Category: Europe

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’.

Who’s in the fast lane? Will new border tech deliver seamless travel for all?

Posted on by Emily

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

By Travis Van Isacker.

For the past year I have been attending border industry conferences to understand the future claims they are making as part of my research on digitised borders for the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures. Listening to their keynotes and speaking with industry professionals I have learned that the border crossing of the future is imagined as a ‘seamless’ one, devoid of gates, booths, even border officers. In their place will be ‘biometric corridors’ lined with cameras observing people as they move. Captured images will be fed back to computer systems matching facial biometrics ‘on the fly’ with those held in a database of expected arrivals. Passports will not be needed as travellers will digitally share all necessary information—biographical details, images of faces and fingerprints, travel permissions—with states and carriers before a trip. There will be no need to stop and question people at the border as they will have been vetted and pre-authorised before leaving their homes. Any people considered ‘risky’ will not even be able to book tickets. The goal: ‘good’ travellers won’t feel the cold gaze of the border’s scrutiny, nor be slowed down.

‘PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE: Seamless Traveller Journey’. World Travel & Tourism Council, April 2019 (image: original photograph cropped, from the World Travel & Tourism Council Flickr account)

This seamless vision is mostly shared by governments who do not want to give visitors a bad first impression and consider that most travellers do not pose any risk. However, there are still differing levels of enthusiasm for the seamless border depending upon, for example, a state’s economic dependence on tourism, or its concern about a terrorist attack. Curaçao recently launched its Express Pass to allow travellers to provide passport information and a selfie from home to then (hopefully) be quickly and automatically verified at the border. By contrast, the United States still does not use automated ePassport gates despite already biometrically verifying all travellers upon entry and exit.

‘Faster meets more secure’. Biometric Facial Comparison advertisement, Miami International Airport, June 2024 (image: author’s photograph)

There has long been a trade-off between speed and security at the border. Screening, searching and questioning people all take time, and that means disgruntled passengers, travel delays, economic loss and press headlines that can make a country less appealing for travel and investment. New digital border technologies promise to resolve this tension. Automated identification through biometrics claims to work with greater speed, accuracy and consistency than humans, allowing for increased security and expedited checks. Advanced data analytics makes a similar claim: knowing more about people earlier, and ‘risking’ them algorithmically, allows digital borders to automatically deflect those it considers undesirable at an earlier stage. By combining these systems, the border industry promises to reduce to seconds the time it takes average business travellers to clear immigration.

The seamless vision of the future border is sold to us all, but is it actually for everyone? A facial recognition system I observed for passengers to bypass showing their passports to a border officer when disembarking cruise ships in Miami failed to deliver for families with small children and people who did not have a passport. There were no suitable images of their faces in the government’s database to match against. Later, I explained to border experts my difficulties in getting airlines to allow me to board flights to the UK with my European identity card. I was told by the vice-president of a facial biometrics company that it sounded as if I was ‘trying to make a point’. Why didn’t I just always carry my passport to avail myself of the eGates? For him it wasn’t only illogical that I wasn’t always able to adopt the most ‘seamless’ path, it was suspicious.

Technologies claiming to offer a seamless border crossing for everyone in fact create a two-tiered system. True, some experience an accelerated border crossing, but those who, for whatever reason, cannot satisfy the tech’s requirements are held up, if allowed to cross at all. The fact that border professionals are all in the first group means they usually don’t experience their systems not working for them.

Edited photograph of the arrivals hall of the Miami Cruise Terminal, June 2024. To the left are exit lanes with facial recognition tablets. To the right is the long queue of people waiting to see an officer (image: author’s photograph)

At industry events there is limited recognition of the fact seamlessness is not necessarily what it claims to be. A senior manager for one of the world’s largest systems integrators (an IT and management consultancy contracted by states to implement border tech) admitted that, actually, a ‘frictionless’ border was not the end goal. Instead, the future border would be one that applies ‘variable friction’, easily speeding up or slowing down movement depending on who or what is crossing it.

