, the civil service, private actors and the media.

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New questions for the UK’s seasonal worker scheme

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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 Lydia Medland.

The pen asks: ‘Need seasonal workers?’ It’s a freebie from a horticultural event aimed at fruit growers. The expected answer is, ‘yes’. On the other side of the pen is the name of an agency that sponsors workers to come to the UK. Where will the workers come from? Neither agent nor grower is expected to care. How will they be recruited? The agency is one of seven licensed operators (six of which recruit for horticulture) legally permitted to sponsor migrant workers for work in UK fields, polytunnels, glasshouses and packhouses.

Promotional pen from a horticultural trade show, 2023 (photo by Lydia Medland)

This Seasonal Worker Visa (SWV) is the post-Brexit scheme to fill the horticultural labour market shortage that occurred after many EU nationals stopped coming to the UK to pick fruit following Brexit. This had followed a period where no visa scheme was in place (2014-2018) when the UK relied entirely on EU nationals via EU Freedom of Movement. Nevertheless, an earlier scheme, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS), dated back, in mostly low numbers, to the post-war era.

Under the current scheme, seasonal workers are restricted to a six month stay in the UK. If workers are unhappy with the farm on which they are ‘placed’, they may request a transfer. Transfers are not guaranteed. When workers are dismissed for any reason (including for working slower than the firm considers normal) they risk being sent home early. The scheme does not permit workers access to public funds or to bring family members. The SWV ties workers to a single employer meaning that vulnerabilities to risks of labour exploitation, debt and other serious challenges are tangible.

One of the big differences between SWV and SAWS is that the new scheme has a global reach meaning seasonal workers are now very nationally diverse. This raises important questions that have not filtered through to public debate:

1. How can workers from a wide range of very different countries be supported?

According to Home Office statistics, in 2022, workers of 62 nationalities came to the UK on temporary visas to do seasonal agricultural work. Such a range of people from different contexts and backgrounds brings an expanding range of needs. Some growers are attempting to respond to needs by, for example, offering prayer rooms. However, other requirements such as linguistic diversity are more difficult to accommodate, particularly in isolated rural locations.

Crucially, lack of effective communication can make it difficult for people to know their labour rights. For example, the retailer-funded Just Good Work App aimed at seasonal workers conveys information about working rights in the UK. However, I found it defaulted to a choice of English or Russian after the registration pages. This is a signal that something as simple as an app is not enough to enable communication between workers, their employers (growers) and intermediaries. Workers often feel pressure from supervisors when they have their hands full with tasks; this is not a context where they can easily use translation apps without losing time and missing targets. The question of how to support the linguistic diversity of workers cannot then be reduced to a smartphone application.

2. Does the distance that seasonal workers travel matter?

The research around the debts accrued by seasonal workers to fund their travel and time in the UK has found distance has important consequences. Workers responsible for paying their own air fares incur high transport costs when they travel long distances. There is currently movement towards an employer pays principle, which would shift the cost of the workers’ visas and flights to the grower. But one of the reasons for the demand for seasonal migrant workers is that growers suffer from the low prices that they receive from retailers (mostly supermarkets). Shifting further costs onto growers may add to this problem. I would like to see the introduction of a retailer pays principle, where costs are carried by supermarkets who receive the highest added value from the fruit and veg they sell. Worker groups are now calling for this.

Moreover, in the context of climate change, we should consider the ecological impacts of a scheme which is global in reach and encourages regular short-term movement of people to the UK and home again. Short-termism is written into the scheme because there is no route to settlement for workers. The practice of recruitment of workers from within Europe not only meant that workers recruited had more rights within the labour market (before Brexit), making them less at risk of exploitation than current visa workers, but it led to a lower carbon footprint for the sector. Regularly flying workers around the world to produce ‘local fruit’ is a contradiction with an environmental cost.

3. Can recruiters be more aware and engaged with contexts of origin?

The SWV has had some early problems. These included the discovery by policy makers, thanks to NGO and journalist research, that many workers from Nepal and Indonesia were paying brokers large sums of money in order to gain access to the scheme, and subsequently accruing large debts to work. The UK government responded to this by revoking a license from one of the scheme operators, and suspending another. In the wake of reports documenting worker indebtedness and labour exploitation, the UK’s Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, arranged bilateral meetings and a signing of agreements on information-sharing and worker protection with the governments of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in May 2023, two major countries of origin for SWV workers.

