Immigration, education and the new caste society in Britain

Abstract

We are accustomed to linking education and skill with mobility and opportunity. In recent education, employment and especially immigration policy in Britain, however, the discourse of education and skill is being used to create a segregated and inegalitarian society, in which privileges and rights are granted to a small elite while being denied to the rest of the population. Education and skill, paradoxically, which are supposed to set us free and empower us are in actuality used to divide, control and deflect our demands for justice and equality. To address problems of injustice and inequality in Britain today, for both immigrants and the native-born alike, we need to challenge the common sense acceptance of discrimination between the high and low skilled, as well as the hegemony of the language of skill itself.