What role do memories play in displacement? Are memories political? In this episode, we discuss questions of memory, war, exile and building a new home. In this episode:Ammar Azzouz, Research Fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford and the Principal Investigator of Slow Violence and the City https://www.geog.ox.a…

In this episode: Guy Aitchison, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at Loughborough University https://www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/staff/guy-aitchison/#tab3If you need help or someone to talk to: https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/guides-to-support-and-services/seeking-help-for-a-mental-health-…

Perhaps one of the most contentious questions within debates around migration is how the movement of people across international borders affect levels of crime. Simply asking the question carries certain assumptions about the relevance of someone’s migration background to whether or not they are more at risk of committing or being the victim or cri…

The Danish parliament has voted in favour of seeking bilateral agreements with third countries to process and protect asylum seekers there instead of in Denmark. The practical and legal obstacles are many, as are worries about the protection of asylum seekers' human rights. In this episode: Nikolas Tan, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for…

EU citizens in the UK had to apply for settled status by the end of June. What does this entail and what happened to those who failed to do so? Why are employers checking the status of their employees?In this episode: Olivia Vicol, co-founder and Director of Work Rights Centre - https://www.workrightscentre.org/ Talking Migration is supported by th…

The UK government has published the New Plan for Immigration policy paper and a consultation period ran from late March to early May. The policy paper describes reforms to the asylum system and other parts of the immigration system. In this episode, we discuss the plans, their implications and criticism. In this episode:William Wheeler, Leverhulme …

In 2017, Dina Nayeri, an American-Iranian author, wrote an article for the Guardian with the title ‘The ungrateful refugee: We have no debt to repay’. Last year, she published the book ‘The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You’, which tells her own and several other refugees’ stories while exploring themes of refugee life.In this epis…

Every year, people die trying to reach safety and a better future in a different country. But how many and who they are has been mostly unknown. The Missing Migrants Project, run by IOM, has started to collect data on who the people are who have lost their lives while migrating. In this episode: Kate Dearden, Project Officerhttps://missingmigrants.…

The UNHCR plays a critical role in the protection of refugees. Yet while the UNHCR seeks to pressure states into providing aid and protection to refugees, it is also funded by states. What does this tension mean? How has the role of the UNHCR changed and how does it brand itself?In this episode: Jeff Crisp, Research Associate at the Refugee Studies…

In her new book, No Refuge, Serena Parekh describes what she calls the second refugee. This crisis means that the vast majority of refugees cannot find safety or conditions for a life with dignity. Parekh argues that this amounts to a structural injustice and she joins this episode to discuss her book. In this episode: Serena Parekh, Associate Prof…

Covid-19 has presented challenges for everyone, but some people are more affected than others. People with disabilities have not been able to socially distance to the extent that others can, and trying to do so may come with extra costs. For disabled asylum seekers, who in the UK are prevented from working and earning a living, this presents additi…

Many people believe that some or all immigration laws are unjust. Does that imply that citizens and migrants don’t have to obey those laws? Do some of us even have a duty to resist them? Is it possible to believe that migrants don’t have to comply with immigration laws even if you think states have a right to exclude immigrants?In this episode:Matt…

Professor David Owen, University of Southampton, talks about his latest book: What Do We Owe to Refugees? https://www.southampton.ac.uk/politics/about/staff/dowen.pageTo get the book: https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/What+Do+We+Owe+to+Refugees%3F-p-9781509539741Talking Migration is supported by the Department of Politics and International Relations at t…

The Coronavirus pandemic has led to restrictions on movement for everyone. How has the politics and policy of migration and asylum in Europe been affected? What might the long-term impact on Europe’s asylum policy be? In this episode:Catherine Woollard, Secretary General of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles: www.ecre.orgECRE’s information…

What role does colonialism play in contemporary asylum and migration politics? Do European asylum and migration policies reflect colonial power relations, or is colonialism something that exits in the past whilst different logics govern contemporary migration policies? And can the link between colonialism and asylum and migration even tell us somet…

One of the key policy goals of President Trump has been to curb migration from Mexico. But how is this received at the Mexican end? What policies have actually been agreed with, or imposed on, Mexico by the Trump administration? In this episode:Laura Carlsen, Director of the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy. Find more informa…

