Handbook on Brexit and Migration

Background

Migration has played a crucial role in the United Kingdom’s decision to exit the EU, and Brexit has significantly impacted the whole nation, particularly the lives of EU nationals and their families living in the UK as well as British nationals residing in the other 27 EU countries. A significant body of social scientific literature has documented these processes since 2016. However, “Brexit”, far from representing solely a unique and historically specific event, raises various and more general questions about how states, political establishments, the EU, citizens and migrants navigate the challenges posed by radical socio-political transformations and “unsettling” events. It also highlights the changing relations between citizenship, identity and the sense of belonging. Analysing migration processes - past, present and future - through this broader analytical lens can tell us about the emerging social cleavages and tensions that will likely dominate the first half of the 21st century. This handbook proposes to pull together these various aspects to provide an authoritative interdisciplinary research-driven statement on the Brexit-migration nexus both as a historically conjunctural sociological experience and as a conceptual tool for framing changes in mobility patterns, policy and legal structures, and European politics.

The overall approach of the handbook - as reflected in its structure - is to take the reader on a journey, starting from the question of whether and how migration affected the UK’s decision to leave the European Union, through exploring the migration trends and policy frameworks shaped by the Brexit event, the social reactions to the yet unsettled changes engendered by the Brexit process, and finally the complex ways in which migrants of various backgrounds are affected by radical socio-political restructuring.

Proposed structure and contributors

The handbook aims to bring together a large variety of approaches and case-studies discussed in the emerging literature on migration in the context of Brexit. With this aim, it will seek shorter contributions from a large number of authoritative voices - both from established academics and young scholars - that are able to make a central analytical point based on original empirical research. It will comprise around 40 chapters of 5,000 words in length, adding up to approximately 200,000 words ( ~ 400 pages including references). The chapters of the handbook are organised in six parts, following an introduction by the editors. The introduction will be a full-length contribution outlining the main concepts and problems addressed in the book. Part 1 focuses on the central political event of the UK’s 2016 EU membership referendum, placing it in the broader ideological and political context of Euroscepticism dating back to the establishment of the European Union in the early 1990s and the changing demographics of migration to the UK over the following two decades. Through a selection of authoritative research-driven analyses, it aims to provide answers to the following contentious questions: in what sense can migration be held accountable for the vote for Brexit? How did Eurosceptic political actors manage to mobilise the “superdiversification” of migration to elicit a popular revolt against the perceived political elite driven by wider dissatisfaction with economic disenfranchisement following the global financial crisis of 2008, among both the “majority” and the “ethnic minority” British population? And what role did mass media - and the changing media landscape - play in these processes?

Part 2 moves away from the immediate context of the EU referendum to provide a quantitative and legal-conceptual overview of the UK’s migration system in its relationship to Brexit. The chapters in this section will discuss in detail the main types of mobility which have figured prominently in public discourses and migration statistics and will discuss how these mobilities have changed and developed in post-Brexit UK

Parts 3 and 4 explore the various reactions given by non-citizens to the radical socio-political transformation posed by the Brexit process. Part 3 focuses on what in a Hirschmannian tradition could be called “voice” and “exit” reactions; on the one hand, Brexit has given rise to a new consciousness around the value and vulnerability of supranational rights and forms of belonging, leading to new forms of grass-roots political activism that provide empirical anchors for studying the formation of social movements; on the other hand, Brexit may have been a factor in decisions to return to the country of origin or move to a third country, and this part of the volume makes an empirically informed intervention in the study of return migration. Part 4 completes the Hirschmannian-inspired triptych with a focus on the strategies of those EU nationals who chose to remain in the UK following its rupture from the EU community of rights. The chapters in this part challenge the classical literature on migrant integration and assimilation through citizenship by emphasising the diversity and subtlety of practices and narrations of belonging. By reflecting on more durable emerging attitudinal patterns, on the ways in which the Brexit event was embedded into migrants’ life-courses, and on the views and lives of young people of EU migrant backgrounds, for whom Brexit forms an integral part in their socialisation and coming of age, these chapters discuss the Brexit-migration nexus as an important mechanism reshaping Britain’s social structure.

Part 5 collects a number of case studies discussing the diversity of legal statuses, migration histories and regional identities, aiming to break down views of a monolithic EU citizenship experience both before and after Brexit. As such, Part 5 will critically engage with the issue of complex borders and boundary making as a result of the post-Brexit migration regime.

Finally, Part 6 explores the legal frameworks and political-economic dynamics shaping the future of British nationals living in EU countries, as well as narrowing down on the experiences of Britons in a few selected EU countries.

Tentative Table of Contents

1. Introduction: definitions, concepts, problems

PART 1: Migration and Brexit: a troubled relationship

2. Political Euroscepticism, immigration and the long road to Brexit
3. The politics of Brexit in the context of migration
4. Media discourses on immigration in the Brexit debate
5. EU enlargement (Turkey) and the Brexit debate
6. CEE migration and the Brexit debate
7. Ethnic minorities, Euroscepticism and Brexit

PART 2: Migration governance and Brexit: trends, legal frameworks and forecasts

8. Transformations of the British migration system
9. Probabilistic forecasts of migration post-Brexit
10. The European and British asylum systems before and after Brexit
11. Points-based immigration
12. Residence rights and wrongs: settled status, unsettled lives?
13. Higher education governance and student migration after Brexit

PART 3: Voice and exit

14. EU nationals’ political engagement/activism
15. Ethnic minorities and pro-EU grassroots activism
16. Migration trends in the post-referendum interstitial period
17. Return migrants
18. Skilled return migrants
19. Student migration/return intentions

PART 4: Citizenship, belonging and embeddedness

20. Legal integration and beyond
21. What does Brexit tell us about citizenship?
22. Racial geographies and histories of citizenship
23. A new politics of belonging?
24. Longitudinal life-course perspectives of EU migrants in the UK
25. Young people with EU migrant backgrounds

PART 5: New and Old Hierarchies of privilege and belonging

Hierarchies of EU citizenship

26. Migrant experiences before Brexit
27. Migrant experiences post-Brexit
28. Emotional costs of integration and hierarchies of privilege
29. Highly skilled migrant experiences

Regional identities and experiences

30. EU nationals in Wales
31. Scottishness, Brexit and migration
32. Northern Ireland

Complex statuses and identities

33. European naturalised third-country nationals in the UK
34. Latin American onward migrants
35. Race and coloniality
36. European naturalised third-country nationals in the UK

PART 6: UK nationals in the EU

37. British citizens living in the EU: a legal assessment
38. British citizens living in the EU: a sociological overview
39. Britons in Belgium
40. Britons in Germany
41. Britons in Germany
42. Britons in France
43. Britons in Spain

Conclusions

44. The state of the art and future directions in research on Brexit and migration