Hong Kongers, Ukrainians, coloniality of migration and citizenship

What does it mean to be a 'good migrant' in post-Brexit Britain? Michaela Benson will evaluate the scaling up of bespoke humanitarian migration routes within the UK’s post-Brexit migration regime.

Groups of people looking at departure boards at the airport. (Photo: Kirill Gorlov / Adobe Stock)

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Hong Kongers, Ukrainians, coloniality of migration and citizenship

27 Feb 2025, 12:00 – 13:00

G03
55-59 Gordon Square
London
WC1H 0NU
United Kingdom

This seminar explores the UK’s ‘safe and legal routes’ by looking at the Hong Kong BN(O) and Ukraine visa schemes. It centres the voices of beneficiaries of these schemes arriving in the UK to explore what we can learn from their understandings and experiences.

Michaela will investigate how those with such legal statuses position themselves on the migration-asylum continuum and how they navigate understandings and expectations of what it means to be a ‘good migrant’ in post-Brexit Britain.

She will argue that these new visas bear the marks of the coloniality of the migration-asylum regime, and are integral to the workings of racial capitalism in the post-Brexit migration regime.

This event will be particularly useful for sociologists, policymakers, and refugee and migration scholars.

Image

Kirill Gorlov via Adobe Stock.

Professor Michaela Benson

Professor in Public Sociology

University of Lancaster

She is also Chief Executive of the Sociological Review Foundation.

Her research focuses on migration, citizenship and the UK’s borders after Brexit and how this relates to longer histories of racialised immigration controls, supported by funding from the ESRC and British Academy.