Despite the hype around tech-enabled seamless crossings there is nothing to guarantee that the widespread adoption of new digital border tech will necessarily take us towards that future. Just recently, the UK Home Office took Jordan off its list of countries allowed to use its new Electronic Travel Authorisation (which uses an app to biometrically enrol people’s faces at home) due to an increase in the number of Jordanian nationals travelling to the UK to claim asylum, and for purposes other than what is permitted under visitor rules. Perhaps the clearest example is the European Union’s new Entry/Exit System (EES), which will require third country nationals to provide face and fingerprint biometrics against which to verify their entering and leaving the Schengen-bloc. This system promises to eventually allow for faster automated crossings but is primarily intended to identify overstayers and strengthen border checks, especially against criminal records databases which are centred on fingerprints. Despite state-of-the-art biometric enrolment kiosks and tablets, there have been nightmarish predictions for the disruption caused when suddenly everyone entering or leaving the EU has to stop to provide their biometrics at the border, especially at the Port of Dover. The fact that the implementation of EES has been delayed for years and was recently postponed again, without a new timeline for implementation, proves just how contingent the future border is.

Sign announcing works in the Port of Dover for Entry/Exit System’s enrolment zone, August 2024 (image: author’s photograph)

State initiatives to increase friction at the border often frustrate those working to develop and sell new border technologies. Some I spoke with believe quite wholeheartedly that everyone will soon be able to cross borders without even realising it, in large part thanks to their inventions. They like to think our modern, globalised world has moved on from the need for severe mobility restrictions and heavy-handed border controls and that we would all be more prosperous if everyone could travel more easily. Unfortunately, the opposite appears to be true. With anti-immigration rhetoric increasing in the world’s richer countries, the EU is currently facing the collapse of restriction-free travel within the Schengen area (itself enabled by immense databases of people considered risky and/or foreign built in the early 2000s). However, luckily for the borders’ builders, their products—originally developed for applications in defence, security and policing, and designed to better identify and surveil individuals—are just as suited to a future in which states are walled off from one another, and movement between them is heavily monitored and restricted. If and when this future vision becomes promoted instead of seamlessness largely depends upon the political moment and intended audience.

Travis Van Isacker is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol working in the Moving Domain of the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures. His research focuses on the transformation of border infrastructures through the application of new digital technologies. Travis has written previously for the MMB blog on ‘Environmental racism in the borderland: the case of Calais‘.

Find out more about the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures here.

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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).

Bodies, things, capital – intersections in our research themes

Posted on by Emily

By Juan Zhang.

As co-ordinator of the MMB Research Challenge ‘Bodies, Things, Capital’ I have been reading our recent blogs under this theme and am struck by the range and depth of the projects. They cross many contexts, disciplines and research fields, and engage with critical debates around (in)justice, vulnerability, borders and the politics of (im)mobility. From Jo Crow’s personal reflections on the broader implications of economic and social immobility in Argentina through a historical lens to Julia Morris’ poetic account on the damaging politics of ‘value extraction’ through offshore asylum processing in the Republic of Nauru; from Rebecca Yeo’s critiques on the disabling impact of the UK’s immigration control measures to Şebnem Eroğlu’s observation of the long-lasting generational poverty among Turkish migrants in Europe, these blogs provoke thoughtful discussions and raise fundamental questions about the politics of movements through bodies, things and capital. These accounts challenge us to think more critically about the multiple intersections of personal experiences, structural inequalities, infrastructural barriers, historical legacies, and geopolitical shifts on both local and global scales. These reflections and scholarly engagements are central to our research at Migration Mobilities Bristol.

(Image: Eddie Aguirre, UnSplash)

Bodies

Bodies are intimate sites of encounter – with borders, checkpoints, institutions, infrastructures, policies, biases and discriminatory politics. It is pertinent to recognise the ways in which migrant bodies are intersectionally positioned within and across systems, and this positioning is influenced by various factors including gender, class and race, as well as immigration status (legal or illegal), moral claims (deserving or underserving), and capacities (shaped by disability or other forms of vulnerability). The blogs also prompt us to consider the colonial and contemporary contexts that influence how bodies are perceived and treated.

