In this important book, Bridget Anderson, a well-known expert in the field of migration studies, explores the various ways in which British policies and public discourses about immigration construct an understanding of British collective identity that excludes and marginalizes many migrants. She argues that the same understanding of British identity also excludes and marginalizes British citizens who are not migrants but who need income support or in some other way fail to conform to the ideal of good citizenship generated by this identity. The result is a “community of value” with both internal and external borders. Anderson’s goal is both to challenge this construction of the British “us” and to promote solidarity among the various “thems” excluded by that “us.” She does this by bringing to the fore inadequacies, tensions, and contradictions in the treatment of, and the talk about migrants.
The book begins with two historical chapters that link the present to the past, sometimes in unexpected ways. In the first chapter, Anderson shows that control over mobility was originally directed not at foreigners, but at the domestic poor. It is striking how many of the familiar tropes of contemporary discussions of immigration can be found in these early concerns to restrict the free movement of British vagabonds in the name of protecting social cohesion, preserving the capacity of local communities to take care of their own, and so on. The second chapter traces the evolution of British laws and practices with respect to entry to the UK, arguing that racialized categories have shaped who was welcome and who was not, and continue to do so, even when the formal rules make no mention of race and the state celebrates its “racelessness.”
The next three chapters consider the ways in which migrants are selected, sorted and shaped. In chapter three, Anderson reveals contradictions between announced policy goals and the ways in which those goals are measured, and between the rationales for admission and the realities of migrants’ lives. Chapter four discusses the ways in which migrants are rendered vulnerable in the workplace. The fact that they take on poorly paid and difficult jobs is simultaneously used to accuse the British working class of relying on welfare rather than work and to blame immigrants for taking jobs from British workers. Chapter five explores the evolution of British policy on naturalization, which has become more demanding in recent years, in an ostensible attempt to make citizenship more meaningful and important. Again, Anderson exposes the ambiguities and contradictions in the way in which citizenship is conceived both in policies and in the associated public rhetoric.
The next two chapters focus on the ambiguities and contradictions of immigration enforcement. Chapter six looks at the issue of illegality and deportation. Anderson points out that illegality is not as clear a category as much of the public rhetoric on this topic assumes. Many migrants are in a state of semi-compliance with the immigration laws, and many are not fully aware of whether or not they are in compliance. And ordinary British citizens become disquieted as they become aware of the ways in which strict enforcement of immigration laws can prohibit activities that most people take for granted as unproblematic (such as a lecture by a visiting scholar) and as they become exposed to the serious harms caused by immigration enforcement, especially when this involves detention and deportation. Chapter seven focuses on the problem of anti-trafficking. To describe anti-trafficking rather than trafficking as a problem may seem puzzling, but Anderson wants to draw our attention to the dark side of an effort that is supported by migrants’ rights activists and human rights NGOs as well as by the British state. She argues that the anti-trafficking policies serve to make “us” feel good about our desire to act morally and to protect migrants (especially women) from harm, while enabling us to ignore the underlying structural factors that give rise to this problem and the ways in which we are implicated in producing and maintaining those structural factors.
The final substantive chapter explores the ambiguities and contradictions of domestic work in the context of immigration, and in doing so, links together many of the themes of earlier chapters, especially Chapters four and six, because domestic work is the sort of poorly paid, vulnerable work that is often undertaken by migrants whose legal entitlement to work is not entirely clear. At the same time, migrants may unintentionally run afoul of immigration authorities by engaging in normal activities, as is illustrated by the poignant story that opens the chapter about a woman from China who was deported after revealing that she had been helping to care for her young nephew while visiting her sister.
Since this is a critical exchange, I want to use the rest of my space here to reflect upon the differences between Anderson’s approach to immigration and my own. I’ll begin with some comments about what Anderson’s work offers and then raise a few challenges.
I’m a normative political theorist, and so when I write about immigration, I’m interested in trying to understand what policies and practices we ought to adopt. The arguments that I advance may be used to criticize or endorse current policies, but my main concern is to ask what would make sense in this area (against certain background assumptions). I think that Anderson is engaged in a very different project. I see her as working within a tradition of critical social science that aims to reveal the problematic rhetorics, logical flaws, contradictions, and hypocrisies actually operating in a given area of public life—in her case, in the area of immigration. Instead of asking what would make sense in principle, she wants to reveal the non-sense in what exists in practice. And there is a lot of nonsense to reveal.
I think that Anderson’s approach can enable people to see things about immigration that are simply not visible in my sort of work and to gain a critical perspective that is quite different from the one I offer. She wants to highlight how politics actually shapes policies and discourse. So, she tries to make explicit views and values that are often left implicit and that must remain implicit, or at least disconnected from each other, in order to work effectively. She does not try to resolve contradictions but highlights them because the contradictions are often crucial to the political effectiveness of a policy or a way of talking about immigration, but only if we don’t notice that they are contradictions. She is interested in the use of code words, in psychological associations, in verbal manipulations, in short, in things that don’t belong in a good argument about what immigration policy ought to be, but that actually play a crucial role in determining what immigration policy is and in justifying that policy in public fora. So, people interested in gaining a critical perspective on the politics of immigration in Britain should certainly read this book.
On the whole, I am inclined to see Anderson’s work as complementary to, rather than in conflict with, my own. I might quibble with this or that claim that she makes at times about the nature of liberalism, but I don’t think those particular phrases are central to her project. There is an aspect to her approach that leaves me a bit dissatisfied, however, namely her unwillingness (at least in this book) to say what she thinks would be a preferable alternative to the status quo. For example, I share her critique of British naturalization policy, but does she think that there is some naturalization policy that would be defensible, and, if so, what would that be? She is right to say that deportation practices are deeply problematic, but does she mean to say that deportation is never justifiable under any circumstances? I am persuaded that British anti-trafficking policy is flawed and serves objectionable political ends, but would she want to eliminate anti-trafficking laws altogether? In short, is she willing to address the question, “What is to be done?” or does she regard that as a question that one should refuse in principle to try to answer? Because this is a critical exchange, these are not rhetorical questions and I look forward to reading her responses.
