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.

Dina Ionesco International Organization for Migration and Alex Sutton UK Climate Change & Migration Coalition give a talk for the COMPAS Breakfast Briefing series. Both climate change and migration are complex and politically sensitive topics. This briefing, a collaboration between the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UK Climate Change and Migration Coalition (UKCCMC), explores what recent research and policy developments tell us about the linkages between the two issues and how we can respond.

Rachel Briggs (Institute for Strategic Dialogue) and Peter Neumann (International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation) give a presentation for the COMPAS Breakfast Brefiing Series. There has been considerable media attention focusing on the security concerns that foreign fighters pose to not only Syria and Iraq, but also their countries of origin. This briefing outlines the nature and scale of the problem and unpack the motivations of Westerners that are drawn to fight alongside IS and explore their activities on the ground. It also addresses responses to this threat, which are constantly evolving. Much attention has been directed towards harder policy approaches, particularly as foreign fighters return to Europe. The briefing discusses the need for alternative approaches that go beyond prosecution.

William Allen, Migration Observatory, COMPAS, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the COMPAS Breakfast Briefing series. On 1 January 2014, transitional controls placed on Bulgarians and Romanians wanting to work in the UK were lifted. From 1 December 2012 to 1 December 2013, arguably a crucial time in the run-up to this important change, UK national newspapers discussed the potential magnitude, impacts, and composition of migrants from these countries. But how did the British national press portray these groups? What kinds of issues were raised in relation to people from these countries? This briefing will explore these questions using new research from The Migration Observatory, Bulgarians and Romanians in the British National Press: 1 December 2012 – 1 December 2013. Analysing the language used by different sections of the UK national press (tabloids and broadsheets) to describe Bulgarians and Romanians over an entire year reveals clear differences in the kinds of words used to refer to each group. Furthermore, it uncovers a range of numerical figures referring to anticipated numbers of migrants that circulated in the press, despite a continuing lack of official data.

In the fourth panel of the Decade of Migration conference Nicholas Van Hear, Robin Cohen and John Burry look at geopolitical influences and global shifts in power and how it affects migrants. Nick Van Hear highlights milestones in geo-politics that show how changes in global political economy have shaped migration and mobility. Robin Cohen's talk is "From new helots to the precariat: back to the future". Jon Urry completes the panel by looking at new mobilities paradigms and offshore worlds. Part of the Decade of Migration Conference. This international conference marked the 10 year anniversary of COMPAS and looked to future research agendas. Bringing together leading academics and senior practitioners from across the world, this event discussed how migration research has re-configured the social sciences over the past 10 years and in turn how changes in the social sciences have influenced the study of mobility and migration, their patterns, consequences and policies.

In the third panel of the Decade of Migration conference Martin Ruhs, Monique Kremer, and Roger Waldinger gave different insights into mobility and the global labour market. Martin Ruhs highlights some key inter-disciplinary and policy related themes of COMPAS research that will be important in the future. Monique Kremer looked at the relationship between the labour market and the welfare state, while Roger Waldinger critiques the transnational perspective on migration. Part of the Decade of Migration Conference. This international conference marked the 10 year anniversary of COMPAS and looked to future research agendas. Bringing together leading academics and senior practitioners from across the world, this event discussed how migration research has re-configured the social sciences over the past 10 years and in turn how changes in the social sciences have influenced the study of mobility and migration, their patterns, consequences and policies.

In the first panel of the Decade of Migration conference Ash Amin and Vicki Bell focus on cities. Ash Amin outlines work set out in his book "City of Migrants", looking at the characteristic of the city and its construction of migrants and migrant experiences. Vicki Bell considers "Routes not taken", examining routes not taken in the field of memory studies and its relation to history based on research in Cordoba, Argentina. Part of the Decade of Migration Conference. This international conference marked the 10 year anniversary of COMPAS and looked to future research agendas. Bringing together leading academics and senior practitioners from across the world, this event discussed how migration research has re-configured the social sciences over the past 10 years and in turn how changes in the social sciences have influenced the study of mobility and migration, their patterns, consequences and policies.

Michael Keith, Paul Boyle, and Andrew Hamilton introduce the conference "Decade of Migration" and discuss the challenges and hopes for the topics and discussions. Part of the Decade of Migration Conference. This international conference marked the 10 year anniversary of COMPAS and looked to future research agendas. Bringing together leading academics and senior practitioners from across the world, this event discussed how migration research has re-configured the social sciences over the past 10 years and in turn how changes in the social sciences have influenced the study of mobility and migration, their patterns, consequences and policies.