Julia Morris’ ethnographic work on asylum and extraction, for example, compares the extractive logic in both Nauru’s mineral and asylum processing industries. The colonial legacy of phosphate mining in this island nation finds an uncanny reiteration of a ‘hyper-extractive assemblage’ in modern-day outsourced asylum processing centres, lending particular ‘political, economic and moral values to the global asylum industry’. In this context, the bodies of asylum-seekers become a kind of resource, exploited and commodified in a way not that different from processing phosphate. At the same time, Nauruans themselves are depicted by global media campaigns and refugee activists as ‘savages’ of cruelty, a racialised and stigmatised image rooted in colonial-era stereotypes.

In other blogs under my Research Challenge theme, critical discussions also extend to how migrant bodies are judged based on an (often) arbitrary assessment of ability and the perceived deservability, which influence decisions on vital matters such as access to social services and support, and family reunification in the UK. When bodies encounter policies and perceptions in these intertwined realms, it provides an impetus for urgent scholarly interventions in popular politics, especially at a moment when ‘one in five Britons say that immigration is one of the top issues facing the country’, and the UK’s Rwanda plan continues to stir controversy and deepen socio-political divisions.    

Things

Things offer another analytical engagement with materialities, spatialities and temporalities in migration, through which social relations and identities are shaped and evolved. Things can be objects (for example, passports, visas, maps and tickets) and systems (for example, policies, rules, processing facilities, services), as well as larger transnational bodies (for example, activist groups and NGOs) and infrastructures (for example, media, national services, and cross-national agreements). Things can be physical and metaphorical, and they highlight how movements intersect with broader contexts of trade, exchange and securitisation. Borders are a good example of things – they can be barriers or productive pathways, depending on who (and what) is crossing them. Offshore processing centres in Nauru become de facto maritime borders for Australia, where immigration control is outsourced and externalised. The Jungle in Calais demonstrates another case in point of externalised bordering, where no safe passage is provided by design, in order to deter migrant crossing into the UK. Things such as tents, makeshift dwellings, and temporary shelters are targeted by the French border police to enforce a ‘no fixation’ rule, preventing people on the move from establishing a sense of stable connection to the city and forcing them to move on or go into hiding.

Apart from borders, urban transport infrastructure offers another interesting take on things, where domestic workers in Latin America, predominantly women, struggle with long commuting hours and concerns for discrimination and crime. While public transport allows workers to travel to their employers’ homes, it is woefully inadequate in terms of providing efficient and reliable services or a safe space for female workers to be comfortable with their daily commute. Essential infrastructures such as public transport are things inherently gendered and classed, as they mediate movements and mobilities in highly embodied and differentiated ways.

Capital      

Capital emerges as another compelling common thread that brings together reflections on value, differentiation and the infrastructuralisation of ‘extractive politics’ through the control and channelling of local and global flows of humans, resources, knowledge and policy frameworks. It is curious to see how the example of offshore asylum processing in Nauru gains instant ‘political capital’ in the UK, when top decision makers use it as a success model to justify sending asylum seekers to Rwanda as a winning solution. The income-tested immigration rule in the UK also effectively monetises the right to family reunification, turning a universal right into a kind of money game, where the right to bring family to the UK comes with a hefty price tag of £29,000, an income the majority of the working population do not earn. This approach reflects a transactional view on migration, where people are either regarded as assets or liabilities to the capital system, rather than human beings with intrinsic social and familial rights. Even for those who have successfully migrated, like the Turkish migrants in Europe described by Şebnem Eroğlu, structural inequalities and systemic racism create barriers for them to transfer social and cultural capital in meaningful ways, thereby limiting their opportunities to capitalise on these resources for a better life. These cases demonstrate how migration policies and individual lives are impacted by a profound ‘capital logic’, where extractive politics are normalised to maximise accumulation and sideline fundamental ethical considerations.

