Category: Policy and Practice

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

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 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’.

The racist politics of ‘mindless thuggery’

Posted on by Emily

By Dan Godshaw, Ann Singleton and Bridget Anderson.

We pay respect to the memory of the children killed and to those injured in Southport as well as their families.

In early August 2024 the UK experienced a wave of fascist violence and organised hate of the kind not witnessed since the 1980s. Far right activists ignited unrest throughout the country (largely England and Northern Ireland). Bricks, bats, boots and fists rained down on Black and brown people. Asylum hotels were attacked, set on fire and daubed with racist graffiti. Mosques, advice centres and immigration lawyers were threatened. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer described this hateful violence as the ‘mindless’ actions of ‘thugs’, but this wilfully ignores the politics of these events, stripping them of their economic and political meaning and potential remedy. The violence is racist violence, an assertion of white supremacy. A criminal justice crackdown is not enough. Counter demonstrations and chants – ‘we are many, you are few’ and ‘migrants are welcome here’ – show the strength of solidarity and opposition to racism, but they too are not enough. These are responses to symptoms, not to the underlying problems.

Anti-racist protestors in Manchester, UK, August 2024 (image: Mylo Kaye on Unsplash)

Analysing the symptoms is critical to understanding what led to this violence. The original pretext for the unrest was the false claim that the young man (at 17 years old, legally a child) arrested for the murder of three children in Southport had arrived in the UK on a small boat as an asylum seeker. He was, in fact, born and brought up in Cardiff and Lancashire but he was later unnecessarily identified as a ‘child of immigrants’. Those targeted for attack have been ‘non-whites’, asylum seekers and Muslims: ‘Get them out’, ‘Stop the boats’, ‘We want our country back’, ‘England,’ the rioters shouted. Resistance by allies of those targeted has been met with chants of ‘You’re not British anymore’. White Britishness is being used to rally ‘pro-British’ mobs. This mix of hostility to migration, racism and Britishness matters. Because while racism is not acceptable in polite society, hostility to migrants is too often represented and made respectable by the framing of ‘legitimate grievances’. In a statement later denounced by other Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) one of the country’s most senior police officers, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight PCC and chair of the Association of PCCs, put it like this:

The government must acknowledge what is causing this civil unrest in order to prevent it. Arresting people, or creating violent disorder units, is treating the symptom and not the cause. The questions these people want answering; what is the government’s solution to mass uncontrolled immigration? How are the new Labour government going to uphold and build on British values? This is the biggest challenge facing Sir Keir Starmer’s government.

Hostility to immigration and asylum has been drip-fed into political consciousness for more than a century, emerging from a long history of colonial racism. But in recent years the demonisation of asylum seekers has held a central place in British institutional politics. ‘Stop the boats’ is a slogan made ‘respectable’ by both former Conservative and current Labour ministers. Migrant numbers have been represented as an external, existential threat by successive Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries. Asylum was effectively outlawed by the Conservative’s 2023 Illegal Migration Act, but it was under the 1997 New Labour Government that the term ‘asylum seeker’ moved from a description of a legal status to a form of abuse. Their term saw policies become fixated on reducing asylum numbers, the withdrawal of asylum seekers’ permission to work and the dramatic expansion of the privately run immigration detention estate. This has for decades inflicted foreseeable and preventable harm on people held in what Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor recently described as ‘truly shocking’ conditions, purely because of their immigration status.

The same New Labour Government introduced dispersal policies that housed asylum seekers away from support networks into cheap housing run by unaccountable private providers, often in areas where long-term residents were experiencing severe economic hardship and lack of investment. All these policies contributed to further division and toxifying of asylum politics, ‘othering’ asylum seekers and migrants. Racism is roundly decried, and rightly so, but migration ‘concerns’ are actively legitimised and cited as justification for more restrictive policies.

Across the world, human mobility is increasingly presented as a threat to citizens, with border deterrents a way to manage populations defined as surplus to the needs of capital. By framing migration as an invasion and drawing sharp lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, wealthy nation states  pursue a war on migration. Supported by a growing border industry, in which profits are made by corporations subcontracted to prevent, detect and deter unauthorised movement, states enact what activists and scholars have termed ‘border violence’, resulting in death and injury. Violent borders such as razor-wire topped fences maim and trap people in ‘death zones’ between states; these borders are internalised within bureaucracies, universities, hospital and schools; they exceed territoriality through boat and land pushbacks and offshore detention sites. The failure of national and European policies has fatal consequences. But rather than facing and responding to these failures, politicians blame the illegal and extortionate markets they themselves have created for human smuggling, claiming these are the sole cause of untold numbers of deaths during migration.

According to the narrative pushed by Starmer and others about the rioters, it is ‘thugs’ who get confused between migrants and the mosque-attending ‘multi-cultural’ public, or between asylum seekers and the social care worker going about her business. Yet the Windrush scandal demonstrates, if demonstration were needed, that creating a ‘really hostile environment for illegal migration’ also means creating a really hostile environment for Black and brown people whatever their citizenship. As the poorly trained general population is increasingly drawn into immigration enforcement, often anxious to err on the side of the law they rely on race and/or ethnicity as a marker of national difference, thereby exposing how ideas of Britishness are in practice bound up with whiteness. As A. Sivanandan, former director of the Institute of Race Relations, observed many years ago ‘We all carry our passports on our faces’.

