Public Policy

In Post-Brexit Britain, is Migration a Crime? Public Policy
Can you spot the criminals in this queue?

In Post-Brexit Britain, is Migration a Crime?

November 2, 2016 2258

Airport queue

Can you spot the criminals in this queue? (Photo: Isriya Paireepairit/Flickr/CC BY-NC 2.0)

In early July, just after Britain’s EU referendum, I travelled to Beijing to work on a research project that explores the experiences of Chinese-Western transnational couples. On the plane to Beijing, I sat next to an elderly couple. We struck up a conversation, and I soon learned a lot about the story of their lives. The gentleman had migrated to Britain from a country in southern Europe in the early 1960s. There, he met his wife, married, and settled down in the Midlands. They both worked hard and eventually founded a prosperous business. Having recently sold it, they were now travelling and enjoying their lives. Without me mentioning the topic, they eventually went on to tell me that they had both voted for Brexit. When I asked them for the reasons, they mentioned Polish criminals, Romanian women who had come to Britain to have babies and live on welfare, and so forth. When I asked them where they had met such people, they told me that they had read about them in the newspaper and seen them on TV.

Nehring Corporate bugAfter my arrival in Beijing, I began to set up interviews with people living in transnational marriages and couple relationships. I did not look specifically for Chinese-British couples, but I did come to meet quite a few. Strikingly, not one of these couples had been able to obtain a British visa. This meant that I only got to interview one half of a couple that had been involuntarily separated by the denial of a visa, or that I encountered couples who had made a home in China because Britain had closed its doors on them. I should add that my study looks specifically at highly-skilled couples. The people I interviewed held MAs and PhDs, worked as academics, investment bankers, researchers in NGOs, civil servants, head teachers, and so on. Settling in Britain, all of them could have been reasonably expected to prosper and make a meaningful contribution to society.

Returning to Britain in September, I was struck by the febrile political climate and the overt hostility that senior politicians and large parts of the media had begun to direct at the country’s immigrant population. I heard senior members of government propose that British companies should make public the number of foreigners they employed, that EU citizens living in Britain might be used as a bargaining chip in the forthcoming Brexit negotiations, and that the reduction of immigration into the country will be the primary goal in these negotiations. I read how journalists in major newspapers descended into fits of rage at the admission into Britain of a tiny number of child refugees from the notorious Calais jungle camp. The press has even sought to delegitimise the presence of these refugees by claiming that they are adults who have lied and cheated their way across the border. The most notable response on the part of Britain’s political class so far has come from an MP who has called for dental checks on refugees to determine their age.

Public debates before Britain’s EU referendum were dominated by concerns about immigration, driven, in part, by the openly xenophobic leave campaign. Pro-Brexit voters may have had heterogeneous motivations, but immigration has been the paramount topic of public debate, rivaled in the aftermath of the referendum only by concerns about the country’s prospective economic decline. In this sense, there is a close association between Britain’s withdrawal from the EU and the wave of anti-foreign resentment that is sweeping the country.

This wave has long been in the making. Influential newspapers have long been fiercely xenophobic. In my field of research, for instance, it is striking that papers such as the Daily Mail consistently equate transnational marriages with so-called ‘sham marriages.’ Britain’s political class has likewise done much to contribute to the anti-foreign sentiments that have now risen to the surface. Rhetorically, there is only a small step between Theresa May’s notorious poster requesting illegal immigrants to go home and Nigel Farage’s equally notorious poster warning that immigration had led British society to a breaking point. In public discourse today, the term ‘migrant’ is used by way of blanked generalization to describe all sorts of undesirables who have entered the country. It is hard to escape the conclusion that in Britain in late 2016, migration is synonymous with crime and deviance.

Under these conditions, what place is there still for foreign academics – and particularly for EU academics – in this country? Many of us have been in Britain for a long time, have developed careers and have formed close friendships with British people. In fact, the distinction between “Briton” and “foreigner” is unlikely to have been part of our thinking until recently. In everyday life, many of us are still likely to experience the friendliness, the friendships and the collegiality that used to make Britain an attractive place to work. And yet, the prevalent tone of public life has changed to such a degree that remaining here seems like an increasingly daunting prospect.


My career so far, which current sees me as senior lecturer in sociology in the Department of Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy of Swansea University, has taken me to a fairly wide range of places, and this has allowed me to experience a wide range of approaches to sociology and social science. In my blog, I reflect on this diversity and its implications for the future of the discipline. Over the last few years, I have also become interested in exploring the contours of academic life under neoliberal hegemony. Far-reaching transformations are taking place at universities around the world, in terms of organizational structures, patterns of authority, and forms of intellectual activity. With my posts, I hope to draw attention to some of these transformations.

View all posts by Daniel Nehring

Related Articles

Why Might RFK Jr Be Good for US Health Care?
Public Policy
December 3, 2024

Why Might RFK Jr Be Good for US Health Care?

Read Now
Tenth Edition of The Evidence: Why We Need to Change the Narrative Around Part-Time Work
Bookshelf
December 2, 2024

Tenth Edition of The Evidence: Why We Need to Change the Narrative Around Part-Time Work

Read Now
Joshua Greene on Effective Charities
Social Science Bites
December 2, 2024

Joshua Greene on Effective Charities

Read Now
The End of Meaningful CSR?
Business and Management INK
November 22, 2024

The End of Meaningful CSR?

Read Now
Deciphering the Mystery of the Working-Class Voter: A View From Britain

Deciphering the Mystery of the Working-Class Voter: A View From Britain

How is class defined these these days – asking specifically about Britain here but the question certainly resonates globally – and when […]

Read Now
Doing the Math on Equal Pay

Doing the Math on Equal Pay

In the UK, it’s November 20. In France, it’s today, November 8. For the EU, it’s November 15. It’s the day of […]

Read Now
All Change! 2024 – A Year of Elections: Campaign for Social Science Annual Sage Lecture

All Change! 2024 – A Year of Elections: Campaign for Social Science Annual Sage Lecture

With over 50 countries around the world holding major elections during 2024 it has been a hugely significant year for democracy as […]

Read Now
0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Newest
Oldest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments