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Taken together these essays reveal both synergies and contradictions between and within immigration and welfare policies. Several common themes emerge. Firstly, while access to the welfare state is an important signifier of membership, in practice claiming certain state benefits is accompanied by suspicion, surveillance and stigma. The good citizen is a worker citizen. Secondly, the importance of the welfare state in putting the nation into the nation-state: the normative national community imagined as the rightful subject of welfare states is racialised and classed. Thirdly, deservingness functions in both welfare states and immigration regimes to prioritise victimhood rather than rights and redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the lens of state control over mobilities of residents both migrants and citizens to move away from assumptions that position them as competitors for the privileges of membership. I begin by critiquing the migrant/citizen binary, claiming that it promotes as actuality Fantasy Citizenship of equality and accessible rights when the reality is one of banal citizenship. This Fantasy citizen is a Worker Citizen. However, the substance of the 'right to work' is the right to the welfare safety net and the banal citizen finds access to this safety net restricted by the 'duty to work'. Taking the example of the UK and specifically, England, I examine how citizens' mobility is restricted and controlled, firstly by social housing allocation policies which effectively turns citizens into 'migrants' via worker citizenship, and secondly through the restrictions of COVID-19 including its racialised policing. In this way, I suggest closer attention to state restrictions on the mobilities of citizens can help draw out connections in practice between the citizen and the migrant, connections that are obscured by Fantasy Citizenship and the migrant citizen binary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how wealthy countries' reliance on migrant workers is not restricted to migrants working within their borders but extends, through global supply chains, to migrants employed in lower-income countries. It provides an exploratory discussion of how migration, labour, and trade systems interact to argue for the expansion of research on dependence on migrant labour – a 'widening of the lens' – beyond national systems effects. Using the COVID-19 pandemic and associated concern with the provision of essential goods and services, we consider how the employment of migrants in global supply chains, and by extension societal resilience of higher-income countries, is shaped by trade policies and agreements regulating flows of essential products across countries; labour markets and conditions in low- and middle-income countries producing essential products for export; and migration systems between and within low- and middle-income countries. Thus, we tentatively explore how national systems and institutions interlock with those of other states, and also with transnational and international institutions. We illustrate our arguments with a case study of the Malaysian production and export of rubber gloves, an essential good during the COVID-19 pandemic that is heavily dependent on migrant labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the 'essential workers' during the Covid-19 pandemic are migrants, playing an important role for the continued functioning of basic services – notably health services, social care, and food supply chains. We argue that this role should be taken into account when assessing the impacts of migrant workers and in the design of labour migration and related public policies. Existing studies highlight how the employment of migrant workers in essential services is shaped by interests of employers, sectoral policies, and national institutions. Considerations of how migrants may affect the systemic resilience of essential services – in a pandemic or similar crises – are pervasively absent, not only in policy-making but also in research. Drawing on several disciplines, we outline the concept of systemic resilience and develop implications for the analysis and regulation of labour migration. We call for shifting the focus from the role of migrants in specific occupations and sectors in particular countries to transnational systems of production and service provision. To study how migrant workers affect systemic resilience, we propose an agenda for comparative research along three lines: comparing migrants to citizens within the same system, comparing migrants' roles across systems, and comparing strategies for resilience adopted in different systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Janine Dahinden and Bridget Anderson discuss each other's responses to the challenges of knowledge production in migration studies. Dahinden introduces the concept of the "migrant-citizen nexus" and Anderson argues for more attention to be paid to the racialisation of "the migrant" through the ways that nationality elides race and discuss the nationalistic policies adopted in reaction to the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent migration ‘crises’ raise important geopolitical questions. Who is ‘the migrant’ that contemporary politics are fixated on? How are answers to ‘who counts as a migrant’ changing? Who gets to do that counting, and under what circumstances? This forum responds to, as well as questions, the current saliency of migration by examining how categories of migration hold geopolitical significance—not only in how they are constructed and by whom, but also in how they are challenged and subverted. Furthermore, by examining how the very concepts of ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ are used in different contexts, and for a variety of purposes, it opens up critical