Overview

Us and Them? explores the distinction between migrant and citizen through using the concept of 'the community of value'. The community of value is comprised of Good Citizens and is defined from outside by the Non-Citizen and from the inside by the Failed Citizen, that is figures like the benefit scrounger, the criminal, the teenage mother etc. While Failed Citizens and Non-Citizens are often strongly differentiated, the book argues that it is analytically and politically productive to consider them together. Judgments about who counts as skilled, what is a good marriage, who is suitable for citizenship, and what sort of enforcement is acceptable against 'illegals', affect citizens as well as migrants. Rather than simple competitors for the privileges of membership, citizens and migrants define each other through sets of relations that shift and are not straightforward binaries. The first two chapters on vagrancy and on Empire historicise migration management by linking it to attempts to control the mobility of the poor. The following three chapters map and interrogate the concept of the 'national labour market' and UK immigration and citizenship policies examining how they work within public debate to produce 'us and them'. Chapters 6 and 7 go on to discuss the challenges posed by enforcement and deportation, and the attempt to make this compatible with liberalism through anti-trafficking policies. It ends with a case study of domestic labour as exemplifying the ways in which all the issues outlined above come together in the lives of migrants and their employers.

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9780199691593

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Enlightening * Zoe Williams, The Guardian * This tightly argued indictment of British policies and the selfproclaimed liberal states illiberal Us vs. Them juxtaposition in law, data collection and discourse should be required reading for political scientists. * Dirk Hoerder, Sozial.Geschichte Online * The book leaves anyone interested in justifications of eligibility in social policies motivated to maintain a critical debate about the very foundations of often taken-for-granted assumptions about deservingness, as well as the global and national distribution effects of particular exclusionary policy choices with regard to individual groups' rights, life chances and livelihoods. It certainly teaches us not to hide behind legal catagories and statuses or formal decision-making procedures in our analyses of policies and politics. * Regine Paul, Journal of Social Policy *

enlightening Zoe Williams, The Guardian This tightly argued indictment of British policies and the selfproclaimed liberal states illiberal Us vs. Them juxtaposition in law, data collection and discourse should be required reading for political scientists. Dirk Hoerder, Sozial.Geschichte Online

Author Information

Bridget Anderson's research interests include low waged labour migration, deportation, legal status, and citizenship. Publications include Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (Zed Books 2000) and Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration and Public Policy (OUP 2010), co-edited with Martin Ruhs. She has worked with a wide range of national and international NGOs including the Trades Union Congress, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the International Labour Organisation. She is Deputy Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at Oxford University.

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