Reflecting on Managed Migration

The recent ‘Managed Migration’ conference (19 May 09) organized by inside government took place in the plush surroundings of a central London hotel. As I was looking for the hotel, I mused about how the choice of location, a hotel in transnational ownership hints at transnational mobility, though in this case of capital.

The conference attendees consisted mainly of those working for local and regional government, the police and the UK Border Agency. Academics were very sparsely represented, only one participant identified herself as working for an NGO. (She asked how organizations like hers would be helped to support an increasing number of homeless migrants who’d become destitute as a consequence of the economic crisis and their ineligibility to benefits. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t receive an answer that satisfied her).

The programme reflected key issues framing the managed migration agenda: Border controls, migration and the economy, ‘empowering’ local government to efficiently deal with migration, security and social cohesion.

Speakers addressed new border control technologies, enabling ‘smart checks’ on who enters and leaves the UK. This was praised as a ‘system that works well for the public’ as it allows them smoother transfers, while enabling removal of ‘foreign nationals already radicalized’. The control of borders was thus clearly linked to the preventing terrorism agenda. Interestingly, the speaker suggested their ability to ‘stay out of the headlines’ as one measures of their success.

A speaker from the UK Border Agency's Migration Advisory Committee pointed out the need to ‘raise UK human capital’ through migration. As part of this, an assessment of the economic contribution of family migrants is planned, constituting an interesting departures from the clear delineation of economically useful versus family migrants.

The complexity of current migrations, often termed as ‘superdiversity’ was addressed by others. Ted Cantle put forward community cohesion as the way of generating shared values and overcoming ‘parallel lives’. He critiqued multiculturalism for empoweing unaccountable community leaders, a dynamic that marginalized especially young women. This takes up criticisms of multiculturalism that have been formulated by antiracist feminists. Yet social cohesion policy is not addressing antiracist feminist demands, but to the contrary making their work more difficult and instead imbuing faith representatives and themes, not antiracist feminist agendas, with power (see, for example Pragna Patel on defending secular spaces). 

The question of community cohesion is closely related to the construction of locality, thus a speaker from the East of England, an area experiencing recent migration, reported on ‘good practice’ of how to locally manage the integration of migrant workers against the backdrop of criticism of inadequate resources from central government. Last but not least, a speaker from the police addressed migrants as victims and perpetrators of crime. His argument about the importance of linking policing to a social cohesion agenda and partnerships, underlines the strong link between control of migration, security, and social cohesion as a project of shaping not just ‘shared values’ but regulations of ‘community.’