The Refugee Convention classes anyone as a refugee who fears persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. This does not include one group of people who are frequently persecuted for who they are, namely LGBTQ+ people. Yet many countries do recognise sexual orientation as a g…

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration was adopted at the end of 2018. Will is safeguard migrants' human rights, or undermine state sovereignty? In this episode:Elspeth Guild, Professor of Law at Queen Mary University of London https://www.qmul.ac.uk/law/staff/guild.htmlTugba Basaran, Senior Research Associate at the Centre for …

This episode was recorded last week with volunteers and researchers working on Samos. They tell about dreadful conditions, a third sector filling governance gaps and discuss alternative policies. The podcast is supported by the Department of Politics and the Migration Research Group, the University of Sheffield. In this episode:Giulia Cicoli, Co-Fo…

There are many calls for reforming the way the world protects, or fails to protect, refugees. Some have suggested that the UN Refugee Convention is out-dated, others that the right to seek asylum should be abolished or that asylum claims should be processed off-shore. At the same time, the UNHCR has been drafting a Global Compact on Refugees, promi…

The images of children in cages, separated from their parents, at the US-Mexico border have upset people across the world. Part of a so called 'zero-tolerance' policy against 'illegal' migration, everyone crossing the border, even to apply for asylum, become subject of criminal prosecution. To facilitate this, almost 2000 children have been separat…

Public and policy debates about immigration in most parts of the world are pursued on the assumption that states have the right to exclude immigrants, if they so wish, perhaps with the exception of refugees. The main questions are how states can manage migration - who and how many immigrants a state should let in. But do states really have this rig…

Many people express and urge others to stand in solidarity with refugees. In 2016, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke about the 65 million forcibly displaced in the world, addressing the UNHCR Executive Committee. He said: ‘The numbers are staggering. Each one represents a human life. But this is not a crisis of numbers. It is a crisis of s…

If you have worked for a Western military in places such as Afghanistan or Iraq, you may think that you would be able to settle in the Western country that you worked for, especially if your life is at risk due to the work you performed. But things are not that straight forward. A new report by the UK parliament’s Commons defence select committee i…

No one will have missed the royal wedding between American actress Meghan Markle and Prince Harry happening this week. Markle has moved to the UK is expected to become known as the Duchess of Sussex after the wedding. But not all family migration procedures are quite so joyful and straightforward. In a new research paper, Dr Marcia Vera Espinoza an…

Migration policy-makers tend to portray the migrant smuggler as their main enemy. Not only do they help facilitate irregular migration, but they are also seen as exploitative of the people they are helping. But who are migrant smugglers and what do they do? To help answer these questions, I talked to Dr Gabriella Sanchez, Research Fellow at the Mig…

When we talk, write and research about migration, do we see like a nation? Would we approach issues differently, and ask different questions, if instead we saw like a migrant? In his new book 'Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility; The Migrant's-Eye View of the World', Alex Sager, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University, c…

When we talk about migration, we assume the existence of borders. But what are borders? And should there be any? This is the topic of this episode with Bridget Anderson, Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Bridget Anderson is well-known for h…

In September 2015, the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, King Abdullah of Jordan and David Cameron, then Prime Minister of the UK, met to discuss the so called Compact Model, to create jobs for refugees in Jordan. The Jordan Compact was agreed in early 2016 and a similar, but smaller scale Lebanon Compact followed.Was the Compact Model the…

Ahmad al-Rashid came to the UK from Syria in 2015. The journey took 55 days and was partly documented in the BBC documentary Exodus: Our Journey. Since arriving in the UK, Ahmad al-Rashid has become a campaigner for refugees and refugee integration. He is working with the course Aim Higher: Access to Higher Education for Refugees and Asylum Seekers…

Our world order is organised around sovereign states and each human being is meant to belong to at least one state where they are a citizen. Yet according to the UNHCR around 10 million people in the world are stateless – they do not have citizenship in any state. In a world completely occupied by territorially defined, sovereign states, what happe…

Restrictions on immigration, as well as certain integration policies, are sometimes justified on the basis that too much, or a certain kind of, immigration risks erode social cohesion in democratic welfare states. Political philosophers who analyse the ethics of immigration have therefore become interested also in the empirical validity of these cl…

Has the debate on immigration been damaged by people too easily resorting to calling out racism? Or is it precisely racism that is at the heart of hostility towards immigration and contemporary white nationalism? Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck University of London, has argued in a recent report for Policy Exchange that there is a …