The phrase ‘mindless thuggery’ mobilises a slur used in the UK and the US against economically marginalised people who are also racialised. Austerity-driven economic policies have produced social and economic conditions that have pitched impoverished communities racialised as white against those racialised as Black and ‘other’. Migration policies focused on reducing people to the essentialised identity of ‘migrant’ have created legitimacy for these attacks. What is needed, alongside incisive placards, demonstrations and counter chants, is a political ground shift. Migration, as a fundamental dimension of human life, must be normalised and accounted for across all areas of public policy. The hostile environment must be dismantled. Politicians must stop scapegoating ‘migrants’ for the social harms of neoliberalism. Instead, they must address elite power and inequality, and invest in housing and public services. We have had enough of decades of state and corporate-driven violence at the border and elsewhere. With anything less than a fundamental shift in political discourse, racist violence on the street, whether random or organised, will not go away.

Dan Godshaw is a Lecturer in Criminology in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. He specialises in migration, with a particular focus on state violence, immigration detention and the intersectional dimensions of border harms.

Ann Singleton is Reader in Migration Policy in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, and MMB Policy Strategic Lead. She is a leading expert in the production and use of international migration data in policy development.

Bridget Anderson is Director of MMB and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at the University of Bristol. She is currently co-PI on the research project Protecting Irregular Migrants in Europe (PRIME).

Why do we use the term ‘irregular migration’ and can it be translated?

Posted on by Emily

By Edanur Yazici and Bridget Anderson.

The term ‘illegal immigration’ is often used in discussions about immigration but is widely agreed to be pejorative, misleading, and stigmatising by scholars, refugee and migrant groups, and across the third sector. Instead, ‘irregular migration’ has become the preferred term, especially in Europe. However, this term can be confusing and unclear – especially when translated into different languages, as we are doing in our work with the PRIME Project to understand employers’ use of migrant labour.

As one employer told us: ‘I can’t give an answer to this, I don’t know. I just don’t know the difference between regular and irregular.’

This post looks into how we define irregular migration in different contexts and examines the challenges and insights gained from translating the term into five languages in a survey of employers.

(Image: Shutterstock)

Surveying employers: defining irregularity

Choosing and defining a term is political, and what is chosen might not always be clear to everyone. There is increasing recognition that ‘who counts as a migrant’ is very uncertain: is a ‘migrant’ defined by their citizenship, how long they’ve stayed in a place, or their intentions to remain? In addition, in migration studies, there’s an increasing recognition of the critical role race plays in how we understand migration. This perspective considers how border policies and practices contribute to the construction of racial identities. Additionally, it emphasises that the term ‘migrant’ itself acts as a form of racialisation.

This uncertainty around the term migration, as well as its association with race, is compounded by the term ‘irregularity’ and other frequently used descriptors such as ‘illegal’, ‘undocumented’ and ‘sans papiers’. These descriptors, including ‘irregularity’ (the term we adopt in PRIME) do not describe a fixed category. They are instead ambiguous, contested, and exist on a spectrum. Types and degrees of irregularity are continuously shaped and reshaped by various stakeholders, including policymakers, migrants, and employers.

The PRIME Project is working to explore how national and sector-specific institutions shape employers’ engagement with migrant labour. As a part of this we are conducting a survey of employers to find our about their labour needs. Before launching the survey, we ran a three-stage pilot. We used the pilot to understand how employers think about migration and what terms make the most sense to them. All pilot respondents employ migrant workers and most of them have contributed to national-level policy debates on migration. Piloting the survey highlighted key issues with terminology and translation. Below, we describe what the pilot asked employers about and how employers understood the terms chosen.

How do employers understand the term ‘irregular migration’?

To start with, we need to understand what employers think about when they describe ‘irregular migration’ and how they understand irregularity.

Our pilot survey asked respondents to tell us who they thought would be categorised as ‘irregular’ and gave them a list of descriptions such as ‘a worker who entered the country illegally’ and ‘a worker who is an asylum seeker.’ Of the pilot respondents, all but one said that they didn’t know.  

We revised the question to ask who they would ‘describe as an illegal migrant’ (with the caveat that ‘defining who is an “illegal migrant” can be complicated’), and this was considered much more accessible.  While more readily understood, the decision to use terminology that has been rejected as stigmatising poses its own set of ethical and definitional challenges. In particular, it raises the question of how migration scholars communicate their ethical and political standpoints to audiences who may not always share their preferred terminology when conducting research.

Who is a citizen?

To analyse factors shaping how and why employers recruit (irregular) migrant workers, we also need to understand how and why they employ non-migrant workers. To do this, we need to understand how employers think about different categories of citizenship and belonging. Different national assumptions about this became evident in the translation.

UK

In the UK English language version of the survey we piloted, we asked: ‘Do you find it difficult to recruit workers with British citizenship?’. All pilot respondents reacted negatively to this phrasing, variously suggesting that we use ‘domestic workers’, ‘workers within the UK’, or ‘national workers’ instead. One respondent suggested PRIME might distinguish between ‘native British citizens’ and ‘British citizens who are foreigners’.

We reformulated the question to ask: ‘Do you find it difficult to recruit British workers?’. This particular wording reveals the different ways that migration status and race intersect. Who, for example, are respondents likely to imagine when asked about ‘British workers’ and what alternative assumptions would have been made if we had decided to use ‘national worker’ or ‘domestic worker’ – each with their own particular nativist underpinnings?

