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Issues of asylum, migration, humanitarian protection, and integration/belonging are of growing interest beyond the disciplines of refugee studies, migration, and social policy. Rooted in more than two decades of scholarship, this book uses critical social theory and the participatory, biographical, and arts-based methods used with asylum seekers, refugees, and emerging communities to explore the dynamics of the asylum–migration–community nexus. It argues that interdisciplinary analysis is required to deal with the complexity of the issues involved, and offers understanding as praxis (purposeful knowledge), drawing on innovative research that is participatory, arts based, performative, and policy relevant.

This book establishes asylum seekers as a socially excluded group, investigating the policy of dispersing asylum seekers across the UK and providing an overview of historic and contemporary dispersal systems. It is the first book to seek to understand how asylum seekers experience the dispersal system and the impact this has on their lives. The author argues that deterrent asylum policies increase the sense of liminality experienced by individuals, challenges assumptions that asylum seekers should be socially excluded until receipt of refugee status, and illustrates how they create their own sense of ‘belonging’ in the absence of official recognition.

This book explores methodological issues relating to the involvement of refugees in both service evaluation and development and research more generally. It builds on a two-year seminar series funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and attended by members of a range of statutory and voluntary organisations, as well as academics and refugees themselves. The participants jointly drew up a set of good-practice guidelines that are re-produced in the book. Key features include a focus on the methodology for active involvement of refugees, a discussion of barriers to involvement, suggestions for overcoming barriers, analysis of existing practices and ideas for change, and a discussion of the implications for policy, research, and practice.

This book provides insights into one of the most controversial and important subjects of the twenty-first century: migration and social integration. Empirically, it offers comprehensive grounding in the relationships between migration, migration policies, and social protection/inclusion in the enlarged European Union and its member states. Theoretically, the collection moves the debate on migration and integration policies into new terrain. It explains how policies in this field are produced by institutional frameworks, political strategy, and contingent responses to events, but that these are themselves shaped by emotions, discourses, narratives, and formal and informal aspects of governance.

Based on 115 interviews with Polish mothers in the UK and Poland, as well as a specially-commissioned opinion poll, this topical book discusses recent Polish migration to the UK. In an account of every stage of the migration process, the book explores why so many Poles have migrated since 2004, why more children migrate with their families and how working-class families in the West of England make decisions about whether to stay. Covering many broader themes — including livelihoods and migration cultures in Poland, experiences of integration into UK communities and issues surrounding return to Poland — the book is relevant to migration policy across Europe and beyond.

This ground-breaking book presents the first evidence of forced labour among displaced migrants who seek refuge in the UK. Through a critical engagement with contemporary debates about precarity, unfreedom and socio-legal status, the book explores how asylum and forced labour are linked, and enmeshed in a broader picture of modern slavery produced through globalised working conditions. Drawing on original evidence generated in fieldwork with refugees and asylum seekers, the book will contribute to ongoing academic and policy debates on the causes of, and solutions to, forced and exploitative labour in the UK. A central claim of this book is that severe labour exploitation – including forced labour – among certain international migrant groups residing in the UK is structured and sustained by overlapping immigration and employment precarity. This claim is made through an analysis of the wider structures and processes of neoliberal labour markets, immigration and welfare policies, and migrant trajectories. We argue that asylum policy and forced labour are linked, and that such a relationship is enmeshed in a broader picture of modern slavery being produced through neoliberal globalised working conditions in the UK economy. This is important reading for students and academics in social policy, social geography, sociology, politics and refugee, labour and migration studies, and for policy makers and practitioners working to support migrants and tackle forced labour.

This book is distinctive in combining theoretical discussion on the role of networks, resources, and social capital with fieldwork evidence and interviews with members of Refugee Community Organisations (RCOs), non-governmental organisations, and statutory authorities. It critically examines the impact of dispersal and current legislative change on refugee communities and RCOs, explores the integrative role of RCOs, assesses the race-relations framework in Britain and its effects on refugee organisations, and provides a thorough and up-to-date literature review.

European governments are now engaging in one of the largest exercises in social engineering that the continent has seen since the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and refugees in Europe are now being denied their basic right to choose where they live and are instead being compulsorily dispersed. This is the first book-length study of dispersal policies, explicitly comparative in nature and written by three national experts. The book is highly topical and controversial as the review of dispersal policies is under way in many countries. It is a valuable case-study of how society deals with ‘outsider’ groups and space.

This book examines the activities of UK and international elites through the lens of state crime and social policy. Initially it defines the ideal state as a single, functioning whole that ensures uniformity in the name of legitimacy yet the book poignantly outlines the dangers associated with the maintenance of legitimacy and state power. Anti-democratic measures such as the invasions of other nation states, the idea that the media, powerful corporations and individuals can both reinforce and influence the state along with the problems of over-zealous policing of a state’s own populace are also covered. Overall, the book promotes a better understanding of the complex interplay between politics, the media, business and criminal enterprise and, as a consequence, provides a comprehensive discussion of state immorality and deviance generally and state crime in particular.