questions about mobility, citizenship and the nation state. Collectively, these contributions aim to demonstrate how problematising migration and its categorisation can be a tool of enquiry into other phenomena and processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In public debates support for migrants' rights has generally taken two approaches: the migrant as "Good Worker" or the migrant as "Poor Slave". This paper will constructively critique these approaches by considering the case of a U.K. campaign demanding a specific visa for migrant domestic workers and how they drew on the Good Worker/Poor Slave. It describes the campaign's initial focus on domestic workers as workers and how this required demanding special rights as migrant workers on the basis of the specific conditions in the private household, at the same time as calling for paid domestic work to be recognised as a job like any other. The campaign was initially successful, but the right to change employer was withdrawn in 2012. The revived campaign was this time situated within the debates about "modern slavery" and the paper will consider some of the ways in which the U.K. government has responded to this. It will argue for the importance of not reifying the difference between "migrant" and "citizen", thereby recognising connections between national and non-national workers, and also between commodified and non-commodified reproductive labour. Given the low level of public debate at the moment this may not be possible for campaigners but academics must continue in attempts to raise the level of public debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration controls serve a crucial symbolic function of delineating the nation and the people, the boundaries of 'Us' and 'Them' and state legitimacy is, through immigration policy, linked to ideas of nation building and preservation (Honig, 2003). Labor migration policy is not simply an instrumental response to the needs of employers but highly symbolic and politically contested terrain that assumes intense public significance. This is particularly evident in the case of domestic workers, who are embedded in the family, the 'heart of the nation'. This paper explores the ways in which migration policies on domestic work not only produce a subordinated workforce, but reflect and construct ideas about family, work, and Britishness, with a particular focus on two visa types: domestic worker accompanying an employer and au pair visas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the argument that immigration controls can be protective of migrants/victims of trafficking. It examines how the avoidance of “harm” has become central to immigration enforcement and considers the implications of this with particular reference to children. It argues that the language of protection and harm risks inscribing the state as an appropriate protector, not just for children, but for at-risk migrants more generally. This is deeply problematic when, through immigration controls and practices, the state is implicated in constructing this vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This article examines how immigration controls and practices work with (and against) migratory processes and migrant subjectivities to help produce types of labour with particular relations to employers, and types of resident with particular relations to citizens. It considers the social and legal construction of the figure of the migrant, and taking the case of au pair and domestic worker visa holders, examines how and why it is that despite these two groups doing the same kinds of tasks, the ways in which these tasks are imagined, and the relationships produced, are often very different. It illustrates how immigration controls, social and historical conditions, and life stages and subjectivities help explain the different experiences of different visa holders, and shape the possibilities for collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the issue of trafficking, as well as public concern over prostitution/sex work, immigration, and the abuse and exploitation it frequently involves. The United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted the UN Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime in November 2000 which aims to promote interstate cooperation in the combating of transnational organised crime and to eliminate safe havens for its perpetrators. Its three additional protocols include the smuggling of migrants, trafficking in persons, and trafficking in firearms. The proliferation of irregular migration and the abuse of migrant workers are attributed by European governments to traffickers. It points out the de-politicisation of anti-trafficking interventions is a form of anti-politics.

This article considers whether there is a specific demand for migrant domestic workers in the UK, or for workers with particular characteristics that in theory could be met by citizens. It discusses how immigration status can make it easier not only to recruit domestic workers, but also to retain them. ‘Foreignness’ may also make the management of the employment relation easier with employers anxious to discover a coincidence of interest with the worker. Employers are not only looking for generic ‘foreignness’ however, but typically also seek particular nationalities or ethnicities of worker, which can raise difficulties for agencies who are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of ‘race’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author comments on review of his book "Us & Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control" by reviewer Joseph H. Carens. Topics discussed include privilege of studying immigration, impact of migration on social, economic, and political issues, and issues of migration separated from factors such as homelessness, health and labour rights.