Sweden

The term ‘Swedish workers’ (Svenska arbetstagare) presented a problem for the survey in Sweden. One pilot respondent suggested re-phrasing the question to ask about ‘workers born in Sweden who speak Swedish as their mother tongue’. This suggested re-phrasing carries assumptions about place of birth and linguistic ability as intrinsically related to ‘Swedishness’. Swedish official categories add another layer of complexity, particularly for comparative international research. Official terms used by state actors in Sweden are: ‘foreign background’ (a person born outside of Sweden or born in Sweden with two foreign-born parents) and ‘Swedish background’ (a person born in Sweden with one or two parents also born in Sweden). Foreignness, birth, and background each point to how the state and official agencies relate to race, migration, and citizenship, each with distinct implications for how irregularity is conceptualised across different national and sectoral contexts. 

The terms Austrian/Italian/Polish workers were not problematic, but the term ‘migrant worker’ raised queries.

Who is a ‘migrant’ worker?

Poland

In Polish, ‘migrant worker’ was translated into ‘foreign worker’ rather than ‘migrating’ or ‘migrant’ worker. In Polish ‘foreign worker’ (pracownicy cudzoziemscy) is more readily understood and the alternative ‘migrant worker’ risks being confused with ‘migrants’, which some interpret as non-citizens and others interpret as Polish citizens who have returned to Poland having been migrant workers in other countries.

Italy

As in Polish, in Italian, ‘migrant worker’ was translated to ‘foreign workers’ (stranieri/e). This was preferred because it is the term used by the Italian Statistical Institute. As in the Swedish context, the adoption of state-sanctioned terminology has implications for conceptualising ‘migrantness’ and ‘foreignness’. These differing conceptualisations are exposed by translation. In this way, the process of translation itself becomes a site of data collection.

Austria

Decisions made about translation and what they communicate about national and institutional contexts are also evident in word choice. In the Austrian context, three variations of the German for ‘migrant workers’ were piloted before settling on a term (migrantische Arbeitskräfte – which roughly translates to migrant worker) that respondents would feel relatively comfortable with.

Looking forward and implications for research

Translation highlights how we attempt to strike a balance between familiarity for respondents and accuracy and ethics for researchers. It opens up questions about the constraints and limitations of methodological nationalism, current academic orthodoxy, and the way the vernacular shapes how we think and know.  

Designing, translating, and piloting the PRIME Employer survey has helped us think through some of these challenges. As we move forward with data collection and analysis and later use survey findings to begin qualitative data collection, we will no doubt encounter barriers and opportunities when conceptualising (ir)regularisation and researching the intersection of race and migration status.

As the study progresses, we will continue to reflect on what our linguistic and methodological choices mean for how we understand and ask for irregularity. We will interrogate what has informed our choices and question how respondents have reacted to them.

Can you help us connect to employers?

The PRIME Employer survey is open until July for employers and labour providers in Austria, Italy, Poland, Sweden, or the UK working in any of the following sectors:

  • agriculture and food processing;
  • older adult care;
  • restaurants; and
  • waste management and recycling sectors.

If you know an employer in the categories above who would be willing to share their experience, please ask them to complete the survey here:

In English | In German | In Italian | In Polish  | In Swedish

Edanur Yazici is a Research Associate on the PRIME Project based in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

Bridget Anderson is Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at the University of Bristol, co-PI of the PRIME Project and Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol.

Hysteria and disinterest: accommodating asylum seekers

Posted on by Emily

By Melanie Griffiths.

The UK’s asylum system is in crisis. Despite the government’s rhetoric, this is largely a crisis of the Home Office’s own making. Years of painfully slow decision-making has created a massive backlog of tens of thousands of people. The recent political hysteria around small boats crossing the Channel and the cruel, fear-mongering policies to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, are attempts to distract from these failings. This includes the inhumane – but entirely predictable – crisis of asylum housing, produced as the need for accommodation has outstripped supply. At a time of fervent emotionality around asylum, this blogpost uses one person’s story to focus in on the disastrous impact of the asylum backlog on the UK’s fragmenting portfolio of asylum accommodation. 

Missing in the system

A friend rang me recently in a panic. A worried family in his country of origin was trying to track down a family member missing in the UK. Their son – I’ll call him Daniyal – had disappeared a fortnight previously, hours after arriving looking for safety.

Daniyal had called his family to reassure them he had survived the dangerous Channel crossing and approached the authorities for protection. But immediately afterwards, he had become uncontactable.

Until recently, asylum seekers were generally housed in the community while their claims were decided. Although notoriously inadequate, such housing allowed a degree of ‘normality’ and social connection. But as the asylum backlog has outstripped Home Office accommodation, the picture has altered significantly.

I suspected Daniyal was lost somewhere in the monstrously convoluted and rapidly diversifying asylum housing system. Armed with just his name and GPS coordinates from his last phone call, I started by contacting detention NGOs.

Indefinite detention

For decades, the UK incarcerated people in immigration detention centres principally to remove them from the country. But since 2021, these ‘removal’ centres have been used for initial processing of newly arrived people.

Last year, the UK detained over 16,000 people in immigration detention, costing the taxpayer about £100 million. These prison-like centres detain people with no time limit and are notoriously harmful, with decades of reports documenting traumatisation, ill-health, violence and abuse. Using such sites to isolate and incarcerate people seeking safety reflects systemic mistrust and distaste towards them.

