Last November Roger Zetter, Alice Bloch (but Alice couldn’t make it) and I were invited to present ‘Sans Papiers: The social and economic lives of young undocumented migrants’ (Pluto, 2014) at the Refugee Studies Centre as part of RSC seminar series this term. The podcast of the presentation is available here.
The Office for National Statistics has released its quarterly update on UK net migration. This time the figure, 183,000, is ‘favourable’ for the UK government. This is a drop of about 25% from the previous quarter, mainly the result of the increase emigration of Britons is search of better opportunities abroad (this is what migration is mostly about) and the recent UKBA’s scaremongering campaign against universities and further education colleges (e.g. London Met) that has made the UK a less attractive destination of overseas students. But what exactly ‘favourable’ means here? As I have argued in the past on this blog, the UK government’s decision to use the quantum of net migration as an indicator of its success or failure in relation to the governance of migration is questionable for multiple reasons. I discussed this in a talk on ‘Unwanted’ immigrants and the liberal state I gave last year at the Alumni Weekend at the University of Oxford. My talk starts at 17’52”.
Undocumented migrant children stand at the crossroads of different and conflicting policy agendas. The unresolved tension between commitments to protect children’s rights and to securing borders is embedded in government policies and is shaping the everyday lives in Britain of thousands of children. In this article published in openDemocracy I explore some aspects and consequences of this conflict.
