Gareth Mulvey

Immigration Under New Labour: Policy and Effects

The Labour governments time in office between 1997 and 2010 was characterised by legislative activism in immigration matters. This article contextualises and tracks the main continuities in the governments policy-making during this period. Key to this process was the attempt to create different conceptions of migrants according to ‘type’. Thus a dual approach was taken, one that characterised asylum-seekers and refugees as unwanted, and labour migrants as wanted. However, policy and discourse regarding the unwanted migrants were to have consequences, one of which was the creation of the notion that immigration was in crisis. This impacted on public perceptions and led to further policy-making that was reactive to the crisis the initial policy had created.

Refugee Integration Policy: The Effects of UK Policy-Making on Refugees in Scotland

While the concept of migrant integration is a contested one, national, sub-national and local governments over the past forty to fifty years have professed support for integration in various forms. However, practical measures have been rare, with broad race-relations policies from the 1960s being the primary means of ‘inclusion’. Under New Labour, refugees were identified as a migrant population with particular challenges and they have been the only migrant group subject to specific integration programmes. Nevertheless, policy and rhetoric about asylum seekers and refugees more generally have tended to operate against integration and have made it increasingly difficult for refugees to rebuild their lives. This paper examines refugee integration from the perspectives of the refugees themselves, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. It also looks at the governance of integration in Scotland and highlights Scottish distinctiveness vis-a-vis the UK. The article suggests that the consequences of broader UK Government policy around asylum and refugee issues negates any positive support in the form of refugee integration programmes and actively inhibits integration.

Social Citizenship, Social Policy and Refugee Integration: a Case of Policy Divergence in Scotland?

The relationship between Holyrood and Westminster is an evolving one where there is some evidence of policy divergence. Underpinning policy approaches are different views of social citizenship, with the Holyrood approach maintaining elements of the post-1945 welfare settlement. The place of refugees and asylum seekers within these differing approaches is currently underexplored. This article looks at the Scottish and UK Governments’ views of social rights and how they apply to asylum seekers and refugees. It suggests that despite refugee ‘policy’ being at least partly reserved, the Scottish Government has been able to take a different approach from that of Westminster, an approach underpinned by these differing welfare outlooks.

Between the crises: migration politics and the three periods of neoliberalism

Between the two UK referendums on European Community/European Union membership, the issue of migration came to dominate the entire debate. The period between 1975 and 2016 corresponds almost exactly to the neoliberal era in capitalism, in its British manifestation, and this is not coincidental. This article traces the shifting periods of neoliberalism (‘vanguard’, ‘social’ and ‘crisis’) across these 40 years, focusing in each case on how the policies associated with them specifically impacted migration into the United Kingdom. In particular, it will argue that the current migration crisis is at least partly an aspect of the wider crisis of neoliberalism as a form of capitalist organisation. It concludes that current levels of anti-migrant sentiment are a displaced expression of hostility to the social effects of neoliberalism, and which may nevertheless cause difficulties for British capital through the imposition of anti-free movement policies to which it is opposed.

Migration and identity in post-referendum Scotland

ABSTRACT This paper examines migration and identity in contemporary Scotland and engages with ongoing debates about the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The paper employs Arendt’s maxim of the ‘right to have rights’ to suggest that while identity would not be the sole or specific focus of policy, more well-developed social policy attuned to the complexities of identity formation would facilitate multicultural and multi-ethnic social identification.

Identities and Politics in the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum: The Polish and Pakistani Experience

The Scottish independence referendum on 18 September 2014 was couched around the implicit assumption that it was a homogenous group of ‘Scots’ voting on Scotland’s future. However, various groups with varying identification with Scotland were eligible to vote in the referendum. Scotland has five significant ‘immigrant’ groups that make up, collectively, 11.8% of Scotland’s population. They are growing, between 2001 and 2011 Scotland’s population, mainly due to immigration, grew by 5 per cent – the fastest rate of growth for 100 years. The Scottish Government projects that the Scottish population will rise by another 10% to 5.76 million by 2035.1 In terms of political participation many immigrants are usually thought of as largely invisible, assumed to be less prone to political activism and economically marginalized. Implicit is perhaps the notion of a kind of devoir de reserve (duty not to interfere) in host country political processes, partly due to an assumption of temporary rather than permanent migration. Though this psychology has a temporal dimension – whilst relatively new migrants may be ill inclined to participate in their new host country’s political processes, the second generation are more likely to be inclined towards engagement. While there is a body of sociological literature on minority communities’ identification with Scottishness and Britishness, there is little research about their political attitudes and views about the constitutional question.2 Race,