Call for Papers for Special Issue of Migration Studies: Trump, Brexit, and the turbulent politics of migration

Deadline: 1 September 2017

Migration Studies invites original contributions addressing the rise of populism and anti-immigration sentiment in Western liberal democracies and its impacts on migration and migrants. We welcome contributions that cast light on a rapidly changing political landscape where long held assumptions on the value of international cooperation, human rights, tolerance, and multiculturalism are being challenged both ideologically and on the ground by a new emerging political and social consensus. Concrete and smart walls are being proposed and built in many countries allegedly to stop unauthorised human mobility; unprecedented financial and human resources are directed to public and private contractors to secure and police external borders; public service providers and private individuals (landlords, neighbours, employers) are summoned to carry out internal border policing against migrants and visible minorities.

Migrants and minorities are caught in an ongoing ideological battle that is reverberating through multiple domains of their daily lives, threatening family life and livelihoods, and reconfiguring rights and entitlements to public services and social security. Nostalgic views of the British Empire are increasingly vented in the UK. Anti-Islam and anti-immigration positions have gained prominence in many EU countries and in the US, often accompanied by a longing for an idealised return to the nation, often with barely disguised racial connotations. Donald Trump’s “America First” and Theresa May’s “red, white and blues Brexit” encapsulate a changing politics of belonging that is redrawing the boundaries of ‘us and them’ in western liberal democracies and in doing so unleashing and legitimising racist and ultra-nationalist ideas and practices.

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