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Us and Them?: The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control
Us and Them? explores the distinction between migrant and citizen through using the concept of 'the community of value'. The community of value is comprised of Good Citizens and is defined from outside by the Non-Citizen and from the inside by the Failed Citizen, that is figures like the benefit scrounger, the criminal, the teenage mother etc. While Failed Citizens and Non-Citizens are often strongly differentiated, the book argues that it is analytically and politically productive to consider them together. Judgments about who counts as skilled, what is a good marriage, who is suitable for citizenship, and what sort of enforcement is acceptable against 'illegals', affect citizens as well as migrants. Rather than simple competitors for the privileges of membership, citizens and migrants define each other through sets of relations that shift and are not straightforward binaries. The first two chapters on vagrancy and on Empire historicise migration management by linking it to attempts to control the mobility of the poor. The following three chapters map and interrogate the concept of the 'national labour market' and UK immigration and citizenship policies examining how they work within public debate to produce 'us and them'. Chapters 6 and 7 go on to discuss the challenges posed by enforcement and deportation, and the attempt to make this compatible with liberalism through anti-trafficking policies. It ends with a case study of domestic labour as exemplifying the ways in which all the issues outlined above come together in the lives of migrants and their employers.
222 pages, ebook
First published June 7, 2013
2 people are currently reading
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About the author
Bridget Anderson
10 books4 followersLibrarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Bridget Anderson's research interests include low waged labour migration, deportation, legal status, and citizenship. Publications include Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (Zed Books 2000) and Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration and Public Policy (OUP 2010), co-edited with Martin Ruhs. She has worked with a wide range of national and international NGOs including the Trades Union Congress, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the International Labour Organisation. She is Deputy Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at Oxford University.
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Bridget Anderson's research interests include low waged labour migration, deportation, legal status, and citizenship. Publications include Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (Zed Books 2000) and Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration and Public Policy (OUP 2010), co-edited with Martin Ruhs. She has worked with a wide range of national and international NGOs including the Trades Union Congress, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the International Labour Organisation. She is Deputy Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at Oxford University.
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June 26, 2013
Bridget Anderson’s work on immigration is something you turn to if you are looking for approaches which challenge the all the conventional prejudices which see it as a business in which those on the outside coming across to grab stuff that belongs to those of us who live on the inside.
There is no real ‘outside’ anymore according to Anderson. The global processes of trade, commerce, financial markets, production supply chains, and the exploitation of labour resources wherever they are available has made everything into one vast ‘inside’. The real issue at stake is whether you are a relatively privileged insider who operates with the notion that you have a superior claim to all the good things that are lying around, or one of those who can be safely told to stand a long way back and keep hands off.
Liberal lefties and outright conservatives are inclined to go along with the notional divisions into ‘them’ and ‘us’ on the grounds that it supports a competitive economic system which facilitates rapid growth. There might be some injustice involved in telling Bangladeshi clothing workers that they can’t expect to fully participate in the enjoyment of the wealth they have helped create with their labour, but we can at least encourage them with the hope that some of it might trickle down to their children or grandchildren.
Bangladeshis working at the end of the long subcontracted chains that extend outwards from the high streets at the shopping malls of the developed world are probably going to be sceptical about the terms of this deal, but if from the standpoint of the politicians who govern the lands of mature capitalism, they don’t really figure (or at least short of the mishap of watching their broken and twisted bodies dragged out from the rubble of the collapsed buildings they were condemned to work).
From the standpoint of the national political elites, the genie that really has to be kept bottled up is the that concerns the sense of social justice that exists amongst the citizen-consumers of their own lands, who might be troubled if they ever grasped to its fullest and truest extent the fact that their wealth and security has depended on cruel exploitation of those further down the line.
Anderson’s new book, Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control, is a polemic that aims to upset the ideological applecart that supports the notion that we owe greater duties of solidarity to those who have gone through all the bureaucratic procedures of modern, mass society and duly certified as being part of ‘us’ and thereupon relegating what is due to ‘them’ to the sort of activity associated with wearing red noses and singing along with Bono once a year.