Multimodal methodologies

In addition to tracing conceptual connections around bodies, things and capital in these blogs, I have also noted the development of multimodal methodologies, particularly creative and art-based methods focusing on participatory designs and artistic interventions. These approaches have effectively bridged the gap between academic research, public engagement and activism. Other innovative methods, including data visualisation and participant mapping techniques, open up possibilities for experimenting with data collection and analysis. Sylvanna Falcon and her team, for example, use data visualisation techniques to map violence against migrants in Mexico while cautioning against the dehumanisation of migrants who disappear into ‘datasets’. Robledo and Randall’s Invisible Commutes project utilises short audio segments to document experiences of daily commutes by domestic workers, as well as their perspectives on critical mobility infrastructure in the city. The incorporation of migrant voices lends a significant feminist perspective to issues of transport justice.

This Research Challenge has brought diverse researchers and their perspectives and methods together, a kind of assembling of bodies, things and capital in its own right. There is clear potential for developing collaborations and innovating strategies of research practice and intervention in the future, as this Research Challenge brings forward MMB’s commitment to informing academic and public dialogues on migration and mobilities across disciplines and borders.

Juan Zhang is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on transnational cultural politics in and out of China, and Chinese mobilities across different cultural and social spheres. She is the Co-ordinator of the MMB Research Challenge ‘Bodies, Things, Capital.’

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’.

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.’

Migration and mobilities research: making connections for social justice

Posted on by Emily

By Bridget Anderson.

Happy New Year all. Let’s hope that 2024 brings more peace and justice than 2023. We need it. It is difficult to be hopeful in the face of the ongoing Gaza horror, more needless (and nameless) deaths in the Mediterranean and Channel, the fall out from the Illegal Migration Act, and the anticipated Rwanda legislation. All these speak to the concerns of many MMB members. Not only migration and asylum policy, but state violence, exclusion, citizenship, nationalism, mobility and immobility, leaving and staying put and, related to all of these, the protean nature of racism.

Many of us believe that it is our academic responsibility to speak truth to power and leverage our analysis to affect transformation. But in reality the transformation has been travelling in the opposite direction to the one demanded by evidence and analysis. Over the past 20 years there has been a proliferation of migration research, Masters’ courses, conferences, journals, centres and networks, particularly in the rich world. Our understanding of human movement and the tools we use to analyse it have undoubtedly improved hugely. So why is it that law and policy are so determinedly taking us in the opposite direction, and we seem to be marching away, not only from justice, but from simple common sense? Anyone who is interested in this kind of question would do well to read Christina Boswell’s work. In her book The Political Uses of Expert Knowledge: Immigration Policy and Social Research (Cambridge 2009) she explains that the usual explanations for the disconnection between policy and research (political pressure; institutional incapacity/lack of resources on the part of government and other research users; abstraction/irrelevance on the part of research producers) are correct but insufficient. She argues that research and expertise also lend credibility, meaning that they serve two important functions for government policymakers. The first is a legitimizing function, creating confidence that decisions are well founded. The second is a substantiating function, supporting already existing policy choices and preferences.

Importantly, the legitimizing and substantiating functions of research are powerful but are not helpful if we seek a significant change in policy direction. To be transformative, scholarly research requires partnership with non-academic actors and to contribute to pressures for change these actors are exerting on state policymakers. MMB members are working with others to rise to this challenge. We have many examples, but just to pick two. Katharine Charsley and Helena Wray’s research UK-EU couples after Brexit works with key campaigning and support organisations to intervene in policy debates on the issues in the family migration regime. Ann Singleton, MMB Policy Strategic Lead, has been working with ACH to use expertise from refugees’ lived and learned experience to develop new small businesses, and models for support that facilitate integration. MMB also co-organises seminars with ACH, bringing together practitioners, policymakers and academics. The most recent seminar took education as its theme, and participants included Rob Sharples from the School of Education discussing his research on post-16 education and the Bristol Plan for Migrant Learners. Do let us know if you want support finding community partners, developing funding ideas with them or featuring collaborations on the MMB website.