Yarls Wood Detention Centre, Bedford, 2015 (image: EYE DJ on flickr)

Diversified detention

After failing to find Daniyal in the detention estate, I turned to the newly established ‘quasi-detention’ spaces. These include disused military barracks, which have housed new arrivals for ‘processing’ since 2000 and have repeatedly been found to be inadequate and unsafe. Manston Barracks were described as ‘really dangerous’ by the independent inspector of borders, who found severe overcrowding and outbreaks of rare, contagious diseases. Moreover, in 2021, the High Court found the Home Office guilty of employing unlawful practices in holding asylum seekers at Napier Barracks.

Worryingly, such sites are categorised as outside of mainstream immigration detention and thus excluded from the scrutiny of official detention statistics. Holding asylum seekers in manifestly unsafe spaces, outside of the community and exempt from proper accountability, reflects underlying notions of contagion and disgust.

Fragmentation

But if Danyial had already been ‘processed’, he could be housed anywhere in a bewildering web of sites. Since 2020, this includes hotels, at a cost of £8 million a day. Thousands of asylum seekers have been housed in these ill-equipped places, with the international aid budget plundered in the process. Hotel residents suffer isolation, poor food and hygiene, worsening mental health and even deaths. They have become a magnet for xenophobic hatred and violent Far Right demonstrations, which the government has been accused of stoking.

Or Daniyal could be in one of the Home Office’s new mass asylum accommodation sites. This includes Wethersfield, which was opened in 2023 on a former airfield in a remote part of Essex. The last chief inspector of borders described an ‘overwhelming feeling of hopelessness’ there, warning of immediate risk of criminality, arson and violence.

Similarly, the controversial barge the Bibby Stockholm has housed asylum seekers since 2023. It has been plagued with problems since opening, including legionella bacteria in the water system. Residents describe it as overcrowded, claustrophobic, retraumatising and prison-like; remote, inaccessible and heavily securitised. Just weeks after it opened, a man tragically died onboard.

The sites differ, but they are united in forcing people into substandard, segregated living, subjecting them to dehumanising levels of danger, despair, punishment and abandonment.

Criminalisation

Or was Daniyal in prison? I launched a search with the ‘locate a prisoner’ service and rang individual prisons. But without a prisoner number, and with the Roman-alphabet spelling of Daniyal’s name uncertain, I got nowhere.

I then contacted Captain Support, an NGO that supports imprisoned foreign nationals at the prison nearest Daniyal’s last known location. They sent out information requests amongst their contacts. Eventually a prisoner reported seeing someone who might be Daniyal. Through a complex web of care and connection spanning international and domestic scales, we found him.

Daniyal was in prison, but why? With more digging we found that he had been charged with ‘illegal migration’ offences, even though article 31 of the Refugee Convention stipulates that people seeking refuge must not be punished for irregular entry. Increasingly, the government seeks to criminalise people for seeking safety, despite not offering legal alternative routes. Earlier this year, Ibrahima Bah – barely out of his teens – was sentenced to a decade of imprisonment for manslaughter, after the dinghy he was travelling on sank.

Across Europe, refugees rather than governments are being held accountable for increasingly deadly borders (see also the case of the El-Hiblu 3 in Malta). In the UK, the new Illegal Migration Act 2023 not only prosecutes and punishes those entering ‘illegally’ but allows the government to refuse to consider their refugee claims. Daniyal, Ibrahima, the El-Hiblu 3 and countless others are re-categorised from rights-bearing refugees into one of the most emotionally labile folk devils of our times: the deeply hated and feared, and highly racialised, figure of the ‘foreign criminal’.

Indifference

And yet, the UK’s response to Daniyal was also one of apathy and cruel disinterest. After several months imprisonment, Daniyal was given a release day but not told what would happen to him nor where in the housing labyrinth he would be sent. He spent weeks waiting in fearful uncertainty.

When the day came, Daniyal was just released from prison, with nowhere to go. Neither the Home Office nor Probation provided him with any support. The Home Office had a statutory duty to provide Daniyal with accommodation but they simply, and without explanation, did not house him. As an asylum seeker, he was forbidden from working and had no recourse to public funds, including night shelters. So, in the middle of winter and unable to speak English, Daniyal was abandoned into the horrors of indefinite street destitution.

‘A proud history of protecting refugees’?

An enormous human backlog has been created in the UK’s asylum system. The political response has been to punish and isolate those affected, including through crimes of refuge-seeking, a diversifying portfolio of quasi-penal, segregated and unsafe housing and through political spectacles such as deporting people to Rwanda. The government is attempting to distract us with fearmongering and inflammatory diatribe fuelling hate, disgust and mistrust.

And yet, the almost-garish emotionality of the immigration debate exists alongside a dehumanising disinterest. As I argued in a recent article, it is precisely this mix of splenetic emotionality and callous lack of emotion that not only characterises the immigration system but produces it, and paints certain people as degradable, deportable and disposable. How hopeful then, that as the government’s Safety of Rwanda Act is passed and asylum seekers violently bundled into detention centres for removal, we are witnessing a tide of public outrage and resistance, with hundreds of people coming together in emotional acts of empathy and solidarity.

Melanie Griffiths is an Associate Professor at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham. She works on mobility and immigration enforcement in the UK. This post relates to Melanie’s article in the recent Special Issue of Identities on ‘Affective Control: The Emotional Life of (En)forcing Mobility Control in Europe’, discussed on the MMB blog by Ioana Vrăbiescu and Bridget Anderson. Previous MMB blogposts by Melanie include ‘The freedom to love: mixed-immigration status couples and the UK immigration system’, written with Candice Morgan-Glendinning.