Based on a project conducted by LSE and COMPAS Isabel Shutes talk examines inclusion and exclusion with regards to welfare rights. She looks at forms of differential inclusion and exclusion cut across citizens and non-citizens like, as applied to EU citizens, non-EU citizens, and British citizens. Part of the COMPAS Seminar Series Trinity 2014- Borders of the welfare state: Exploring the tensions between migration enforcement and welfare state entitlements

Part of the COMPAS Seminar Series Trinity 2014- Borders of the welfare state: Exploring the tensions between migration enforcement and welfare state entitlements Young people who arrive in the UK from outside Europe without a parent or legal guardian are institutionally categorised according to a range of possible legal statuses and usually afforded time-limited Leave to Remain in the UK. These categorisations are associated with specific welfare entitlements which tend to diminish over time and become particularly uncertain as young people transition into ‘adulthood’. Situated within a broader research programme examining the link between migration, ‘wellbeing’ and ‘futures’, this paper examines the multiple transitions imposed on young people subject to immigration control as they approach the age of 18 and beyond, (from child to ‘adult’, from being accorded a temporary residence permit to more permanent leave to remain or from legality to ‘illegality’) and the implications for their access to various dimensions of welfare provision. This talk shows how different components of the ‘state’ have time limitations at their disposal to control access to welfare and state support according to chronological age. From young people’s perspectives, such ‘tactics’ fundamentally control their trajectories and future prospects unless they can formulate strategies of their own to counter such tactics.

Part of the COMPAS Seminar Series Trinity 2014- Borders of the welfare state: Exploring the tensions between migration enforcement and welfare state entitlements Theories of EU citizenship and equal treatment can seem optimistic and inclusive in academic study, but are somewhat at odds with the reality of being an EU migrant. This presentation draws upon findings of the EU Rights Project which tests out the accessibility of EU welfare rights in the UK, through taking on cases, representing clients, and conducting a parallel ethnography of the claims and appeals processes. These findings are placed in the context of significant general recent welfare reform, and reforms targeting EU nationals specifically, suggesting that the motivation for dismantling institutionalised obstacles to accessing rights and accessing justice may be seriously impaired by the messages of suspicion and aversion created through the law.

Jacobsen, Bendixsen and Karlsen outline findings from the project PROVIR, examining the access to welfare and its limitations for irregular migrants in Norway. Part of the COMPAS Seminar Series Trinity 2014- Borders of the welfare state: Exploring the tensions between migration enforcement and welfare state entitlements

COMPAS Seminar Series Trinity 2014- Borders of the welfare state: Exploring the tensions between migration enforcement and welfare state entitlements Over the last two decades, research on unauthorized migration has departed from the equation of migrant illegality with absolute exclusion, emphasizing that formal exclusion typically results in subordinate inclusion. Irregular migrants integrate through informal support networks, the underground economy, and political activities. But they also incorporate into formal institutions, either through policy divergence between levels of government, bureaucratic sabotage or fraud. The incorporation of undocumented migrants involves not so much invisibility as camouflage – presenting the paradox that camouflage improves with integration. As it reaches the formal level of claims and procedures, legalization brings up the issue of the frames through which legal deservingness is asserted. Looking at the moral economy embedded in claims and programs, we examine a series of frame tensions: between universal and particular claims to legal status, between legalization based on vulnerability and that based on civic performance, between economic and cultural deservingness, and between the policy level and individual subjectivity. Sebastien Chauvin shows that restrictionist governments face a dilemma when their constructions of “good citizenship” threaten to extend to “deserving” undocumented migrants. Hence they may simultaneously emphasize deservingness frames while limiting irregular migrants’ opportunities to deserve, effectively making deservingness both a civic obligation and a civic privilege.

COMPAS Seminar Series Trinity 2014- Borders of the welfare state: Exploring the tensions between migration enforcement and welfare state entitlements he European Social Charter (ESC) is the socio-economic 'sister' instrument of the ECHR. The text of the ESC contains a comprehensive list of social rights, which are generally binding on the vast majority of European states, and its provisions have exerted a considerable influence over the development of national and EU legal standards (including the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights). However, a tension exists between the universal nature of these rights and the limited personal scope of the ESC, which in general exempts irregular migrants from its scope of protection. The European Committee on Social Rights (ECSR), the body which interprets the ESC, has tried to bridge this tension by setting out a minimum floor of social protection which should apply to all irregular migrants, in decision such as Defence of Children International v Netherlands. However, states have resisted this interpretation of the ESC, and it remains to be seen whether this minimum floor of basic social rights protection will become an effective means of guaranteeing irregular migrants access to essential services across Europe.