Importantly, research does not have to have an immediate impact to make a difference. MMB’s tagline is ‘new thinking on people and movement’ and this also requires ‘slow science’. Longer term, research can build different understandings of migration – for example, through connecting it with movement of the more-than-human, including goods, data, animals and plants; through putting it into a richer historical context that sees how movement shapes our worlds; and through analysing and making accessible the power of representation. All of this requires multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches whose ‘pathways to impact’ are not necessarily easily traceable, but which help us to think differently and hone tools for the future. We are very pleased that Bristol University Press will be publishing a volume with us that advances this kind of thinking and are planning to develop this work in the coming years.

Thinking differently also needs international partnerships, and this is particularly true for thinking differently about movement. MMB research often is not only shaped by international borders but stretches across them. We have already learned much from the initial visit by Victoria Hattam from the New School for Social Research who joined us as a Visiting Leverhulme Professor for two months in 2023. Her second, longer visit will start in February 2024. Do come to the MMB welcome drinks on 6th February to learn more about our plans with her, which include public lectures, a workshop on visual representation, seminars on race and mobility, political economy and cross-border production, and a PGR discussion group.

Developing and nurturing these partnerships is a priority for MMB in the next two years. We are delighted that Jo Crow, Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, has joined us as Associate Director (Research Development) to take the lead in developing this aspect of MMB’s work. We are particularly interested to learn about the research agendas of potential partnerships to facilitate long-term collaboration, funded and unfunded, so do let us know if you have any ideas. We are keen to support project and network development, big or small. Partnerships, within and outside the university, local, national and international, lend new perspectives, energy and creativity. Let’s harness that to build a more just world in 2024.

Bridget Anderson is 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.

Borderscapes: policing within

Posted on by Emily

Borderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover.

By Victoria Hattam.

Governments around the globe have been building border walls for decades: Calais is no exception. At least since the Touquet Treaty, the UK government has helped fund the securitization of the Port of Calais through a variety of construction projects. Cement walls, white-mesh-razor-wire fencing, and landscaping are being used to restrict undocumented migrants from crossing from Calais to Dover. Bordering is an expensive business: the House of Commons Research Briefing puts the UK financial commitment to France between 2014 and the 2022/23 financial year at slightly more than GBP 232 million (Gower, 2023). And even this figure, Gower notes, underestimates the total cost as supplemental payments can be found in most years. In 2018, for example, the supplemental payment for Calais bordering was an additional GBP 45.5 million in addition the initial allocation.

Calais white-mesh-razor-wire wall (image: Victoria Hattam, July 2023)

I was fortunate to be able to join an MMB trip to Calais last summer and found even my short trip revealing. I began to see the slippage from walls to landscaping. Intense as border walls, razor wire, and surveillance technologies are, it is the landscape design that has stuck with me. Long after one leaves the border proper, bordering continues. 

Bouldering mobility

Hundreds of large boulders have been placed throughout Calais, packed close together, filling a variety of once open spaces. Small parks, spaces underneath bridges, and even small median strips alongside roadways and city intersections now are occupied by rocks rather than people. The materials of choice are decorative boulders: large rocks, generally 3-5 feet in diameter, irregularly shaped, placed in irregular patterns as if in a natural setting. At times, the boulders are accompanied by an array of ornamental grasses: tall, textured, different shades of pale yellow, browns and greens – a touch of Russian Sage for brighter color. The grasses sway in the breeze contrasting with the immovable boulders. It’s a look. Hardscaping, as landscape designers often refer to it, can be found throughout the city.

Boulders filling public space in Calais
(images: Victoria Hattam, July 2023)

Fixation points, the French government argues, are being unfixed by making it impossible for people on the move to congregate (Pascual et al., 2023: Van Isacker, 2020). One can sit on the boulders, one might even be able to lie down between them, but they are placed tightly together making congregation and encampment difficult. The so called ‘Jungle’ of Calais is not to be repeated. Landscape design is a new frontier of border policing.