Her very substantial contribution is to lay bare the social and economic processes which made us into ‘us’ in the first place. “The history of the world is unavoidably a history of mobility” she tells us. Peasant farmers are ‘liberated’ from the social relations which bound them to the land today just as they were 600 years ago in Britain when the Tudor magnates fashioned capitalism from out of their landed assets. In doing so they opened up vagrancy, marginality, criminality and insecurity as the routes which led, over time, to the production of a vast population of propertyless wager earners who would service the profit-hunting needs of business. Out of these fires the first ‘us’ was forged.
However, emerging capitalism society presented 17th century England with a startling new crisis when it was discovered that the cultural mores of feudalism were no longer sufficient to secure the class solidarity needed between the greater and lesser castes of property owners who now existed. Power had to be shared, and that meant an expanded role for the Parliament which kings and queens had once suffered to exist only to obtain a degree of consensus the extortion of taxation from the population. Parliament, rather than the monarch, was judged to be sovereign, and that meant that the few percent which was entitled to participate in elections now needed to new frames of thinking to support the developing sense of obligation and duty they had to one another. That frame was called ‘nationalism’ – the idea that membership of the same nation was the precondition for the trust and fellowship needed to order and secure society.
Anderson weaves the story of immigration into these historical segments, explaining that the genesis of our modern system of passports lay in the control the Tudor state wished to assert of the movement of its own subjects, rather than in dealings with foreigners. Under Parliament, as the Atlantic world was forged out of empire-building and the displacement of rival powers, the space for being one of ‘us’ was extended to those who were still two centuries away from having the vote, but whose loyalty and identification with the imperial mission needed to be obtained to provided the manpower for the ships of the Royal Navy and the foot soldiers of the chartered companies.
As modern stated became more bureaucratic to the notion of ‘us’ became embedded in the paperwork and filing systems which were needed to govern growing, potentially unruly populations. Anderson explores this in the context of the development of nationality law and, more recently, points-based systems of immigration control. To legitimise the complexity of the emerging system, with all its costs and infringements of personal liberty, a sense if the threat posed by the hoards of uncivilised others had to be ramped up. With the constant fear of having to deal with ‘them’, it seems that citizens have been made willing to carry the increasingly heavy burden of a security state which is less capable of providing welfare to its people, but which, at a minimum, can still be relied upon to keep ‘us’ safe.
Anyone reading this book should be prepared to encounter a tumult of ideas and insights which can be overwhelming at times, as Anderson is carried forward by the floodtide of her own logic. It is a long way from a finished work. Its 180-odd pages are the sketch of a theory and approach to immigration which moves us far beyond the idea that this has to have the story that ‘them’ and ‘us’ are fixed categories that arise from the fundamental nature of things. But much more is there to be said about, for example, the logic of the welfare state, with its need to determine who merits the benefit of the services it provides, further structures and conditions our sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’.
This book challenges us to follow up by filling and in and deepening the record of our own experiences of how modernity has fated us to live our lives as ‘us’ and ‘them’. What a gain it will be as we move to fill in all the blank spaces in this story, offering the hope that we can act and build on other principles of human solidarity as we understand more, and strengthen the hope that we will move beyond the confines of the divisive template that history has imposed on us all.
There is no real ‘outside’ anymore according to Anderson. The global processes of trade, commerce, financial markets, production supply chains, and the exploitation of labour resources wherever they are available has made everything into one vast ‘inside’. The real issue at stake is whether you are a relatively privileged insider who operates with the notion that you have a superior claim to all the good things that are lying around, or one of those who can be safely told to stand a long way back and keep hands off.
Liberal lefties and outright conservatives are inclined to go along with the notional divisions into ‘them’ and ‘us’ on the grounds that it supports a competitive economic system which facilitates rapid growth. There might be some injustice involved in telling Bangladeshi clothing workers that they can’t expect to fully participate in the enjoyment of the wealth they have helped create with their labour, but we can at least encourage them with the hope that some of it might trickle down to their children or grandchildren.