Liz Collett and Milica Petrovic from the Migration Policy Institute give a talk The UK debate has been obsessed with numbers, limits and caps since 2010, and arguably a generation. This misses the real story of immigration: how immigrants integrate into society. When do migrants cease to be migrants? The integration story is a complex one but its importance cannot be understated: whether or not groups are successfully included will ultimately shape immigration policy. MPI Europe has been interested in what governments can do to encourage such a process. In the UK, policy responsibility for integration is diffused through a range of national and local government agencies, often with unclear or overlapping mandates. In contrast, countries in mainland Europe, such as the Netherlands and Denmark, tend to resource specialised actors within government that design and manage integration policies in isolation from mainstream policy, with clear targets and tailored interventions. As policy-makers in these countries grapple with the need to infuse integration priorities into mainstream policy portfolios across government, what can be learned from the British experience, and vice versa?

Derek McGhee and Claire Bennett, University of Southampton, give a talk for the COMPAS Breakfast Breifing series Citizens may be broadly in agreement with government immigration policy and acknowledge the consequent logic of illegality and deportation, but its actual practice can be deeply unsettling, challenging liberal respect for physical integrity and freedom of choice. State funded ‘Assisted Voluntary Return’ (AVR) programmes seem to resolve these contradictions and are on the increase across Europe. Returnees are not subjected to outward mechanisms of enforcement (handcuffs, guards, etc.) but rather ‘choose’ to return and are granted a support package to reintegrate. NGOs are becoming heavily involved in these programmes, and in the UK the entire programme is implemented by a refugee charity, Refugee Action. This briefing draws on ‘Tried and Trusted ? the Role of NGOs in the Assisted Voluntary Return of Refused Asylum Seekers and Irregular Migrants’ a joint research project between the Centre for Population Change, University of Southampton and COMPAS, Oxford University. It discusses how ‘choice’ is understood in the context of state enforced destitution and ‘illegality’. Does AVR make immigration enforcement more acceptable in liberal democracies? Does the focus on choice mean we miss questions of justice? How do NGOs implementing the programme negotiate these tensions? Can NGOs maintain independence when funded by governments? Does this relationship open space for weighty advocacy’ or are NGOs simply ‘doing the government’s dirty work’? These issues are also discussed in relation to detention centres, where the Home Office has recently removed access to AVR. AVR is a laboratory for the development of new forms of co-operation between states and NGOs.

Sue Lukes former member of the Housing and Migration Network and John Perry former member of the Housing and Migration Network and Policy Adviser at the Chartered Institute of Housing and manager of housing rights give a talk for the COMPAS Series Destitution appears to be a growing problem among migrants, for a variety of reasons. London rough sleeping data consistently show more than half of rough sleepers are migrants, although proportions are generally much lower elsewhere. This breakfast briefing looks at the evidence of how much destitution there is among migrants, the different reasons why it occurs and also the difficulties in assessing the extent of destitution. It also looks at how advice agencies and others can assist destitute migrants and what issues arise in doing so. Finally, it looks briefly at a case study of a current project. The speakers are Sue Lukes and John Perry who respectively write for and edit the Housing Rights website run by the Chartered Institute of Housing.

This talk was hosted by COMPAS and the University of Oxford's Human Rights Hub. It was chaired by Dr. Sarah Spencer (COMPAS) and comments provided by Dr. Cathryn Costello (Director, Human Rights Hub).

In recent years, many European countries have been grimly reminded of the threat from far-right violence motivated by hatred towards migrants and minorities. This talk explores how 10 European countires are attempting to address this. Amongst other events, the attacks on Oslo in July 2011 and the discovery of the National Socialist Underground in Germany have fed the fear that right-wing violence is on the rise, and raised questions about whether this form of extremism has been a blind spot for European policy makers and security officials. This briefing sets out the results of a 2-year research project, funded by the European Commission, to assess policy and practitioner approaches to far-right extremism across 10 EU countries (UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovak Republic), and enhance European cooperation and sharing of good practice. Drawing on interviews with over 100 individuals across Europe, from those writing National Action Plans to counter extremism to those carrying out one-on-one interventions with far right supporters, the presentation will set forth key challenges and recommendations for prevention, intervention and response to far-right extremism and hate crime.