After a day of walking the city, it is difficult to distinguish public beautification projects from border policing. Ponds, parks, flowerbeds all make the city greener, but these very same elements are designed to make Calais less hospitable to the undocumented by removing vegetive cover. 

Boulders and walls control movement differently. The recently constructed white-mesh-razor-wire fences are designed to stop undocumented migrants from crossing over to the UK. For walls, movement is the problem. Boulders carry with them a different politics: move along now, do not gather here. For boulder landscaping, it’s the stopping that is threatening. Walls and boulders create a double opposition in which neither moving nor staying in place are permitted. Migrants, as Nandita Sharma (2020) has argued, are those deemed out of place.

Border creep

The turn to landscaping materializes the ways in which border policing is never simply a matter of securing territorial perimeters. Border security bleeds into internal policing (Ngai, 2004). In Calais, and many other cities, a variety of bordering devices can be found within the city limits. Temporary steel fence sections sit on street corners standing at the ready, waiting to be called to action. Heavy metal poles also have been inserted into the middle of the sidewalk diverting and obstructing movement. The poles are not placed alongside footpaths but are inserted right where one might usually walk. Obstruction is everywhere.

The border creeps from territorial edge into the city proper
(images: Victoria Hattam, July 2023)

Aesthetics and politics: what politics do boulders carry?

Living and working in New York City, I am accustomed to highly securitized spaces.  Sidewalks, roads, and buildings are often blocked off, supposedly protected by the deployment of anti-bombing barricades. But New York barricades have a different aesthetic. Rather than natural, irregular, softer boulders, New York City barricades present as manufactured objects: straight lines and crisp edges, often stamped with the New York Police Department initials (NYPD) making clear that this is an official barrier. There is no mistaking NY barricades for landscape features. The barricade of choice is the Jersey Barrier that is materialized both in cement and heavy-duty plastic. Few flowers and grasses are included to soften the look. Security is front and centre.

Jersey Barricades near the United Nations, New York City
(images: Victoria Hattam, October 2023)
Westside Highway, Manhattan, New York City (image: Victoria Hattam, October 2023)

At times, there is a grunge counter aesthetic in New York in which garbage mingles alongside security barriers.

Jersey Barriers were introduced in the 1940s and 50s through Departments of Transportation as devices for minimizing incidental damage during traffic accidents. Over the last 50 years, the barriers have been used in a wide array of policy domains, including deployment by the Department of Homeland Security at the US-Mexico border and by the Department of Defense in Iraq. Traffic management devises have morphed into security objects (Copp, 2018; U.S. Department of Defense, 2006).

The shift from walls to boulders does not diminish hostility towards migrantized people. On the contrary, it extends that hostility inwards. Consider the street alongside Little Island, the newly constructed park that sits just off Manhattan on the Hudson River. Little Island aspires to be a ‘magical place’, but as one enters and exits, there is a sign in big bold letters stipulating that this is an ‘enforcement zone’. Parking and bordering merge. I can no longer easily distinguish one from the other.

Victoria Hattam is Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research, New York. Her current research focuses on US-Mexico border politics and the global political economy. Victoria is currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol, hosted by MMB. During 2023-24 she is giving numerous workshops, seminars and public lectures at Bristol – read more about her events here.

Other blogposts in our series on Calais include ‘Time and (im)mobility in Calais’ borderlands‘ by Juan Zhang, ‘Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais‘ by Bridget Anderson and ‘Notes from a visit to Calais‘, a video blogpost by Nariman Massoumi.

What fosters a sense of belonging? Refugee voices in Germany

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By Emily LeRoux-Rutledge.

My children are new in Germany like those two flowers. I want my children to be allowed to stay in Germany…. We build something up. We are like LEGO, block by block.

