7. The British Migration State: Britain's Internal Controls on Immigration Through Welfare Policy

Abstract

By looking at the main trends and major changing points of internal immigration control, this project highlights the way in which the social security system has been transformedto become a tool of governmental policy enforcement rather than the repository of universal rights ideology. The shift in the value placed on and treatment of migrants overthe past 30 years has been substantive. Once a necessary and sought after supply of labour and demographic growth, newcomers have become a stigmatized ethnic category,a danger to societal cohesion and a parasite on the welfare system. In order to constantly manage and monitor them, the government has exploited the close relation betweenbenefits and immigration to create an unstructured, yet increasingly visible, internal control system. An analysis of policy will show how every act slowly increases theresources allocated for direct enforcement of immigration controls by bringing new employees into the network of those responsible for indirect enforcement such asimmigration officers, police, health or education staff, or even employers. By spreading the responsibility for enforcement among a variety of agencies (both state and private)whose concern is not immigration, the British Home Office created a machinery specifically designed to have power over every aspect of an immigrant or asylum seeker’sexperience in the United Kingdom.