Brexit, race and migration (original) (raw)
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Ascriptions of Migration: Racism, Migratism and Brexit
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022
This article offers an analysis of scholarly attempts to make sense of the nexus of race and migration in Brexit-era UK discourse. To illustrate my arguments that intend to challenge and extend existing scholarship, I discuss exemplary snapshots from news articles, blog posts and social media sources. Building on critical race and postcolonial studies as theoretical background, I trace the phenomenon of naming the discrimination against East Europeans-which is undeniably one of the driving forces of the Brexit discussion-'racism'. Sometimes, and this shows the pattern of the overgeneralization of the term, 'racism' gets extended to name the post-Brexit exclusion of any EU nationals. This use of 'racism', however, is based on methodological nationalism and conceptual whiteness as my analyses show. To make sense of the overlapping racist, anti-immigration and anti-EU rhetoric that marks the pre-and post-Brexit moment in the United Kingdom, this article introduces the concept of 'migratism'-a name for the power relation that ascribes migration to certain people, constructing them as migrants and discriminating against them. The terms 'migratism' and 'migratization' function grammatically in an analogue way to 'racism' and 'racialization'. If racism is the power relation that racializes (=ascribes race to) people, migratism if the power relation that migratizes (=ascribes migration to) people. The terms are not symmetrical but have a complicated interdependent relationship. Racism and migratism are bound to each other and play a crucial role in organizing the Western nation state. The suggested concepts foreground a postcolonial understanding of race and racism and make it possible to analyse both migration-based discrimination and discrimination based on perceived migration in violence and hate crimes connected to the Brexit referendum.
Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness, 2021
Our argument is that the focus on the white working class has not only racialised and divided the most diverse section of our society, but displaced racism, white supremacy, and Brexit itself onto the working class. In the process, it not only served to exculpate the middle and upper classes and rendered their racism and white supremacy relatively invisible, but allowed elites to serve and protect their own economic and political interests, while appearing to be looking out for the so-called ‘legitimate’ concerns of the ‘left behind’.
‘Post-race’ racisms in the narratives of ‘Brexit’ voters
The Sociological Review, 2019
Although a growing body of scholarship seeks to understand the motivations behind the ‘Brexit’ vote – including that which centralises explorations of racism, nationalism and post-colonialism – little consideration has been given to the ways in which ‘post-race’ racisms underpin the narratives of Leave voters. This article draws on data generated through 13 semi-structured interviews to examine the subtle and subterranean ways in which xeno-racism is articulated in the accounts of some Leave voters in the Greater Manchester city of Salford: a city that saw a higher percentage of the electorate (56.8%) vote to leave the EU than the national average (51.9%). Whilst restricting immigration was a key motivator of Leave voters in our research, interviewees vehemently rejected accusations of racism. Instead, couching their views in seemingly non-racial ways, they framed their concerns about immigration as a ‘legitimate’ response to a victimised whiteness. Thus, in discussing our data, we ...
Migration Studies, 2022
What has Brexit meant for migration and migrants? How has the geopolitical repositioning of the UK in consequence of the UK’s exit from the European Union (EU) impacted on the experiences of long-established migrant communities and newly arrived migrants? In what ways are the impacts of Brexit differentially experienced across migrant communities according to, inter alia, class, gender, age, country of origin, disability, and race? How has migration scholarship addressed Brexit and its impact on migration and migration governance? And what has been the significance of migration research within this project? This critical review of migration studies scholarship literature focussed on Brexit and migration, we draw out the dominant themes and gaps in this emergent field and consider how these reconfigure the ‘spotlights’ and ‘blindspots’ in migration research from methodological nationalism to. In this way, we identify the potential for new lines of enquiry for research on Brexit and m...
Coloniality, Race, and Europeanness: Britain's Borders after Brexit
International Political Sociology, 2024
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.”
Research in Political Sociology, 2020
In June 2016, a clear majority of English voters chose to unilaterally take the United Kingdom out of the European Union (EU). According to many of the post-Brexit vote analyses, the single strongest motivating factor driving this vote was “immigration” in Britain, an issue which had long been the central mobilising force of the United Kingdom Independence Party. The article focuses on how – following the bitter demise of multiculturalism – these Brexit related developments may now signal the end of Britain’s post-colonial settlement on migration and race, the other parts of a progressive philosophy which had long been marked out as a proud British distinction from its neighbours. In successfully racialising, lumping together and re-labelling as “immigrants” three anomalous non-“immigrant” groups – asylum seekers, EU nationals, and British Muslims – UKIP leader Nigel Farage made explicit an insidious re-casting of ideas of “immigration” and “integration,” emergent since the year 2000, which exhumed the ideas of Enoch Powell, and threatened the status of even the most settled British minority ethnic populations – as has been seen in the Windrush scandal. Central to this has been the rejection of the post-national principle of non-discrimination by nationality, which had seen its fullest European expression in Britain during the 1990s and 2000s. The referendum on Brexit enabled an extraordinary democratic vote on the notion of “national” population and membership, in which “the People” might openly roll back the various diasporic, multi-national, cosmopolitan, or human rights-based conceptions of global society which had taken root during those decades. The article unpacks the toxic cocktail that lays behind the forces propelling Boris Johnson to power. It also raises the question of whether Britain will provide a negative examplar to the rest of Europe on issues concerning the future of multi-ethnic societies.