Crossing the Race Line: "No Polish, No Blacks, No Dogs" in Brexit Britain? Or, the Great British Brexit Swindle (original) (raw)
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The scholarship on the politics of immigration often frames governments’ responses to far-right mobilization as a return to border closures and a rowing back on neoliberalism. In this article, I draw on and expand the scholarship on coloniality to address the limitations of this diagno- sis. Specifically, I explore the role of political mobilization in the making of the post-Brexit border regime. My research draws on the analysis of legal and policy initiatives between 2020 and 2023 and twenty-three re- search interviews with individuals who express their opposition to immi- gration via engagement in think tanks, grassroots organizations and vigi- lante groups. The interview data indicates multiple connections between these milieus and shows that each engages in action repertoires beyond the nation-state. And while this prompts border closures, the post-Brexit border regime also encodes openings and loopholes for the circulation of financial elites and precariously employed workers. Thus, I argue that state and non-state actors co-produce a neoliberal border regime of stratified rights, partial inclusions, and gradual exclusions. These variegated entitle- ments draw on and reinvigorate the racial order of coloniality. The post- Brexit immigration regime enables the free mobility of those racialized as “West European,”facilitates disposable labor mobility of those racialized as “Eastern European,”and restricts the movement of those racialized as “non-European.”This racial imaginary does not only operate via binary distinctions of (non)-Britishness but puts people in complex hierarchical relations to “Europeanness.”
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Our current glut of crises, one following hot on the heels of last, presents us with both opportunities and problems of interpretation. How and where are we to begin unpicking the mesh of social, economic and political issues confronting? To what extent are the critical paradigms to which we were used prior to 2008, the beginning of the global financial crisis, still applicable or useful? Specifically as Europeans, how does the project of integration and federalisation implicate and alter these other factors? This essay is a contribution towards a critical response to this glut, specifically towards the issues of immigration and multiculturalism which confront Europe. Our chosen route in is a speech given by British premier David Cameron to the Munich Security Conference in February 2011. Though it may seem like an arbitrary decision, I believe that this speech provides us with a way of structuring our thoughts on the subject, and a way of coming understand Europe's resurgent hard-Right. We begin with a brief sketch of the political context, tracing Cameron's move from his earlier social liberalism to the present hard-line populism, driven by both the ascendency of UKIP and the need to deflect blame away from those responsible for the financial crisis. We then move to a close analysis of the speech, before seeing how the ideological formulation it constructs can be used to understand the European hard-Right.
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As multiculturalism in the United Kingdom passes to a 'post' phase of existence, at least in academic and political discourse, it is important to consider the lingering impact of over fifty years of its presence in the form of Race Relations and integration measures. This article aims at a critical reassessment of the overarching strategies that have developed over the last half-century in relation to the integration of immigrants by putting the legacy of British multiculturalism into a firm historical and socio-political context; by marrying immigration and integration policies with normative models of integration in the hope of drawing a certain causality between them; and finally by highlighting the changes that have taken shape amidst the continuity of certain shared principles or frames of reference. The first part of the article looks at immigration and integration policies in Britain through a historical perspective; the second section delves into the concept of integration itself and its complex manifestations in British politics and policies; finally, a critical review of the development of these policies and their 21 st century manifestations and outcomes are discussed in the third section. The analysis shows that the United Kingdom has, over the last decade, seen an ever-stronger intertwining of immigration and integration policies towards a robust civic integration approach, made evident in the introduction of citizenship and language testing schemes and strict preconditions on entry. Meanwhile, the turn in anti-discrimination legislation has been rather subtler. It has extended its reach to other areas of inequality, focusing on more pressing, or less contentious minority group support, such as women and LGBT rights, whilst retaining a measure of ethnic and national minority protection.
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