Talking Migration

If you have worked for a Western military in places such as Afghanistan or Iraq, you may think that you would be able to settle in the Western country that you worked for, especially if your life is at risk due to the work you performed. But things are not that straight forward. A new report by the UK parliament’s Commons defence select committee is highly critical of how the UK government has tre...

No one will have missed the royal wedding between American actress Meghan Markle and Prince Harry happening this week. Markle has moved to the UK is expected to become known as the Duchess of Sussex after the wedding. But not all family migration procedures are quite so joyful and straightforward. In a new research paper, Dr Marcia Vera Espinoza and Dr Joe Turner, both at the Department of Politic...

Migration policy-makers tend to portray the migrant smuggler as their main enemy. Not only do they help facilitate irregular migration, but they are also seen as exploitative of the people they are helping. But who are migrant smugglers and what do they do? To help answer these questions, I talked to Dr Gabriella Sanchez, Research Fellow at the Migration Policy Centre at the European University In...

When we talk, write and research about migration, do we see like a nation? Would we approach issues differently, and ask different questions, if instead we saw like a migrant? In his new book 'Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility; The Migrant's-Eye View of the World', Alex Sager, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University, claims that much research in migration is biased by...

When we talk about migration, we assume the existence of borders. But what are borders? And should there be any? This is the topic of this episode with Bridget Anderson, Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Bridget Anderson is well-known for her defence of No Borders, as well as her 2013 book...

In September 2015, the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, King Abdullah of Jordan and David Cameron, then Prime Minister of the UK, met to discuss the so called Compact Model, to create jobs for refugees in Jordan. The Jordan Compact was agreed in early 2016 and a similar, but smaller scale Lebanon Compact followed. Was the Compact Model the win-win solution everyone has been waiting for?...

Ahmad al-Rashid came to the UK from Syria in 2015. The journey took 55 days and was partly documented in the BBC documentary Exodus: Our Journey. Since arriving in the UK, Ahmad al-Rashid has become a campaigner for refugees and refugee integration. He is working with the course Aim Higher: Access to Higher Education for Refugees and Asylum Seekers. He was awarded a SOAS Sanctuary Scholarship and...

Our world order is organised around sovereign states and each human being is meant to belong to at least one state where they are a citizen. Yet according to the UNHCR around 10 million people in the world are stateless – they do not have citizenship in any state. In a world completely occupied by territorially defined, sovereign states, what happens to those who do not belong anywhere? The topic...

Restrictions on immigration, as well as certain integration policies, are sometimes justified on the basis that too much, or a certain kind of, immigration risks erode social cohesion in democratic welfare states. Political philosophers who analyse the ethics of immigration have therefore become interested also in the empirical validity of these claims. This was the topic of a recent conference at...

Has the debate on immigration been damaged by people too easily resorting to calling out racism? Or is it precisely racism that is at the heart of hostility towards immigration and contemporary white nationalism? Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck University of London, has argued in a recent report for Policy Exchange that there is a distinction between racism and what he calls 'raci...

Apologies for the poor sound quality of this episode. In 1987 Joseph Carens, Professor and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, University of Toronto, pioneered political philosophy on immigration by making the case for open borders. In his most recent book, The Ethics of Immigration, he restated his case for keeping borders open. Yet some people find that this is simply too idealistic and that...

One of the ways that refugees have tried to make it to Europe is through the so called 'Balkan route'. Yet as EU and European leaders have tried to shut this way by increasing border controls, many refugees and other migrants have become trapped along the Balkan route. A research team, IR and Aesthetics, from Aston University have just returned from Serbia, Macedonia and Greece, where they spoke t...

Political theorists have long debated the question of open borders. Do states have a right to exclude migrants from their territory? Is there a human right to immigrate? The focus has been on the external borders of states. Yet, in the forthcoming book Immigration and Freedom, Professor Chandran Kukathas, Chair in Political Theory and Head of the Department of Government at the London School of Ec...

Italy is one of the key destinations for migrants coming to Europe, with many coming by boat from Libya. Now Italy is threatening to close its ports to stem the inflow of migrants and refugees. Italy wants more support from the rest of the EU and EU ministers met earlier this month to discuss. But what would it actually mean for Italy to close its ports? Are these threats a result of a country bec...

In 2015, a large number of refugees came to Europe in what has come to be referred to as a European refugee 'crisis'. Now, some of the focus has shifted towards questions of integration of those who came. But who were they? One of the countries hosting many of the refugees from 2015 is Austria, and a team of researchers spent some time in 2015 interviewing over 500 of those who came, asking them f...

We are told that we are currently witnessing the biggest refugee crisis sine World War Two and that the average stay in refugee camps is 17 years. But is this true? Refugee historian Benjamin Thomas White, Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow, joins the podcast to take issue with these claims. He argues that statistics are incomplete, that our understanding of refugees' experiences are...

Canada is often the country everyone looks to for inspiration when it comes to immigration. Why? Daniel Hiebert is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and has written a report for the Migration Policy Institute called “What’s So Special about Canada? Understanding the Resilience of Immigration and Multiculturalism”. Daniel Hiebert has led large research projects on immigra...

In a recent special issue of the open access journal Comparative Migration Studies, Will Kymlicka, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University wrote an essay on "Solidarity in diverse societies: beyond neoliberal multiculturalism and welfare chauvinism". He discussed the so called "progressive's dilemma" and argued that progressives should embrace a multicultu...

In this episode, we speak to Dr Marcia Vera Espinoza, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, and Esteban Sanchez Botero, Master student from Colombia at the University of Sheffield, about refugees and migration in Latin America. The discussion begins with the question of how a US wall at the Mexican border may affect immigrants in the US from Latin America, as well as immi...

10. What's wrong with ethnic discrimination in immigration policy? by Talking Migration

In this episode, we speak to Professor Keith Banting, Queen’s Research Chair in Public Policy and Professor in the Department of Political Studies and the School of Policy Studies at Queens University, and Dr Andreas Bergh, Associate Professor in Economics at Lund University as well as the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm, about whether there is a conflict between migration...

After a summer break, we're back talking to Professor Ruth Wodak, The University of Lancaster and the University of Vienna, about her new book on populism, as well as to fiction writers Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes, who's written a fictional book on the situation in Calais.

In the aftermath of the EU referendum in the UK, in which the British population voted to leave, we discuss the prominence of immigration in the debate with Robert Ford, Professor in Political Science at the University of Manchester, and Kenan Malik, writer, lecturer and broadcaster. We also talk to Nando Sigona, Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, about the situation for unaccompanie...

This episode was recorded ad the British International Studies Association's Annual Conference in Edinburgh. We hear short versions of three research papers presented on the refugee crisis, by Dr James Souter, the University of Leeds, Kelly Staples, The University of Leicester, and Simon McMahon, Coventry University. Questions raised include whether accepting refugees is part of being a good inter...

In this EU-special we talk to Andy Mycock, Reader in Politics at the University of Huddersfield, about the role of identity and immigration in the referendum and to Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory, on what might happen to EU migration if the UK leaves the EU.