Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS)

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.