Developments in UK Immigration Law

Literature

Primary Sources

Secondary Literature

UK Immigration Legislation (The National Archives, 1971)

Theoretical

Literature on UK immigration law

'Immagined Communities'

Themes

National Identity

Borders

Othering

British exceptionalism

Immigration Law

Links Between Sources

Future Studies

Notions of 'nations' and 'nationalism'

Orietnalism (Said, 1978).

Said defines Orientalism as a way of seeing that imagines the East as the antithesis of the West. It is evident that Western perceptions often involve a logic of European superiority over Oriental ‘’backwardness’’ (Said, 1978, 7).

'Island Story'

Identities are social and cultural constructions.

What shapes immigration policy?

1970s and 1980s theories of immigration control policy had Marxist and neo-Marxist frameworks (Castells, 1975).

1990s Authors moved away from Marxist approach, pacing emphasis on principles related to the nation-state (sovereignty, citizenship etc.).

Opposing Views

Models of nationhood and understandings of national identity are changing due to immigration (Soysal, 1994).

Traditional nation-state is both enforcing immigration and being challenged at the same time (Joppke, 1999).

System of liberal democracy leads to expansive immigration policy (Freeman, 1995).

Theories of the nation-state

Opposing Views

Literature on the nation-state: Gellner, Anderson, Hobsbawm.

Orientalism

Narrative about the special character of the British nation as an Island Nation (Spiering, 2014, 34).

The idea that Britain is special and superior.

Concept of 'Othering' vital for the formation of identity - way in which people attach themselves to identity by distinguishing themselves from others (McCrone, 2002, 759).

The idea that Britain is distinctive from other countries.

Sovereignty

The power that Britain has lies at the heart of Britain's identity.

Border not treated as fixed territorial unit (Parker et al., 2009, 586).

What extent is immigration law determined by national and/or racial predicates (Parker et al., 2009, 584).

Instead conceive it as a series of practises, discourses, symbols, institutions or networks through which power works (Johnson et al., 2011, 66).

Sovereignty must continually be articulated and re-articulated in terms of a "stylized repetition of acts". The State through its policies, actions and customs performs itself as sovereign (Johnson et al., 2011, 66).

Focus on biases of UK immigration law (Mulvey, 2010; (Fazel and Stein, 2004).

Theories have been hegemonic and have committed fallacies: European processes of modernisation and nationalism, led to a depiction of the West as superior, as East measured against Western structures (Chakrabarty, 1998; Veer, 1998).

Anderson and Hobsbawm imply that only through colonial institutions, colonial people able to access and emulate models of nationalism (Anderson, 1991, 115-116; Hobsbawm,1990, 164).

Gellner suggested modernisation and nationalism only occurred when influenced of religion has decreased (Gellner, 1983, 36, 142).

Windrush genertation

Comparisons of UK legislation on immigration

Critique of Western scholarship of the Orient in the recent decades.

Postcolonial literature

Subaltern studies

Britishness

Colonial Legacy

Anderson depicts the nation as a socially constructed community, which is imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group (Anderson, 2016).

Benedict Anderson’s widely used definition of a nation as ‘an imagined political community, and one that is imagines as inherently limited and sovereign’ (Wellings, 2012, 35).

1950's-2000

Commonwealth