‘A new life’ (image by Liam)
‘Building a life in Germany with our family’ (image by Liam)

These photographs and words belong to Liam* — a young man who made his way to Germany in the midst of the so-called European refugee crisis in 2015. They convey his determination to begin anew. Yet voices like Liam’s were scarcely heard during the crisis, subsumed by the voices of those already living in European host societies and their concerns about ‘integration’, which culminated in the 2016 German Integration Act.

In 2017, cognisant of this imbalance, Carmen Lienen and I undertook a photovoice project with refugees and asylum seekers in Germany, who had entered the country since the start of the crisis. We wanted to understand how they felt about the country (in contrast to how the country felt about them) and what would help to foster a sense of belonging. Our results were recently published in the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies.

Much of what we learned aligns with the prevailing literature on immigrant identity, which suggests that newcomers undergo a complex process of identity negotiation as they endeavour to balance their pre-existing identities with those that align with their host societies. Often they do this aware of negative social representations about them, from which they seek to distance themselves. Additionally, they do this in the context of temporal uncertainty brought about by government policies, which require them to wait for approval to remain, to work and to reside permanently.

There was one thing that surprised us, however. Imagine, for a moment, you were to speak with two different groups of people: one made up of refugees with permission to remain in Germany, and the other made up of asylum seekers with no permission to remain. Which group do you think would feel a greater sense of belonging? You might think the former — indeed, previous scholarship has highlighted the importance of secure legal status for integration (which we don’t dispute) — but that’s not what we found.

In our small, qualitative study of the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers in two German towns, we found that those in town N, where the majority did not have permission to remain, felt a much greater sense of belonging than those in town E, where the majority did. 

‘I think… I’ve become a citizen of Germany. I feel good,’ said Sabir, a young man in town N who did not have a residence permit. 

‘Germany has many job opportunities, future… but it’s not our country,’ said Amer, a young man in town E, who did have a residence permit.

How to account for this? The answer, according to our data, appears to be in the reception of the townspeople:

‘I know almost five to six [local] families where I always go to eat, or who help me with things,’ said Zeynep from town N.

‘Yesterday, I sit at train station and a man asks, “Why do you look at me?”’ [imitates an angry voice], said Rayhan from town E.

The inclusive and open way in which research participants were welcomed in town N seemed to provide them with social scaffolding, underpinned by positive social representations of refugees held by the townspeople of N. This appeared to foster a sense of belonging in our research participants, and, consequently, some of them were able to identify with German culture and claim a German identity.

In contrast, participants residing in town E appeared to lack such social scaffolding and such identification. Their narratives indicated a greater sense of alienation from locals and German society. Few participants reported having personal relationships with locals, which they attributed to Germans being ‘generally private’.

This may, on one level, seem obvious — the way in which people are received impacts their sense of belonging. Yet, under Germany’s 2016 Integration Act — which contains punitive measures against refugees and asylum seekers who have not demonstrably tried to ‘integrate’ — residents of Germany have ‘keinen zusätzlichen Erfüllungsaufwand,’ or ‘no further obligations’.

The German government itself has defined integration as ‘feeling part of a community and developing a common understanding of how to live together in society.’ By explicitly stating in the law, however, that German residents have ‘no obligations’ towards achieving integration, is the government not absolving German residents of the very thing that could foster, in newcomers, the sense of belonging it seeks?

The on-going development of the National Action Plan for Integration may be a step in the right direction. The plan considers how Germany’s institutions and citizens can contribute to sustainable integration — but it remains to be seen how far this goes towards fundamentally shifting people’s understandings of what integration is: a reciprocal process undertaken by both receiving society members and newcomers.

*All names are pseudonyms. The origin countries of participants have been withheld to protect their identities.

Emily LeRoux-Rutledge is a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at the University of the West of England. She currently studies the psychology of migration, looking at the identities and representations of refugees, asylum seekers and other diaspora groups. Her most recent paper, ‘Refugee Identity and Integration in Germany during the European “Migration Crisis”: Why Local Community Support Matters, and Why Policy Gets It Wrong,’ was published with Carmen Lienen in the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies.