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Immigration is a flypaper issue: all kinds of anxieties about a variety of problems get stuck to it. The people I have been listening to in interview-based research projects over the past decade[1] use it as a device through which to express losing their place in the world, being abandoned by government to their struggles over dwindling, stigmatised social housing, employment, and the ways they now perceive themselves to be at a disadvantage relative to migrants and other ethnic minorities. I have placed ‘perceived’ in italics: perception is everything. Statistics do not support these claims of ethnic disadvantage. Indeed, to take just one figure from many, Black and Minority Ethnic households were, prior to the 2008 recession, 40% more likely to be in income poverty (i.e. with incomes below the poverty line) than white UK ones (Platt, 2007). Moreover, despite the frequent assertion that immigration has a set of negative impacts on employment, housing and other resources, my starting point is that immigration is neither the sole nor the direct cause of these outcomes. In this set of three articles, I’m going to move from how people read immigration, to the role of integration in the immigration discussion, and finish with some ideas on the future of immigration as a political topic.
After researching how white UK people in provincial English towns talk about social identities and entitlement [2] in a set of projects spanning 2005-2011, one conclusion is that the ‘immigration’ people talk about does not correspond to the nuts and bolts of immigration policy; the number of people actually entering and leaving Britain; who actually claims benefit; who pays taxes; or how to fill gaps in the labour force. People instead tend to understand ‘immigration’ through a set of overlapping frames. These are shaped simultaneously around nation, ‘race’ and class (among other things), and I use the term ‘discourse’ below as a shorthand to describe the contents of, and set of parameters to, the ways in which ‘immigration’ is discussed in the broadest sense.
