Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS)

Michael Collyer, University of Sussex, gives a talk for the COMPAS Hilary 2016 term Seminar Series entitled: Open the Way: Understanding the Refugee Crisis on 4th February 2016.

Heaven Crawley, Coventry University, gives a talk for the COMPAS Hilary term 2016 seminar seires; 'Open the Way: Understanding the Refugee Crisis' on 21st January 2016.

Yasmin Gunaratnam, Goldsmiths College, gives a talk for the COMPAS seminar series.

Melanie Griffiths, University of Bristol, gives a talk for the COMPAS seminar series. For academics, politicians and NGOs alike, the issues seen to relate to irregular migrants, especially if they are male, tend to revolve around questions of legality, criminality and mobility. Little concern is generally afforded to their emotional lives and wellbeing. Drawing on qualitative research conducted with UK-based precarious male migrants with British or EU citizen partners and children, this talk considers the effect of having family ties in the UK on the men’s experience of the immigration system, as well as the impact of immigration concerns on family life itself. A variety of repercussions are identified in relation to the formation and sustainability of partnerships and families, including in terms of suspicion over motives, the threat of enforced separation and other relationship strains. Particular attention is given to immigration detention and the prohibition of employment as examples of ways in which the immigration system reaches into the heart of family life and produce gendered implications for the men’s ability to be the parents and partners they wish to be. The talk also considers the wellbeing of the British and European women in mixed-citizenship couples, exploring the impacts of the immigration struggles of their loved ones on the women’s sense of security, privilege and belonging as citizens. Considering wellbeing in the context of relationships illuminates the significant and wide-ranging impact of the immigration system on family lives and gender roles. Laying bare the fallacy of migrant/citizen binaries, such impacts not only affect irregular migrants, but also the citizens close to them, who are not themselves subject to immigration control but whose lives are nonetheless shaped by immigration objectives.

Peter Dwyer, University of York, gives a talk for the COMPAS seminar series. Conditionality matters for migrants. First, in a broad sense i.e. the ways in which UK immigration and welfare policies intersect to establish and structure the diverse rights and responsibilities of different migrant groups living in the UK. Second, in respect of more focused understandings of welfare conditionality and the linking of an individual’s rights to social welfare benefits and services to specified behavioural requirements. This seminar explores how these two aspects of conditionality play out in migrants’ interactions with welfare agencies. Discussions will draw on early analysis of new qualitative data generated in first wave interviews with 54 migrants who are one cohort within a larger, repeat qualitative longitudinal panel study being conducted as part of the ESRC funded ‘Welfare Conditionality: Sanctions Support and Behaviour Change’ project (see www.welfarecondtionality.ac.uk)

Jonathan Darling, University of Manchester, gives a talk for the COMPAS seminar series. In this seminar I draw on my current research looking at how dispersal has worked across four UK cities historically, and how changes with the privatisation of provision has affected relations between asylum seekers and cities, between private providers and local authorities, and between local authorities and the Home Office. I will link to some of my past work around sanctuary, responsibility and generosity in terms of discussing spaces within cities that challenge the tensions of current governance structures and that enable different relations between asylum seekers and cities. Part of the story here is of the significance of local relations and contexts that are too readily ignored in top down dispersal processes and plans, so being able to speak across four different cities should enable some of these more hopeful stories to come to light.

Osea Giuntella, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the COMPAS seminar series. Despite a lower average socioeconomic status, recent immigrants in many advanced economies have better health outcomes than the incumbent residents in the hosting countries. Paradoxically, this initial health advantage erodes with time spent in the destination country, despite immigrants’ socio-economic assimilation. In the talk I will discuss the role of selection, acculturation, socio-economic and occupational characteristics in explaining immigrants’ health trajectories presenting evidence from some of my recent work on migration and health in the US, UK, and Germany. Furthermore, I will examine different mechanisms through which immigration can have effects on the health of incumbent residents. First, immigration has important effects on the allocation of tasks and job-related risks in the labour market. Second, immigration can have effects on healthy behaviours by affecting both the demand and the supply of healthy products and by increasing product variety and access to healthy options in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

This paper uses a UK nationally representative data set to examine the extent to which family migration history helps explains inter-ethnic variations in subjective well-being. By Cinzia Rienzo, National Institute of Economic and Social Research [NIESR].

Rob McNeil, COMPAS, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the Immigration and democracy in the UK COMPAS Seminar Series. Rob McNeil looks at the nature of migration in the media and why it looks as it does. What is truth in this context? He also considers what that means from a policy perspective.