More information about the Captain Support Network can be found here. Donations to a fundraiser for the network can be made here.

Navigating ethical emotions in European migration enforcement

Posted on by Emily

New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Ioana Vrăbiescu and Bridget Anderson.

The European Union represents itself as a global champion of human rights, yet its external borders are marked by hostility, surveillance and death. Despite official claims to equality and that Black Lives Matter, the vast majority of those excluded at the border and within Europe are people of colour. Institutional racism permeates European immigration and asylum systems. This has consequences beyond territorial edges: differential treatment within Europe results in an intricate network of borders that excludes migrants and asylum seekers, but also has consequences for minoritized and otherwise marginalised citizens (Anderson 2024).

Our recent co-edited Special Issue of Identities, ‘Affective Control: The Emotional Life of (En)forcing Mobility Control in Europe’, focuses on the enforcers of these systems: immigration officers, civil servants, police, social workers, legal officials, private companies, NGOs and many others. We start by questioning: What emotions are experienced during the daily work of migration enforcement? What is the relevance of race and gender in the experience of emotions? When and how do state officials erase emotions and claim rationality? How does the state immigration organizational structure, classification and ideology cultivate or repress certain emotions? Bureaucracies are infused with affects, but emotions (and perhaps this is particularly the case when it comes to immigration bureaucracies) are typically regarded as unimportant side effects. When emotions do come to the fore, the focus is on those who are subject to bureaucratic intervention: feeling fear and anxiety about being arrested, detained or deported. In contrast, this collection explores how emotions enable enforcers to make or dispute the ethical sense of their activities and what these emotional responses to immigration controls tell us about the nature of those controls and the contexts within which they operate.

Exit from the port in Calais (image: Pierre Pruvot on flickr)

Emotions in migration studies

This Special Issue explores how police, social workers and individuals make sense of the complex emotions experienced while executing immigration checks. It steps into the uncharted territory of how they manage, accommodate or suppress feelings when surveilling, controlling and recording migrants and enforcing deportations. The emotional challenges public servants face, including feelings of complicity and belonging, shape their behaviour and raise ethical questions about the moral values of those implementing migration policies.

We introduce the concept of ‘ethical emotions’ to elucidate the affective states that emerge where personal views of the world come into tension with organizational and social values. We use it to capture how emotions can (dis)enable people to make sense of the contradictions between the personal and the institutional and what this means for how emotions are negotiated, exhibited and managed in the workplace. Contributors to this Special Issue highlight in particular the intricate relationship between emotions, ethics, organisational structures and racism. Thus, the collection brings together the fields of migration on the one hand and race and ethnic studies on the other, showing the ways in which ethical emotions support patriarchy and institutional racism.

Nationalism, racism and ethical emotions

The legitimacy of immigration controls hinges on claims that they are not racist even as they mobilise to protect national values. In most European bureaucracies, it is acknowledged that overt racism based on skin colour is socially unacceptable. We do not claim that it is in practice unacceptable, and we also emphasise that this relies on a grotesquely oversimplified idea of what racism actually is. Nevertheless, despite these extreme limitations, how to manage ‘not being racist’ on the one hand with enforcing immigration controls on the other is emotionally draining.

Alpa Parmar’s article examines how street-level bureaucrats feel race. She explores the emotive register of police officers and criminal case workers deployed in their occupational roles. Importantly, she includes the complex and contradictory emotions experienced by racially minoritised people in police and migration related roles. Aino Korvensyrjä, like Parmar, explores how race is used to understand and manage social conflict, aid policing and criminalize dissent. Katerina Rozakou, too, foregrounds race in her analysis of the ambiguous feelings of police officers in charge of guarding, surveilling and deporting migrants from Greece, and argues that the culturally significant sentiment of filotimo (love of honour) can require that they perform care for migrants at the same time as consolidating nationalism.

Lisa Marie Borrelli and Corina Tulbure, in different ways, both consider the relationship between the welfare state and immigration enforcement. Borrelli looks at bureaucrats in Switzerland and how those managing welfare and those managing migration control regard – and feel towards – each other and their respective departments. Tulbure’s work is conducted in Barcelona where she examines how social workers select ‘deserving’ social beneficiaries, the emotional toll it takes and how emotions end up justifying exclusions.

Melanie Griffiths shows how feelings and affects are embedded in immigration legislation and in enforcement processes, exploring the workings of what she calls an ‘emotional economy’ that operates at individual and systemic levels. Finally, Ioana Vrăbiescu argues that melancholia is the best concept to explain the complex emotional mix lived by those who manage migrants’ detention centres in France, spaces where emotions are extreme but also denied.

We hope our collection will open new conversations on the working life of immigration policy implementation in Europe. Racialized dynamics, ideological polarization and the securitization of migration generate emotions and affective atmospheres that expose the human and moral cost of the troubled workplace of immigration enforcement. We hope too that they can show us some of the cracks in the façade of the all-seeing, rational state.

Ioana Vrăbiescu is Assistant Professor in Organization Sciences at the Vrije University Amsterdam. She currently works on the role of ethical emotions in migration control apparatus and on the intersection of climate change and human and non-human forced mobility. She is the co-editor of the Special Issue of Identities, ‘Affective Control: The Emotional Life of (En)forcing Mobility Control in Europe’.

Bridget Anderson is the Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She is the co-editor of the Special Issue of Identities, ‘Affective Control: The Emotional Life of (En)forcing Mobility Control in Europe’.

