Call for Papers : Atelier MIDIB au Congrès SAES de Nancy 2024

Crossing Borders: 
Contemporary Political and Sociological Perspectives
on Migration and Diversity in the UK

CRECIB / MIDIB Panel

SAES 2024 annual conference, 30 May – 1 June 2024, Nancy 

Coordinators: Vincent Latour & Romain Garbaye  

International migration and its impact on the evolution of British society are continuously debated in the UK.  This panel seeks to present current research on all facets of the phenomenon, from the evolutions of migration and border control policies to the impact of migratory flows on social and cultural evolutions. 

From the Blair-Brown era (1997-2010) to the present day, the UK has witnessed a significant evolution in its approach to immigration, with various administrations shaping the landscape of migration and integration. Under New Labour, immigration policies were patterned on the one hand on the necessity to reduce drastically the numbers of asylum seekers and on the other hand, on the needs of the British economy. This latter aspect was a departure from earlier periods and resulted in mass East European immigration from the second half of the Blair years. By 2004, as a result of enlargement to the East, there were 656,395 East Europeans in the UK amongst whom 430, 395 Poles (versus merely 58,000 in 2001). In 2016 when the Brexit referendum was held, an estimated 911,000 Poles lived in the UK.

By contrast, restrictionist and anti-immigrant policies have been on the rise in recent years. Since 2010, successive Conservative or Conservative-led governments have implemented a series of policies in line with Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ (25 May 2012, interview for the Daily Telegraph). This strategy sought to deter illegal immigration: it underpinned the Brexit campaign, characterised by ideological porosity and discursive convergence between the populist radical right and the mainstream right, notably regarding border control (“We have to take back control of our borders and put in place an Australian-style point system”, claimed Nigel Farage during the ITV Leaders’ Debate in April 2015). This approach inadvertently led to the Windrush scandal in 2018, where many long-term British residents and indeed citizens of Caribbean descent were wrongly targeted.

 More recently, Rishi Sunak’s plan to ‘stop the boats’ shocked a great many political commentators and British voters. In addition to Sunak, other political figures like Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Sajid Javid or James Cleverly, who all come at least partly from non-white families, have been at the forefront of promoting such measures. Their role underscores the complexity of the politics of race and immigration in today’s UK, because while these Conservative politicians talk tough on immigration, Britain has continued to evolve into an increasingly multicultural society. The Black Lives Matter movement, originally started in the United States, has spectacularly morphed in the UK into a campaign to critically re-examine the racist dimension of the country’s colonial past, leading for instance to heated debates on the removal of statues in public spaces. In the meantime, notions such as ‘superdiversity’ have become commonly used to describe the deeply cosmopolitan make-up of places like London or Manchester. Transnational diasporic modes of belonging play an ever-increasing role in all aspects of urban life and culture, from businesses, large and small, embedded in transnational practices and networks, to all aspects of cultural and musical creation. 

MIDIB thus calls for papers on the following themes:

• Migration and border control policy
• Asylum policy
• The Conservatives and migration
• The Labour party, migration and diversity
• Ethno-cultural diversity in urban Britain
• Racism and anti-racism 
• Transnational diasporic communities

Paper proposals of roughly 200 words as well as a short biography should be sent to Romain GARBAYE (romain.garbaye@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr) and Vincent LATOUR (vincent.latour@univ-tlse2.fr ) by 11 December 2023. 

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