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This article draws attention to the limitations of the UK's integration and cohesion agenda and introduces an alternative analytical approach that focuses on solidarity, mobility and citizenship over cohesion, integration and community. Developing such an approach through analysing the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into Citizens campaign, the article has two interrelated objectives. First, it aims to shed critical light on the assumptions regarding community that inform the UK's integration and cohesion agenda, which involves a series of contradictions that exclude asylum seekers and irregular migrants as subjects of integration and cohesion. Second, it aims to offer some reflections on how these assumptions are challenged by the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into Citizens campaign, based on the activation of mobile solidarities that cut across established social hierarchies. In so doing, the article suggests that the UK's approach to integration and cohesion is flawed because it overlooks engagements and solidarities in which cultural categories and legal distinctions are extraneous, while at the same time it privileges the collective engagements of established residents over those whose presence may be more fleeting or less definite. In order to demonstrate the inadequacies of such an approach, the article shows how minor acts of citizenship that are mobilised by City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens enact a mobile form of solidarity based on participation through presence. This, the article argues, potentially serves as the grounds for a critical alternative to an approach that assumes that intensified movements and diversities induce hostility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union is often seen as a laboratory for a post-national polity. Leaving aside important discussions regarding exclusionary citizenship practices at the European level, this article draws attention to the on-going importance of member states' citizenship traditions, which constrain the development of post-national citizenship in the EU. Considering the cases of Germany and the UK, the article shows how longer-standing citizenship traditions continue to play an important role in mediating relations between citizens and migrants. This, we suggest, remains the case despite changes to citizenship law over the past decades that have brought the two traditions closer to one another. Specifically, the article examines the on-going influence of each citizenship tradition with reference to political debates surrounding migration since 11 September 2001. It argues that divergent processes of 'securitising' migration reflect the respective citizenship traditions of the two member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper charts the development of restrictive asylum policy since New Labour came into power in 1997, and assesses party political responses to asylum during this period. It considers how far a discourse of control has become dominant across the political spectrum over recent years, and develops an account of the flourishing of restrictive asylum policy in contemporary Britain. In so doing, the paper challenges conventional interpretations that perceive restrictive policies to be a direct result of rising numbers of asylum applications and ‘abuse’ of the asylum system. It also challenges interpretations that perceive restrictive policies to result directly from popular pressures to intensify controls. Instead, the paper argues that restrictive policy is conditioned by inter-party dynamics, which need to be understood in relation to a wider discourse of control. This discourse of control, the paper suggests, has become increasingly dominant both in political and also in public or popular discourse, and is evident both at the domestic as well as the European levels.British Politics (2008) 3, 241–261. doi:10.1057/bp.2008.4 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does New Labour's multicultural introduction of the 2002 White Paper ' Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain' mark a progressive shift in migration policy? Analysing policy debates surrounding the 2002 legislation through a discourse theoretical perspective, this paper assesses how far New Labour practices an integrative approach to nationality, immigration and asylum. Locating the analysis historically, the paper first reconstructs New Labour's normative framework through the adaptation of Berry's model of refugee acculturation. It then goes on to problematise claims to a multicultural 'integration with diversity', arguing that processes of 'assimilation through segregation' are indicative of a primary monoculturalism within New Labour's approach. In showing how a complex of inclusions and exclusions maintains this exclusivist approach, the paper suggests that the ideological concealment of monoculturalism is evidence of a reactionary and conservative response rather than a radically progressive one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]