Instead of separating thousands more families, rethink UK family migration policies

Posted on by Emily

By Katharine Charsley and Helena Wray.

Last week, new immigration rules were laid before parliament that will force thousands of British citizens and settled residents to live apart from their partner and even their children. This is because the Minimum Income Requirement (MIR) to bring a non-British partner to the UK is going to rise to £29,000 in April, and to £38,700 in early 2025 (the staggering of the increase was announced only after a public outcry).

The MIR has been a source of anguish since it was introduced in 2012, replacing a simpler test of ‘adequate maintenance’. As it has not risen from the original £18,600, it is easy to see why the government would now consider an increase. However, the MIR has already caused family separation and hardship, and the increase will make things worse.

The MIR is inflexible, being concerned with only one question: the income of the UK partner on application. Changes to the household income after entry, regardless of the incoming spouse’s potential contribution, are irrelevant. As a result, a British parent who cares for children, who works part-time or is still in education or training may be unable to meet the MIR even if the family’s financial position would be transformed once their partner joins them. In addition, meeting the MIR is not just a matter of having the right income, but of having it for at least six months, often longer, before the application. People in casualised work, the self-employed or those returning from abroad often find this challenging if not impossible. Exceptions designed to meet the government’s human rights obligations exist, but they are often difficult to obtain and can require expensive legal advice and an appeal.

(Image: Nenad Stojkovic on Flickr)

The benefits of the MIR are unclear. The government’s twin rationales have been to ensure families have financial resources for integration, and to ensure new entrants do not impose a burden on the welfare system. But those on family visas are already ineligible for public funds, and the costs of the 5-year partner visa process now exceed £11,000 – leaving some families struggling to meet basic needs. Indeed, by refusing so many partners, the MIR creates enforced single parents, so it only increases financial hardship and welfare reliance.

The rationale for the new figure is also unclear. The government has not consulted the Migration Advisory Committee (as it did in 2012), and the new MIR is not tied to the full-time National Living Wage (less than £24,000). The only explanation given is that the government wants to link the MIR to the minimum salary for skilled migrant workers. Leaving aside that even the skilled worker minimum has exceptions, this seems arbitrary.  Family migration policy concerns the minimum conditions for allowing citizens and residents to enjoy family life with a non-UK partner. Why should this depend on meeting a criterion set for an entirely different category: skilled migrants coming to the UK for work?

The MIR is discriminatory. The old minimum of £18,600 cannot be met by 20-25% of the UK’s working population, and has always particularly impacted those tending to earn less: women, young people, some ethnic minorities and those outside London and Southeast England. The increase exacerbates this injustice: 40-60% of the working population do not earn £29,000, and the vast majority will be excluded by the higher threshold of £38,700. The government estimates that between 10,000 and 30,000 people will be affected each year, but it could be much higher as UK-EU couples outside the settlement scheme now also come under the immigration rules.

The manner of the introduction of these changes has been cruel. British spouses make major life changes to meet the visa requirements: changing jobs, making difficult choices between caring obligations and working longer hours, or moving back to the UK alone to earn enough to be joined by their family. They make these changes months in advance, enduring prolonged family separation to find work, earn the MIR over six months and then wait for their application to be processed. Increasing the MIR in April, with less than six months’ notice, leaves those who had been assiduously working towards the visa requirements – often at great cost to their family lives – with their plans destroyed.

The UK’s family migration policies are among the most restrictive in the world – a House of Lords Committee found they ‘fail both families and society’. There are many reasons why families need to live together in the UK – which is after all the home of at least one partner – and there is a pile of evidence as to the deep unhappiness, financial stress and loneliness caused by the system, including to children. This will sadly increase once the new MIR applies.

Living in your home with your partner should not be a privilege only for the wealthy. It is time for a total rethink. We have written to the main opposition parties asking them to include a commitment to review the family migration rules in their election manifestos.  

Helena Wray is Professor of Migration Law at the University of Exeter where her research focuses on the regulation of families through immigration law. Her latest monograph, published by Hart in 2023, is Article 8 ECHR, Family Reunification and the UK’s Supreme Court: Family Matters? She is currently working on the ESRC funded Brexit Couples project looking at the impact of the immigration rules on UK-EU couples after Brexit.

Katharine Charsley is Professor of Migration 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.

To learn about the impact of the new Minimum Income Requirement on universities, read Eda Yazici’s recent MMB blogpost, ‘Debordering Higher Education’. And for a previous study on the impact of the UK immigration system on families see Katharine’s blogpost from 2020, ‘Kept apart – couples and families separated by the UK immigration system’.

Obstacles and aspirations: stories from young refugees in the UK education system

Posted on by Emily

By Jáfia Naftali Câmara.

‘Refugee Stories: Education: Obstacles and Aspirations‘ draws on findings from my doctoral research project on young refugees’ educational experiences in the UK. The study investigated how young refugee people and their families have encountered the education system while considering the implications of living as refugees in England. Young refugee people’s right to education is enshrined in British law; however, the UK has no specific educational policy for them.

Invisibilizing practices add to the silence around their experiences and needs. ‘Refugee Stories’ tells young refugees’ and families’ stories to amplify their voices and shine a light on the social and material conditions they experience.