This talk draws on a case study of forced displacement, onward migration, and prospective return within the living memory of one community, and explores questions of freedom and force ethnographically: How do members of this community conceptualise compulsion and choice in their own and others' lives, and with what implications for the politics of victimhood and claims for redress?

Geetanjali Gangoli, University of Bristol, gives a talk for the COMPAS seminar series on forced marriage and its implications on immigration and human rights The issue of forced marriage is extremely contentious in the UK, and has undergone much policy and legal shifts in the past few decades. This talk looks at how immigration policies treat the issue of forced marriage including attempts to increase entry age on a marriage visas and current rhetoric on immigration, and attempt to look at the implications that these engagements have had and potentially continue to have for gender, ethnicity and immigration issues nationally and internationally. It will specifically look at the twists and turns in immigration and forced marriage policy over the last decade, and government approaches to research evidence in this regard.

This seminar discusses the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) Index. This project builds a dataset on immigration policies in all OECD countries for the period 1980-2010. It will open a completely new research field and allow researchers to study the causes and effects of immigration policies and developments across time more systematically. Contrary to existing indices this index will be conceptually more comprehensive and distinguish between (1) all relevant policy fields, (2) regulations that create/constrain rights and control mechanisms, (3) external regulations that concern border crossing and thus eligibility criteria and conditions and internal regulations that concern the status and rights of immigrants.

Part of the COMPAS Seminar Series Michaelmas 2013: Rebordering: reflections in relation to (post)socialism Madeleine Reeves (University of Manchester) explores the relationship between infrastructure, (re)bordering, and inter-communal relations in rural Central Asia. Two decades after independence from the Soviet Union, large stretches of the international border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan remain to be juridically delimited or demarcated. The two states are in disagreement over which maps and normative acts, ratified in one republic but not the other when both were part of the Soviet Union, should be taken as the basis of negotiation for border delimitation today. This presentation explores the contemporary legacies of spatial indeterminacy for understanding the politics of territorial integrity in contemporary Kyrgyzstan. Drawing on ethnographic research in border villages, the paper explores local concerns over creeping migration at new international borders and the contention that has arisen over new initiatives of bypass-building that are intended to reinforce territorial integrity and transport independence in a context of disputed territoriality. In so doing, I seek to bring discussions of rebordering after socialism into conversation with the anthropology of infrastructure, to draw attention to the material politics of border work in contemporary Central Asia.

Part of the COMPAS Seminar Series Michaelmas 2013: Rebordering: reflections in relation to (post)socialism This paper moves from the usual focus on mobile people crossing borders (migrants, traders, tourists, etc.) to examine more closely the activities of the various state agencies found at the international border. It is argued, focussing on the Russian side, that these agencies need to be disaggregated and that the relations both between and within them are incoherent. The actions of state agencies are not merely reactive but dynamic and unpredictable. Their incoherence and and predictability give rise to wide ranging shifts in the patterns of activity of the mobile people crossing the border.

Part of the COMPAS Seminar Series Michaelmas 2013: Rebordering: reflections in relation to (post)socialism Madina Tlostanova. Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration gives a talk on the post-communist remapping of the world has effectively left the post-socialist people out of the new world order of global coloniality. We are inhabiting its margins and desperately trying to cross the newly drawn seemingly transparent but in fact much more impenetrable boundaries, in the strange capacity of the new subalterns who are longing yet are never able to belong, remaining forever marked with a peculiar double consciousness of being too same to be real others for the West and too different to be fully accepted. This sensibility can evolve in the direction of anger, rejection and hostility, in a predictable assimilative way of crossing borders in order to eventually reroot in a new soil. But it can also give birth to a specific version of positive though critical border thinking (dwelling in the border being the border rather than simply crossing borders). This stance intersects in many ways with decolonial option originating in Latin American thought, as well as with more well known Anglophone postcolonial studies, but there are also considerable diversions due to specific local histories of the Post-Socialist world. Why then the post-socialists still do not have a discourse of their/our own and largely remain invisible? And how the post-socialist border thinking and imaginary can be drawn into the general picture of global coloniality and the no less global decolonial response?