These responses to problems are reactive, framed as exceptions to a norm. The system is designed for prospective workers anywhere in the world to apply with an email. While on the face of it this is ‘open access’, for those with no English or prior knowledge of the UK or its government, using an intermediary is a logical thing to do. It is therefore no surprise that workers use brokers, especially in countries (for example, Indonesia) where the use of brokers is common and well-documented in academic research. These events are part of a context-blindness in which few efforts are made to understand the situations of prospective workers approaching the system from outside the UK labour market. In aiming to reach workers ‘globally’, the SWV system obliges potential migrantised workers to do all the cultural and linguistic work, and face all the risks of having their contexts, languages and needs little understood.

Not all seasonal migration programmes work this way. Canada, France and Spain use bilateral agreements that give both states of origin and destination responsibilities to temporary seasonal workers. Canada’s scheme is open to citizens of 12 countries (from Mexico and the Caribbean). Spain and France are subject to the EU Seasonal Workers Directive and have bilateral agreements to govern specific relationships. Spain’s system involves seven countries; France’s relevant bilateral agreements cover 19 countries. The UK’s open market approach is subcontracted through labour agents so bilateral arrangements including safeguards for workers rarely occur.

My pen keeps asking its question: ‘Need seasonal workers?’ The world does need seasonal workers. Harvests are seasonal, our food is seasonal, and we need our food. However, do seasonal workers need to be pro-actively recruited from a global rural labour force? I am not sure. Reports continue to emphasise needs for reform, particularly removing the tied nature of visas and allowing workers to access public services. Is this enough? Building a workforce requires continuity, reliability, exchange, connection, understanding and the development of skills. A better way of building such connections needed in the SWV could also include better linguistic support, verified intermediaries who are not sponsors, and a systematic role for trade unions to facilitate freedom of association as one of the core labour standards, so easily overlooked in the market-orientated UK context.

Lydia Medland is a Research Fellow in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She is currently the Principal Investigator of the British-Academy funded project Working for 5 a Day: Research on risk and resilience in the changing food system, which explores work in the horticultural sector in England.

In a previous MMB blogpost Lydia has asked ‘Does it matter that the UK relies on migrant workers to harvest food?‘

Read the introduction to this special blog series from the SPAIS Migration Research Group here.

Moving as being: introducing the SPAIS Migration Group blog series

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 Samuel Okyere.

Welcome to the MMB special series by the SPAIS Migration Group, a collective of researchers in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol who are engaged in researching and teaching topics related to migration and mobilities. Many members of the group are themselves migrants with first-hand knowledge of the vagaries of border controls and other experiences associated with the migrant status. Since its establishment in October 2023 the group has worked hard to establish a community for migration researchers in SPAIS as part of its remit to develop migration research and teaching within our School, University and beyond. This has been achieved through seminars, peer-support for draft scholarly publications and grant applications, and mentorship for early career scholars among other efforts. This blog series showcases some of the remarkable migration research and scholarship by our members and in so doing expresses our group’s unique identity. 

(Image by Karen Lau on Unsplash)

The phenomena of migration and the movement of people have always been inherent to the human experience. Contrary to the narrative that portrays these as recent occurrences, for centuries many groups and individuals across the world have migrated temporarily or permanently across geographic, cultural and socioeconomic borders for purposes such as education, marriage, exploration, avoiding socio-political conflicts, responding to climatic events and humanitarian emergencies, and seeking better life opportunities. The difference is that the politics, practices and attitudes towards the phenomenon of continued global migration in this era have become extremely polarised as shown by the dramatic surge in far-right parties and groups in Europe on the back of anti-immigrant sentiments and the ongoing anti-migrant riots in parts of the UK at the time of writing this post. Tensions can arise from concerns about strain on public services and infrastructure. However, the polarisation and growing antagonism towards migrants as characterised by the ‘us’ and ‘them’ sentiment is majorly underpinned by exclusion, race and racism, nationalism, islamophobia and other kinds of religious intolerance. 