How ‘Refugee Stories’ was born

Cover of ‘Refugee Stories’ (illustration by ARC Studios in collaboration with participants and Jáfia Naftali Câmara)

I volunteered as an English as an Additional Language (EAL) tutor to young refugees at a secondary school in the South of England. I also volunteered at local organizations advocating for refugee people and fundraising to facilitate their access to phones and internet at home. Through volunteering, I built connections with three families who expressed interest in participating in my research. While most research tends to be school-based, I focused on working directly with families to understand how they encountered England’s education system. Particularly, I was interested in how policy meets lived experience. The mothers often asked me to help their children with their homework or to help them access technology to continue remote schooling. I maintained contact with families and provided support when they needed it throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns implemented in England.  

As part of my methodology, I enacted an ethics of care by trying to mitigate some of the challenges they endured. Refugee families, including asylum seekers, may have limited access to resources and technology at home. Therefore, remote schooling was very challenging for them because they did not have reliable access to computers, phones and internet, and they also struggled to pay for data for their cell phones. As part of my research and commitment to support them, I tried to highlight their hardships and amplify their voices, as in this article, I co-wrote with Maria, a mother seeking asylum who participated in the study.   

Creating ‘Refugee Stories’ with families to highlight their experiences and perspectives was essential to my methodology and ethics of care. My approach to critical ethnography was to go beyond simply observing and interviewing participants but also to try and address some of the hardships that families experienced. In addition to providing schoolwork and English language support, I facilitated one family’s access to a laptop and a phone, books and art supplies for all the young people, data for their phones and access to extra-curricular activities such as football lessons. I dedicated time weekly to helping one family use their new laptop and new software needed for their schooling, including MS Teams, sending emails, creating Word and PowerPoint files and attaching files to email messages. When their schooling shifted online, young people were expected to know how to do those tasks, but some had never done it before.  

Page from ‘Refugee Stories’ (illustrations by ARC Studio in collaboration with participants and Jáfia Naftali Câmara)

As a migrant from a working-class family from the so-called ‘global south’, I understood some of the challenges that the families lived through. We developed a connection of mutual care. The mothers often cooked meals and invited me to have lunch or dinner with them. One mother baked a cake for my birthday, and their children wrote me Christmas cards and ‘thank you’ notes. ‘Refugee Stories’ was part of my methodological approach to amplify young people’s and their families’ perspectives and experiences and communicate research findings beyond academia. It was an art-science collaboration to make research findings more accessible. For example, the young people chose their pseudonyms, the appearance of their characters and what they wanted to highlight to readers. ‘Refugee Stories’ was funded by the University of Bristol’s Temple Quarter Engagement Fund, allowing me to involve families in creating the zine and pay them an honorarium for their time. 

Using ‘Refugee Stories’ for teaching and learning  

I am interested in learning how educators and students may find the zine useful for their practices. I point to a few goals I have for how this zine may support learning in classrooms:  

I adopt anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives. The zine prompts us to consider how education can acknowledge the UK, EU and US colonial histories and imperialism that permeates today, including the militarization of borders and the criminalization of migration. Colonial histories and imperial violence need to be acknowledged in education systems. 

The zine could lead to discussions on what causes people to leave their homes, migration histories, how refugees are created, and the challenges they experience trying to find safety. For example, Muhammad, a young Iraqi man portrayed in the zine, often talked about the history of Iraq and the US invasion of his country. Muhammad also highlighted that his history classes mainly studied Europe and World War II. While interesting, he wanted more history about the world, including Mesopotamia. Muhammad’s reflections indicate the need to challenge the Eurocentric nature of curricula in Western countries – what knowledge(s) and histories are erased? Whose voices are silenced?   

The zine can provide resources that connect to students’ realities. I learned from my research that curriculum content is often disconnected from young people’s realities. A young man from Eritrea in secondary school discussed that he had to annotate Shakespeare’s poems while learning to write for the first time in his third language, English. His teacher was aware that he struggled but was not aware why he faced difficulties to follow her instructions. She had no idea about his previous experiences, including that he had never been taught how to write. Resources like this one can offer mirrors of students’ own experiences, while offering windows for other students into refugee students’ lives.  

The zine can support educators in understanding the knowledge refugee students bring to the classroom. Schools may view refugee learners through a deficit-based lens and focus on what they ‘lack’: insufficient English language proficiency, no ‘formal education’, limited schooling or viewing learners through a lens of ‘trauma’. Young refugee learners bring essential knowledge(s) and different ways of knowing, being and doing. They may still be learning English but often speak or understand various languages. As demonstrated in ‘Refugee Stories’, young people are resourceful and active agents in creating their networks, helping their parents learn the language and their new country’s systems, and studying independently. England is very institutionally monolingual. Talking to the young people who participated in the study, I learned that some educators might have deficit-based views of families who speak their first language at home rather than English, thinking that the young people may struggle to learn English because they speak other languages at home. In this study, some young people were influenced by that and often stopped using some of their languages to prioritize speaking in English more often. ‘Refugee Stories’ could be used to discuss various themes such as language and multilingualism, migration and colonialism. 

I welcome your thoughts on these issues and how you may use ‘Refugee Stories’ for teaching and learning. 

READ THE COMIC HERE

Jáfia Naftali Câmara is a Brazilian scholar and Research Fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She received her PhD from the University of Bristol with a thesis on ‘Refugee Youth and Education: Aspirations and Obstacles in England’. She is currently undertaking a study on education in emergencies focusing on Brazil and other Latin American countries. 

This blogpost was originally published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education REACH programme (Research, education and action for refugees around the world) under the title ‘Refugee Stories: Education: Obstacles and Aspirations.’

