Migration Flashcards
How is UK migration growing?
Net migration to the UK since 2015 has been stable at around 200,00 to 300,000 per year. Biggest source of immigration are Eastern Europe countries (e.g. Poland) (600,000 in 2019)
The UK population now stands at more than 68 million.
Net Migration, accounts for approximately 75% of this growth, the rising birth rate, only 25%.
What are the causes of increasing migration to the UK?
Push factors:
- Unemployment/low wages
- War and conflict
- Political and religious persecution
Pull factors:
- Higher wages/better job prospects
- Good social welfare system
- Tolerance of diversity
Consequences of immigration
- Impact on population structure: Immigrant women have more children, which increases the dependency ratio. However these children eventually grow up and work which increases the dependency ratio. Thus the long term effect of immigration might help combat the problems of the ‘ageing population’.
- Impact on public services: It is not possible to day with certainty what the implications of migration are for public services, and these impacts are likely to vary by area and depending on the type of public service. Migrants contribute to demand for public services. If foreign born people in the UK used public services in the same way as demographically similar UK born people, they would be expected to make less use of health and social care, but greater use of education. Migrants also contribute to financing and providing public services and are overrepresented in the health care and social care workforces.
- A more ethnically diverse society: By 2021, ethnic minorities made up 14% of the population. However, in some areas of the country, 50% of the population is non white.
- Divided working class: Immigrants tend to settle in poorer areas. The increased burden on public services/pressure on jobs is felt by the poor more than the rich. 52% of the white working class people think immigration is a bad thing compared to only 33% of white middle class people. This goes some way to explaining the support for UKIP amongst poorer communities.
- Political impact of globalisation (Assimilation and Multiculturalism): States now have policies that seek to control immigration, absorb migrants into society and deal with increased ethnic and cultural diversity. More recently policies have also become linked to national security and anti-terrorism policies.
- Differentiation and migration: There are class differences among migrants. Robin Cohen. Citizens - with full citizenship rights such as voting rights. Denizens - privileged people welcomed by the state - such as billionaire ‘oligarchs’. Helots - the most exploited group - include illegally trafficked workers.
- Traditional identities: Thomas Eirksen - Migrants are less likely to see themselves as belonging to one culture or another and instead they may develop transnational neither/nor identities and loyalists. Such migrants are less likely to want to assimilate into the ‘host country’.
- Feminisation if migration: Half of global migrants are female and the types of job they do fit patriarchal stereotypes. Ehrenreich and Hochild (2003) - care work, domestic work and sex work in the UK increasingly done by women from poor countries.
How has globalisation affected UK population?
- More immigration from the EU
- More undocumented workers. Undocumented workers are those who come and stay in the UK illegally. They are ‘pulled’ by the prospects of better living standards, and often ‘pushed’ by poverty and the lack of opportunities in their own countries, but they lack the skills or wealth which would allow them to enter the country legally.
- More asylum seekers. In 2021 there were more than 56,000 people seeking asylum in the UK to escape persecution, torture and potential death in their countries of origin. Asylum seekers are widely perceived to be a large group of undeserving scroungers of benefits, social housing and jobs; the reality is that, in 2020, they make up only 12% of migrants, are banned from working, and have near zero government support.
- Greater cultural diversity. Globalisation has meant there is much greater cultural diversity, as different cultures and ways of life come into contact with one another. In family life, this can mean growing numbers of couples coming from different cultural backgrounds, and more ‘hybrid families’ creating new family relationships and values derived from a merging of two cultures,
- Changing families: Migrants from Eastern Europe tend to have larger families, and this has contributed to a new ‘baby boom’ in the 2000s. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2014) talk of the growth of ‘world families’, and ‘distant love’, in which love and other forms of relationships are conducted between people living in different countries and continents. Chambers (2012)
suggest that globalisation has meant there are more global family networks, as migrants in the UK try to maintain relationships and send money to their families in other countries. Chambers also points to globalisation leading to a growing trade in surrogate motherhood, mail-order brides - what Chambers calls the ‘purchase of intimacy’ - and the purchase of family personal care, such as home helps and nannies from poorer countries across the world, for those who can afford it. A related element of this ‘purchase of intimacy’ arising from globalisation is the growing international criminal trade in trafficking of women for enforced prostitution.
Most EU countries, including the UK, now have strict immigration controls to restrict immigration from outside the EU, including, in the UK, the non-British wives or husbands and children of British citizens. There is now a minimum income requirement of around £18,600 a year before British citizens can bring in their non-British, non-EU partners and children. This would exclude even full time workers receiving only the National Minimum Wage. The government’s own estimate is that the new rules will break up as many as 17,800 families every year, with husbands and wives separated, and children growing up separated from one of their parents - a kind of enforced lone parenthood. Despite immigration rules, it is generally much easier for those with money and skills from outside the EU to migrate than it is for the poor.