The SPAIS Migration Group’s MMB blog series examines these themes and other complexities surrounding the fundamental human right and need to move. The series is timely for several reasons. Firstly, it draws on findings from recent, extensive research conducted by the group’s members in various regions including Europe, Southeast and East Asia, South America and Sub-Saharan Africa to show the globally significant nature of the issues under discussion. The contributions collectively reveal that the portrayal of migration as a crisis and the resulting moral panic are deliberate tactics aimed at limiting migrants and their rights, rather than supporting them. The series brings into sharp relief some of the anti-migrant systems that have emerged as an outcome of the portrayal of migration as a crisis.

Notably, the post by Nicole Hoellerer and Katharine Charsley underlines how bi-national couples are increasingly being pressured into marriage by the UK’s restrictive spouse and partner immigration regulations. Hoellerer and Charsley demonstrate that although the British government claims to oppose ‘forced marriage’, the timing and choice of partner for migrants are not ‘free’ but instead largely influenced by migration policies designed to address the migrant ‘crises’ or control the number of immigrants. The same systemic challenges are created by the UK’s seasonal worker visa (SWV) as Lydia Medland’s blog shows. The SWV scheme, created to fill the horticultural labour market shortage after a lack of EU nationals coming to the UK to pick fruit following Brexit, ties workers to a single employer. As widely documented with other ‘tied’ work visas, the SWV scheme, which is also aimed at preventing migrants from settling in the UK, has similarly exposed migrant workers to severe labour exploitation, worker abuse and debt. 

Secondly, this blog series provides valuable insights into how attitudes to migrants and the associated notion of who belongs or not to the nation state and under what terms are underwritten by racism and ethnic discrimination. This is revealed in Minjae Shin’s post, which discusses how debates around military service in South Korea are closely intertwined with the notion of race, ethnicity and masculinity. Popular rhetoric casts Korean nationals with dual heritage as being ineligible for the country’s mandatory military service, a way of rejecting their equality with ethnically ‘pure’ Koreans and hence their right to equal citizenship. In Brazil, Julio D’Angelo Davies’ shows that notions of ‘race’ and ‘belonging’ are implicitly inscribed through the omission of the country’s African heritage from official nation-building narratives. Migration to Brazil and the founding of the state is presented as an activity that involved white Europeans despite the evidence of the country’s multi-racial make up. The racial politics of migration in Brazil is further exemplified by Maeli Farias’ blog on the Bolsonaro administration’s approach to Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers in that country.

Meanwhile, Magda Mogilnicka’s assessment of attitudes towards racial minorities among Polish and Ukrainian migrants in the UK offers further lessons on the inextricable links between racial or ethnic discrimination, migration and belonging. Her blog shows that some Eastern Europeans hold crude racist and Islamophobic stereotypes. However, Mogilnicka cautions against rhetoric that casts East Europeans as racists, struggling to fit into a multicultural Britian. This is not just because racism and Islamophobia remain rife in Britain itself, but also because many East Europeans eventually embrace cultural diversity and make efforts to either live in diverse neighbourhoods or make friendships with those they perceive as racially or ethnically other. 

The blogs in this series also underline how migrants in the different regions and cultures where contributors conducted their research are seeking to navigate the systems of exclusion and fundamental human rights violations that have become a normalised part of their experience. Here, our contributors interdisciplinary research and case studies reveal the ways in which experiences of migration and attitudes towards migrants are strongly linked to factors such as racial and ethnic discrimination, homophobia, Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination that construct some migrant groups as a threat and systematically exclude them from access to welfare, rights and justice. Maite Ibáñez Bollerhoff’s blog on the experiences of Muslim refugee women in Germany shows how these barriers occur at the intersection of gender, religion and refugee status. This theme is also the focus of Natalie Brinham’s post on how Rohingya refugees seek to make life liveable in a context where they have been issued ID cards that make a mockery of the principles of ‘freedom’ and ‘protection’, which the cards are supposed to offer.  

 This blog series above all underlines the SPAIS Migration Group’s identity as:  

  1. a group of scholars committed to collaboratively expanding the current theoretical, methodological and empirical boundaries for studying and understanding the lived experiences of migrants; and
  2. a group of migration scholars committed to exposing the creation and value of borders as an affront to the right to move and the wider experience of being human. 

Samuel Okyere is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bristol where he leads the Migration Research Group in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS). His research interests include child labour and child work, migration, trafficking, ‘modern slavery’ and contemporary abolitionism. He is currently Co-I on the five-year European Research Council funded project Modern Marronage: The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World.

Samuel has written previously on the MMB blog about ‘Migrant deaths and the impact on those left behind’.