S2 E4 What do family migration rules reveal about British citizenship today?

Who do we think we are?

You start a relationship with someone living abroad. As the relationship gets serious, you decide to take the next steps and live together. But there's a border in the way. We’re joined by Ala Sirriyeh, senior lecturer in sociology at Lancaster University to talk about how borders disrupt and remake families, why as a British citizen your non-British family members are not exempt from immigration controls and what this tells us about British citizenship today.

George Kalivis goes back into the archive to look at the secret deportation of Chinese merchant seamen from Liverpool after WW2 and how this shattered families and left many unanswered questions for their wives and mixed-race children left behind. Michaela Benson looks at the 2012 changes to the UK’s immigration rules and their impact on non-British family members, the ‘Surinder Singh’ route which exempted from the UK’s domestic immigration controls for some family members under EU free movement directives. And Ala talks to Michaela about how family migration rules exclude people on the grounds of race and class, and the creative ways in which people try to overcome these in order to simply live together.

You can access the full transcripts for each episode over on the Rebordering Britain and Britons after Brexit website.

In this episode we cover …

1. The secret deportation of Chinese Merchant Seamen
2. Family Migration Rules
3. The right to family life, the Surinder Singh Route and Brexit

Quote

In looking at the impacts of these family migration rules shows us the blurring of the migrant-citizen divide … The kind of hierarchies of citizenship are not simply about being citizen or migrant but are based in much more complex and less stable ways … around a kind of hierarchy around axes of race and class.

— Ala Sirriyeh

Find out more … about Ala and her work here, take a look at her books Politics of Compassion and Inhabiting Borders, and follow her on Twitter.

Further Resources

Ala’s article ‘All you need is love, and £18,600’.

Dan Hancox’s Guardian articles on The Secret Deportations and how they were coerced to leave by the Home Office.

Michaela’s co-authored works on marriage-migration to the UK and how Brexit has deepened the inequalities of status within families.

If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy our episodes on English language testing for migration and citizenship and the children denied the right to British nationality.

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