Claudio Sopranzetti, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the Arrival Cities COMPAS Seminar Series. This talk analyses the transformation of labor and internal migration structure in Thailand since the 1997 economic crisis. In particular it shows how, since the restructuring of the Thai economy along post-fordist lines, both processes have been re-organized through discourse and practices of "free" flexible labor. The speaker focus specifically on a group of informal urban workers: motorcycle taxi drivers who, as migrant workers from the provinces, allow Bangkok to function. While many of these migrants used to work in factories before the crisis, since then they have decided to join the ranks of "free" transportation entrepreneurs, gaining easier mobility between the city and their villages but also renouncing to social security and other services, not unlike millions of workers around the world. This talk analyses this process both in its emancipatory and exploitative dimensions to explore the duplicitous nature of mobility in contemporary Thailand.

Carlos Vargas Silva, COMPAS, University of Oxford, gives a talk for Immigration and democracy in the UK COMPAS Seminar Series. This talk analyzes the effects of immigration on access to health care in England. Linking administrative records from the Hospital Episode Statistics (2003-2012) with immigration data drawn from the UK Labor Force Survey, we analyze how immigrant inflows affected waiting times in the National Health Service. We find that immigration reduced waiting times for outpatient referrals and did not have significant effects on waiting times in Accident and Emergency (A&E) and elective care. However, there is evidence that immigration increased waiting times for outpatient referrals in more deprived areas outside London. These effects are concentrated in the years immediately following the 2004 EU enlargement and vanish in the medium-run (e.g., 3 to 4 years). Our findings suggest that these regional disparities are explained by both differences in the health status of immigrants moving into different local authorities and in natives’ internal mobility across local authorities.

Scott Blinder, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, gives a talk for the Immigration and democracy in the UK COMPAS Seminar Series. This talk reviews a wide variety of research findings on how migration functions as a political issue in today’s Britain, and how migration and migrants affect British political systems and outcomes. In the electoral context, I review evidence on how migration affected the 2010 election and how it is likely to affect the 2015 vote – both through impact on majority-group voters and on the increasing population of migrants and ethnic minorities who vote as well. Beyond this, I examine evidence on how migration has changed British politics, through shifts in the party system and erosion of trust in the political system itself.

Daniel Trilling, New Humanist Magazine, gives a talk for Shifting Powers, Shifting Mobilites COMPAS Seminar Series The world economic and financial meltdown and its social, economic and political aftermath have helped to consolidate and accelerate shifts in the global political economy, which in turn are re-shaping the global migration order, as emergent powers become increasingly important players on the world migration scene. Moreover, power is not only shifting socio-economically and spatially, but arguably its very nature is shifting too. This seminar series will explore how these shifts are playing out in three related spheres: the connection between mobility and politics (‘fight and flight’), global urban transformation, and the limits of governance. The series will open with three scene-setting sessions looking at recent shifts and shocks and the recent wave of protest and revolt, before moving on to consider how generation, class, gender and ethnicity play into the choices between moving and staying put, and between protesting, enduring and acquiescing in the face of adverse and threatening conditions.

Nicholas Simcik Arese, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the Arrival Cities COMPAS Seminar Series. As activists lament that the rights-based aims of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution feel increasingly distant, research is necessary on the documentation of ongoing social-justice struggles in Cairo, though they may not be framed as 'revolutionary' by participants themselves. In August 2010 and in February 2011, during the 18 days of Hosni Mubarak’s fall, a group of 231 resettled slum dwellers from the Duweiqa district of Cairo, abandoned their 23 square-meter allocated homes to squat live-able larger ones in Haram City, a budget gated community marketed by developers and development practitioners alike as a new best-practice "cooperative" public-private partnerships for low-income housing. In this forced 'arrival city', squatters leverage their foothold on vast expanses of empty houses to negotiate a return home. This paper traces their metaphorical use of rights-based language – aligning notions of moral 'rootedness' in property and place, outlaw discourse, and brokerage practices – outside of dominant legal and revolutionary norms, towards survival..

Kristen Biehl, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the Arrival Cities COMPAS Seminar Series. As of the late 1950s, Istanbul has maintained its position as Turkey’s leading arrival city for millions of internal migrants from all parts of the country, whose impact on the city’s changing physicality, diversity, imaginary and exclusions has been extensively researched within the field of Turkish urban studies. Over recent decades, however, a new form of migration composed of international migrant and refugee flows is becoming an emergent reality of Istanbul, whose transformative impact still remains little understood. This talk presents ethnographic research from Istanbul's historic Kumkapi neighborhood, which today has become a key residential and employment hub for a great diversity of migrants and refugees, whose national/ethnic/religious/gender backgrounds, migration motives and legal statuses greatly vary. It will initially set out the numerous aspects, historical and present, that have permitted this transformation, focusing throughout on processes of informalization and diversification. Ethnographic examples will then be presented in relation to the socio-spatial ramifications of these processes. In conclusion, the speaker will discuss the usefulness of the notion of arrival city as it relates to the multiple spatialities, temporalities and mobilities of Kumkapi.

