Category: Immigration
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New article on alien registration in inter-war australia
This is just a quick announcement that my article ‘The Bureaucratic Limits of a National Security Agenda: The Winding Road of Alien Registration in Interwar Australia’ has been published in Australian Historical Studies journal. You can download it here. If you don’t have access, please get in touch!
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‘Rather swamped’: Thatcher, moral panics and racist rhetoric
There has been shock at the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, using the word ‘invasion’ in a parliamentary speech to describe the arrival of those seeking asylum in Britain. However, this kind of rhetoric has a much longer history, with politicians since the 1890s using the term ‘invasion’ and similar phrases. The following post is about…
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When the UK government tried to thwart an investigation of racism in the border control system
Today The Guardian reported that the Home Office refused to release an internal report on the history of the UK border control system which concluded that between the 1950s and 1980s, the border control system was designed to keep non-white people out of the country. This was not a surprise for many historians who have…
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New post at History & Policy on controlling Cypriot migration to UK
History and Policy has published an opinion piece by Andrekos Varnava and I on our research into the controlling of Cypriot migration to the UK in the 1920s-30s. It is based on our article in English Historical Research last year and some of the research we have been doing as part of our ARC project on…
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Cypriot colonial citizenship and UK immigration controls, 1920s-1950s
This week, the citizenship of Cypriots as part of the British Empire/Commonwealth (prior to Cypriot independence in 1960) has been the subject of debate in the Australian media, thanks to the controversy surrounding Senator Nick Xenophon. My colleague Andrekos Varnava and I have worked on the question of Cypriot citizenship during the colonial era and…
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New article in Terrorism & Political Violence: ‘Creating the National/Border Security Nexus’
Terrorism and Political Violence have just published my article, ‘Creating the National/Border Security Nexus: Counter-Terrorist Operations and Monitoring Middle Eastern and North African to the UK in the 1970s-1980s’. It is based on research funded by the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ David Phillips Travelling Fellowship. The abstract is below: This article looks at an…
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Buy ‘Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control’ from Palgrave and save £30
This is just a quick plug to let you all know that Palgrave Macmillan are having a “£30 off” sale until December 31, 2016 and while they do publish a ton of great books, you should really use it to buy our book, Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control. You can buy…
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Age disputes and the non-medical use of x-rays in the UK border control system
Tory backbencher David Davies has recently called for dental x-rays to verify the ages of refugees coming from Calais. Although these calls were dismissed by the Home Office and the British Dental Association, this is an issue that has lingered since the 1970s. Below is a post based on an article that Marinella Marmo and…
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The last time the government evoked the ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ slogan
The new Home Secretary Amber Rudd has, in the wake of Brexit, evoked the slogan ‘British jobs for British workers’, which has been used in the past by Gordon Brown in 2007 and by the British National Party and the National Front in the 1980s. While she has been heavily criticized for her statements, this…
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Theresa May and UKIP: A repeat of Thatcher and the NF in ’79?
While everyone is falling over themselves to make analogies between the Labour Party of the 1980s and that of today under Corbyn (or stressing that it’s not a repeat of that decade), we are also in danger of seeing Theresa May’s time (however long) as Prime Minister through the prism of Margaret Thatcher. In the…
New Historical Express 