Bangladeshis working at the end of the long subcontracted chains that extend outwards from the high streets at the shopping malls of the developed world are probably going to be sceptical about the terms of this deal, but if from the standpoint of the politicians who govern the lands of mature capitalism, they don’t really figure (or at least short of the mishap of watching their broken and twisted bodies dragged out from the rubble of the collapsed buildings they were condemned to work).
From the standpoint of the national political elites, the genie that really has to be kept bottled up is the that concerns the sense of social justice that exists amongst the citizen-consumers of their own lands, who might be troubled if they ever grasped to its fullest and truest extent the fact that their wealth and security has depended on cruel exploitation of those further down the line.
Anderson’s new book, Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control, is a polemic that aims to upset the ideological applecart that supports the notion that we owe greater duties of solidarity to those who have gone through all the bureaucratic procedures of modern, mass society and duly certified as being part of ‘us’ and thereupon relegating what is due to ‘them’ to the sort of activity associated with wearing red noses and singing along with Bono once a year.
Her very substantial contribution is to lay bare the social and economic processes which made us into ‘us’ in the first place. “The history of the world is unavoidably a history of mobility” she tells us. Peasant farmers are ‘liberated’ from the social relations which bound them to the land today just as they were 600 years ago in Britain when the Tudor magnates fashioned capitalism from out of their landed assets. In doing so they opened up vagrancy, marginality, criminality and insecurity as the routes which led, over time, to the production of a vast population of propertyless wager earners who would service the profit-hunting needs of business. Out of these fires the first ‘us’ was forged.
However, emerging capitalism society presented 17th century England with a startling new crisis when it was discovered that the cultural mores of feudalism were no longer sufficient to secure the class solidarity needed between the greater and lesser castes of property owners who now existed. Power had to be shared, and that meant an expanded role for the Parliament which kings and queens had once suffered to exist only to obtain a degree of consensus the extortion of taxation from the population. Parliament, rather than the monarch, was judged to be sovereign, and that meant that the few percent which was entitled to participate in elections now needed to new frames of thinking to support the developing sense of obligation and duty they had to one another. That frame was called ‘nationalism’ – the idea that membership of the same nation was the precondition for the trust and fellowship needed to order and secure society.
Anderson weaves the story of immigration into these historical segments, explaining that the genesis of our modern system of passports lay in the control the Tudor state wished to assert of the movement of its own subjects, rather than in dealings with foreigners. Under Parliament, as the Atlantic world was forged out of empire-building and the displacement of rival powers, the space for being one of ‘us’ was extended to those who were still two centuries away from having the vote, but whose loyalty and identification with the imperial mission needed to be obtained to provided the manpower for the ships of the Royal Navy and the foot soldiers of the chartered companies.
As modern stated became more bureaucratic to the notion of ‘us’ became embedded in the paperwork and filing systems which were needed to govern growing, potentially unruly populations. Anderson explores this in the context of the development of nationality law and, more recently, points-based systems of immigration control. To legitimise the complexity of the emerging system, with all its costs and infringements of personal liberty, a sense if the threat posed by the hoards of uncivilised others had to be ramped up. With the constant fear of having to deal with ‘them’, it seems that citizens have been made willing to carry the increasingly heavy burden of a security state which is less capable of providing welfare to its people, but which, at a minimum, can still be relied upon to keep ‘us’ safe.
Anyone reading this book should be prepared to encounter a tumult of ideas and insights which can be overwhelming at times, as Anderson is carried forward by the floodtide of her own logic. It is a long way from a finished work. Its 180-odd pages are the sketch of a theory and approach to immigration which moves us far beyond the idea that this has to have the story that ‘them’ and ‘us’ are fixed categories that arise from the fundamental nature of things. But much more is there to be said about, for example, the logic of the welfare state, with its need to determine who merits the benefit of the services it provides, further structures and conditions our sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’.
This book challenges us to follow up by filling and in and deepening the record of our own experiences of how modernity has fated us to live our lives as ‘us’ and ‘them’. What a gain it will be as we move to fill in all the blank spaces in this story, offering the hope that we can act and build on other principles of human solidarity as we understand more, and strengthen the hope that we will move beyond the confines of the divisive template that history has imposed on us all.
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