Kareem Rabie, CUNY Graduate Center, gives a talk for the Arrival Cities COMPAS Seminar Series. This talk explores the arrival city framework in the context of occupied Palestine, beginning with a consideration of the ways that markets and immigration are treated in that framework. Next, it introduces ethnographic material on ordinary Palestinians' relationships to a particular massive housing development being built in the West Bank, and the increasing stratification between Palestinians in urban (as well as new, potentially-urban) and rural areas. New forms of political, social, and economic imagination integrate Palestinians into a vision of the future formed through privatization and market creation, and led by private developers and the Palestinian Authority. Yet not everyone is equally integrated. What does the Palestinian case - one characterized by unevenness, differentiation, and equalization at different geographical scales - tell us about the arrival city model? This talk asks, what do social capital, ambition, privatization, or immigration mean under stifling structural political conditions?

Dimitris Dalakoglou, University of Sussex, gives a talk for the Arrival Cities COMPAS Seminar Series. In 2010, it was reported that out of the 510 border guards employed in the country, 473 were, in fact, serving in Athens. Indeed, deployment of border guards in cities has become standard practice these days; for example, in the summer of 2013 UKBA organized a large-scale operation in London’s underground stations stopping and checking migrants and people of migratory origin. This urbanisation of security and military techniques developed supposedly to protect the borders of a nation-state from a military attack is just part of a wider process which reconfigures the social class divisions in Western European metropolises. This new political economy which often passes over the bodies and lives of non-Western migrants, at the time of crisis, finds one of its major materialisations in the centre of Athens along the Greek part of the common European borders. This paper, drawing from an 18-month long ethnography in Athens, will attempt to set a light to the urban everydayness that follows the current financial crisis.

Chris Minns, London School of Economics, gives a talk for the Arrival Cities COMPAS Seminar Series. This paper develops a simple methodology to estimate the stock of citizens and citizenship rates for over 30 European towns and cities between 1550 and 1800. We find substantial variation in individual urban citizenship rates, from less than five percent to over twenty percent, even within the borders of present-day Western European nations. Estimates of the share of households with citizens suggest that many early modern cities were relatively inclusive, when compared to the extent of the franchise in mid to late 19th century European nation states. We also find compelling evidence that population growth and urban expansion was associated with a decline in the importance of urban citizenship.

Sarah Spencer and Jonathan Price, COMPAS, Oxford, give a talk for the COMPAS series. This briefing presents the findings of an 18 month study that explored the implications of a tension between two areas of policy concerning the welfare of children: a requirement in immigration law that excludes some families from mainstream welfare benefits and a provision in the Children Act (s17) that requires local authorities to safeguard and promote the welfare of any child ‘in need’. The study involved a large survey of local authorities and of the voluntary sector; 8 local authority cases studies and 92 interviews. While central government determines who may access ‘public funds’, and has to resolve the immigration status of families with applications pending, local government provides a safety net for destitute children whose parents have no other means of support. The study provides data on families, the practices of local authorities that assess and provide support, the nature of the support provided, the role of the voluntary sector and challenges in the working relationship between the two tiers of government with responsibility for these families.

This briefing explores the lived experiences and concerns of segments of the majority population in Higher Blackley, a ward in the north of Manchester. Part of the COMPAS Breakfast Breifing Series. The briefing focuses on key areas of local policy - employment, education, health, housing, political participation, policing, and the media - as well as broader themes of belonging and identity. Higher Blackley has a majority white working class community, with significant pockets of deprivation alongside areas of relative affluence. The briefing is based on a report published by the Open Society Foundations' At Home in Europe programme, as part of a series providing ground-breaking research on the experiences of a section of the population whose lives are often caricatured and whose voices are rarely heard in public debates on integration, social cohesion, and social inclusion. The research on which the briefing was based was conducted by The Social Action & Research Foundation (SARF). Part of the COMPAS Breakfast Briefing Series: Topical, cutting edge research on migration and migration related issues will be made accessible to an audience of policy makers and other research users. Questions and discussion will follow the presentations on the potential implications for policy and practice.