Opening the recent Migrant Voice conference in London, founder Nazek Ramadan stated that on the question of migration, ‘we are all in this together’. Striking a key note for the event as a whole, her comments suggest that the issue needs to be approached not from the dualistic and often antagonistic perspective which pits citizen against non-citizen, but from a number of different directions at once.
In an increasingly polarised debate – exacerbated by recent successes by the UK Independence Party in local elections earlier this year – the need to confront a governmental agenda hostile to migration in Britain through collaboration with other dissenting voices is ever more pressing. However, it is also a major challenge. A key question arising from the varied conversations which took place at the conference was how to productively reorient prevailing views of migration in light of systemic inequalities at both the national and global levels. After all, with proliferating economic and ecological crises, migration is set to increase and, as Zoe Tyndall predicts, ‘the political narrative around immigration will only continue to harden.’
Immigration has long been a touchstone for politicians across the political spectrum in Britain, but as Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather opened the debate by commenting, concerns about migration in the public sphere conceal a complex and wide-ranging reality which politicians are unwilling to address. These sentiments were echoed by other members of the ‘Question Time’ style panel with which the conference began, with many arguing that the highly-charged migration debate in Britain is a smokescreen for systemic inequalities. For Sheffield University’s Jairo Lugo-Ocando, the perennially popular issue of immigration allows the government to deflect concerns over social equality, welfare, employment and housing. Arguing against David Goodhart (whose controversial new book The British Dream: The Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration has recently been reviewed on openDemocracy), Lugo-Ocando remarked that the reason for the low standard of living for many people in the UK is not that migrants occupy a disproportionately high number of jobs, but is a result of the neo-liberal economic model which requires modes of working that are low-wage, insecure and often exploitative.