Apologies for the poor sound quality of this episode. In 1987 Joseph Carens, Professor and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, University of Toronto, pioneered political philosophy on immigration by making the case for open borders. In his most recent book, The Ethics of Immigration, he restated his case for keeping borders open. Yet some people…

One of the ways that refugees have tried to make it to Europe is through the so called 'Balkan route'. Yet as EU and European leaders have tried to shut this way by increasing border controls, many refugees and other migrants have become trapped along the Balkan route. A research team, IR and Aesthetics, from Aston University have just returned fro…

Political theorists have long debated the question of open borders. Do states have a right to exclude migrants from their territory? Is there a human right to immigrate? The focus has been on the external borders of states. Yet, in the forthcoming book Immigration and Freedom, Professor Chandran Kukathas, Chair in Political Theory and Head of the D…

Italy is one of the key destinations for migrants coming to Europe, with many coming by boat from Libya. Now Italy is threatening to close its ports to stem the inflow of migrants and refugees. Italy wants more support from the rest of the EU and EU ministers met earlier this month to discuss. But what would it actually mean for Italy to close its …

In 2015, a large number of refugees came to Europe in what has come to be referred to as a European refugee 'crisis'. Now, some of the focus has shifted towards questions of integration of those who came. But who were they? One of the countries hosting many of the refugees from 2015 is Austria, and a team of researchers spent some time in 2015 inte…

We are told that we are currently witnessing the biggest refugee crisis sine World War Two and that the average stay in refugee camps is 17 years. But is this true? Refugee historian Benjamin Thomas White, Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow, joins the podcast to take issue with these claims. He argues that statistics are incomplete, t…

Canada is often the country everyone looks to for inspiration when it comes to immigration. Why? Daniel Hiebert is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and has written a report for the Migration Policy Institute called “What’s So Special about Canada? Understanding the Resilience of Immigration and Multiculturalism”. Daniel …

In a recent special issue of the open access journal Comparative Migration Studies, Will Kymlicka, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University wrote an essay on "Solidarity in diverse societies: beyond neoliberal multiculturalism and welfare chauvinism". He discussed the so called "progressive's dilemma" and ar…

In this episode, we speak to Dr Marcia Vera Espinoza, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, and Esteban Sanchez Botero, Master student from Colombia at the University of Sheffield, about refugees and migration in Latin America. The discussion begins with the question of how a US wall at the Mexican border may affect immigr…

10. What's wrong with ethnic discrimination in immigration policy? by Talking Migrationبقلم Talking Migration

In this episode, we speak to Professor Keith Banting, Queen’s Research Chair in Public Policy and Professor in the Department of Political Studies and the School of Policy Studies at Queens University, and Dr Andreas Bergh, Associate Professor in Economics at Lund University as well as the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm, ab…

After a summer break, we're back talking to Professor Ruth Wodak, The University of Lancaster and the University of Vienna, about her new book on populism, as well as to fiction writers Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes, who's written a fictional book on the situation in Calais.بقلم Talking Migration

In the aftermath of the EU referendum in the UK, in which the British population voted to leave, we discuss the prominence of immigration in the debate with Robert Ford, Professor in Political Science at the University of Manchester, and Kenan Malik, writer, lecturer and broadcaster. We also talk to Nando Sigona, Senior Lecturer at the University o…

This episode was recorded ad the British International Studies Association's Annual Conference in Edinburgh. We hear short versions of three research papers presented on the refugee crisis, by Dr James Souter, the University of Leeds, Kelly Staples, The University of Leicester, and Simon McMahon, Coventry University. Questions raised include whethe…

In this EU-special we talk to Andy Mycock, Reader in Politics at the University of Huddersfield, about the role of identity and immigration in the referendum and to Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory, on what might happen to EU migration if the UK leaves the EU.بقلم Talking Migration

In this episode, Professor Tariq Modood talks about his new edited book Multiculturalism and Interculturalism: debating the dividing lines and Timo Lochocki at the German Marshall Fund tells us about German refugee policy and the success of the far right.بقلم Talking Migration

Professor Chris Bertram and Professor Martin Ruhs discuss whether there is a trade-off between migration and the rights of migrants. Sarnata Reyolnds talks about the situation for the Rohingya who are fleeing Myanmar (Burma).بقلم Talking Migration