Who is in control? Re-thinking impacts of immigration

Speaker: Professor Bridget Anderson (University of Oxford)
Chair: Sue Conlan (Irish Refugee Council)
Admission: Free
Accreditation: This event is accredited with 1 CPD hour with the SRA and BSB
Series: Current Legal Problems 2014-15

There has been and continues to be considerable academic and public debate on the impact of immigration, yet there has been little on the impact of immigration controls. When this is discussed it is solely with reference to migrants/non-citizens. In this paper I will start to open up this discussion. I will first consider how immigration control and enforcement affect citizens’ engagement with labour markets, and family relations. I will move on to examine requirements on citizens to enforce controls and the increasing criminalization of immigration breaches for citizens as well as for migrants. I will then examine how controls re-regulate labour, and welfare states with a particular focus on EU migrants in the UK. I will end by suggesting that there is a need to rethink not just the impacts of migration, but an approach that takes migrants and marginalised citizens as competitors for privileges of membership.

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About the speaker

Bridget Anderson is Professor of Migration and Citizenship and Deputy Director  at COMPAS, primarily working on projects in the Citizenship and Belonging, Labour Markets and Welfare clusters.

She has a DPhil in Sociology and previous training in Philosophy and Modern Languages. She is the author of  ‘Us and Them: the Dangerous Politics of Immigration Controls’ (OUP, 2013) and ‘Doing the dirty work? The global politics of domestic labour’. She co-edited  ‘Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration and Public Policy with Martin Ruhs (2010) and ‘The Social, Political and Historical Contours of Deportation’ with Matthew Gibney and Emanuela Paoletti (2013).
Bridget is particularly interested in citizenship, nationalism, immigration enforcement (including ‘trafficking’), and low waged labour, migration and the state. She has worked closely with migrants’ organisations, trades unions and legal practitioners at local, national and international level.

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems annual lecture series was established over sixty years ago. The lectures are public, delivered on a weekly basis and chaired by members of the judiciary.

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) annual volume is published on behalf of UCL Laws by Oxford University Press, and features scholarly articles that offer a critical analysis of important current legal issues. It covers all areas of legal scholarship and features a wide range of methodological approaches to law. With its emphasis on contemporary developments, CLP is a major point of reference for legal scholarship.
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