Alexander Betts, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the COMPAS seminar series The seminar, based on Betts' new book, explores the challenge of responding to new drivers of cross-border displacement that fall outside the existing refugee framework. Rather than beginning with particular causes of displacement - whether environmental change, food insecurity, or generalized violence - it offers a human rights-based framework through which to critically consider who, in a changing world, should be entitled to cross an international border and seek asylum. Based on extensive fieldwork, it grounds its analysis in an exploration of contemporary flight from three of the most fragile states in the world: Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia. It explains the massive variation in national and international institutional responses in the neighbouring states, arguing that politics rather than law ultimately determines how the refugee regime is implemented in practice.

Karen O'Reilly, University of Loughborough, gives a talk for the COMPAS seminar series This paper draws attention to the relatively affluent nature and precarious positioning of some lifestyle migration. Lifestyle migration has been defined as the movement of relatively affluent people to destinations that offer an improved quality of life. Lifestyle migrants (often, but not always, Westerners) are thought to move more in search of freedom and leisure than for security or as a result of economic necessity. However, lifestyle migrants are not always affluent in absolute terms; nor are they unerringly powerful or privileged. Increasingly, studies of lifestyle migration are drawing attention to the precarious nature of their migrant experience, whereby rules and regulations governing movement affect those groups who always seem most vulnerable: the elderly, the poor, women, and children.

Julia O'Connell Davidson considers historical notions of slavery and how they can or cannot be applied to modern situations of forced migration. Debates about force and freedom are fundamental to migration theory and policy. The refugee/migrant binary that has been the subject of significant critique in research continues to underpin asylum and immigration policy, while considerable resources are devoted to distinguishing between the trafficked (forced) and the smuggled (free choice) migrant. Immigration policy has long sought to categorise and 'identify' those who must be rescued and those who must be punished. This seminar series will critically examine these distinctions, but it will also engage with the hidden compulsions of immigration controls (such as worker sponsorship) and the liberally discomforting explicit force of detention and deportation. What does this reveal about ideals of freedom? What does the foregrounding of the forced/free binary obfuscate?

Martin Ruhs, COMPAS, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the COMPAS podcast series The great majority of labour immigration programmes in high-income countries are temporary migration programmes that limit the migrant‚ employment to the employer specified on the work permit. Drawing on his recent book ‚ÄúThe Price of Rights. Regulating International Labor Migration (Princeton University Press 2013, www.priceofrights.com ), Martin Ruhs discusses the causes and consequences of tying migrant workers to their employers.

Allan Findlay, David McCollum and Jakub Bijak give a talk on migration and Scotland In September 2014 Scotland will hold an historic referendum on its constitutional future. Migration is an important aspect of the debates surrounding this ballot: the current UK government has emphasised its desire to restrict immigration to Britain, whilst the Scottish Government has viewed net immigration as a valuable contributor to the economic and demographic growth of Scotland. The Breakfast Briefing explores these contrasting positions and draws on new research (using secondary datasets, and interviews with employers, students and local authorities) undertaken as part of the ESRC 's 'Future of the UK and Scotland' programme. The speakers consider the challenges and opportunities that Scotland faces in devising an immigration policy attuned to its particular needs, whatever the outcome of the referendum.

Alice Bloch, University of Manchester, gives a talk for the COMPAS Breakfast Breifing series This briefing draws on data from an ESRC funded project, 'Undocumented Migrants, Ethnic Enclaves and Networks: Opportunities, traps or class-based constructs', in order to explore the choices and constraints of undocumented migrants in the labour market, from their own perspectives. It examines the diverse realities of working lives among undocumented migrants. Focusing on how undocumented migrants navigate their precarious situations the briefing will attempt to shed light on some of these individual experiences within the wider policy and structural frameworks in which they operate.

Martin Ruhs, COMPAS, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the COMPAS Breakfast Breifing series Many low-income countries and development organisations are calling for greater liberalization of labor immigration policies in high-income countries. At the same time, human rights organisations and migrant rights advocates demand more equal rights for migrant workers. The Price of Rights, a new book by COMPAS economist Martin Ruhs, shows why you cannot always have both. Examining labor immigration policies in over forty countries, as well as policy drivers in major migrant-receiving and migrant-sending states, Martin Ruhs finds that there are trade-offs in the policies of high-income countries between openness to admitting migrant workers and some of the rights granted to migrants after admission. Insisting on greater equality of rights for migrant workers can come at the price of more restrictive admission policies, especially for lower-skilled workers.In this breakfast briefing, Martin Ruhs will give an overview of his analysis and discuss the implications for global and national debates about migrant rights, labour migration and development.