Debordering Higher Education

Posted on by Emily

By Edanur Yazici.

On 4th December 2023, the Home Secretary announced a series of policy changes with the aim of reducing net migration. Among the changes announced was an increase in the general salary threshold for the Skilled Worker Visa from £26,200 to £38,700 a year and an increase in the salary requirement for settled people and British citizens applying to bring their partners to the UK from £18,600 to £38,700. The new threshold, which is higher than the median full-time salary of £35,000, comes at a time of persistent wage stagnation and high inflation.

Salaries in Higher Education (HE) have fallen by 20% in real terms since 2009. For those at the beginning of their academic careers, starting salaries are typically around £37,000 and are often on precarious, short-term contracts. This means that from April – when the new policy is due to come into force – it may not be possible for migrant academic teaching and research staff to begin their careers in the UK. This may make even the unsure footing of a year-long contract a distant possibility.

(Image by Redd F on Unsplash)

Under the current visa regime, applicants for a Skilled Worker Visa must be paid the higher of the going-rate for their occupation code and the £26,200 salary threshold. For example, the current going-rates for a historian and physicist are £25,600 and £32,600 respectively. For PhD graduates, postdoctoral researchers and under 26s, there are discounts of up to 30% in place on the salary threshold or the going-rate (depending on which applies). Eight weeks since the new threshold was announced, however, there is still no clarity on whether these discounts will remain in place from April. It is possible that in-line with the removal of discounts for shortage occupations, discounts for postdoctoral positions will also come to an end. If the 30% discount continues to apply, future postdoctoral researchers and teaching associates will continue to be classed as Skilled Workers. If it does not, early career academics will either be unable to begin their careers in the UK, or, if they completed their PhD in the UK, will have to apply for other, often less secure visa routes, such as the Graduate Visa, which does not have a path to settlement and is also under review.

Whether exceptions are put in place remains to be seen, but what the proposed changes do reveal is the impacts of pernicious and increasingly restrictive immigration policy on Higher Education. It also shows how immigration policy intersects with low pay in the sector. This has implications for how academic workers fight to improve their pay and conditions; the experiences of migrant workers in HE generally; and the experiences of students. The changes above signal the worrying potential of a future of a sector that is increasingly closed to migrant workers and, if wage growth remains stagnant, where academic teaching and research is progressively deskilled and undervalued.

Funding HE

Linked to the changes in the Skilled Worker Visa route are changes that came into force for the Student Visa route in January this year. Also driven by a desire to reduce net migration, it is no longer possible for postgraduate taught students to bring dependents with them to the UK. It is now only possible for Student Visa holders to be accompanied by their dependents if they are on a postgraduate research course. Not only is this racialised – with the highest number of dependent study visas issued to Nigerian and Indian citizens – but also demonstrates the conflict between the government’s determination to reduce net migration at all costs while depending on international students to prop up the unsustainable funding model in HE.

In England, HE is funded in two main ways: through student fees and direct funding. Direct funding separates teaching and research. The 2021-2022 level of funding for teaching in HE was 78% less than it was in 2010 in real terms. Student fees are expected to fund the majority of HE teaching. For so-called ‘home students’, fees were raised to a maximum of £9,250 in 2012. For international students, fees for undergraduate courses are on average £22,000 a year. There is consequently both an incentive to recruit international students – many of whom face racism and inadequate support from their institutions – and a reliance on international students for funding. At present, international student fees make up 21% of British Universities’ total income. This means that if international student numbers were to fall in line with the government’s fixation on net migration, there would be severe consequences for the financial sustainability of HE institutions. Unless the funding model were to change, this would also likely exacerbate wage stagnation and job insecurity in the sector.

The conflicting policy objectives of cutting funding and reducing net migration is indicative of the follies of dogged ideological commitment to nationalism and a small state. The impact of these conflicting policy objectives is also evident in other sectors –  most particularly in health and social care. For academic workers, challenging unjust immigration policy goes hand in hand with improving funding, pay and conditions. This also involves confronting complicity in upholding the hostile environment in the sector.

The hostile environment in HE

The hostile environment suite of policies extends borders into many aspects of everyday life and affects everyone. It determines how people apply for jobs, open bank accounts and rent homes among many other things. The hostile environment increasingly regulates universities. This includes attendance monitoring of students, which puts international students at risk of losing their visas if they miss a certain number of classes; right-to-work checks for all workers including for one-off events; and reporting staff absence among visa holders to the Home Office. The financial dependence on international student fees also means that over-compliance is widespread in the sector because institutions fear losing their licence to sponsor international students. For migrant staff and students, the hostile environment creates a culture of fear that can dissuade people from advocating for change.

For academic workers, particularly those of us who are migration researchers, debordering our institutions is as much about challenging injustice as it is about securing the future of teaching and research. This raises the question of how the deeply interconnected problems of the hostile environment, unsustainable funding models and deteriorating pay and conditions are confronted. It also highlights the importance of not viewing migration as a policy arena in isolation, making it clear that every change to the visa regime affects us all.

Eda Yazici is a Research Associate on the PRIME Project at the University of Bristol. PRIME is an international project that analyses how institutions shape the conditions of migrant labour across Europe. Prior to joining the University of Bristol, she was a Research Fellow on the Open City Project at the University of Warwick, which looked at issues of race, migration and mobility in London. Eda’s PhD research focused on race, place and belonging in the British asylum system.