Biographical notes: Lea Sitkin's academic research focuses on the organisation and effects of immigration controls, the relationship between neoliberalism, welfare and punishment and the development of precarious labour markets across Europe and the USA. Her doctoral research uses a comparative case study (UK and Germany) to interrogate materialist explanations for punitive transformations in immigration control in Europe. The thesis offers a historical analysis for why immigrant communities are policed differently in the two contexts. It also explores the role of underlying labour market variation (as described in the Varieties of Capitalism literature) on the construction of immigrants as vulnerable workers in the UK and Germany. Previous research has focused on the generalizability of Wacquant's Punishing the Poor (2009) to the European context.
AbstractThe UK government has recently introduced measures to intensify the internal migration control regime by improving coordination between immigration authorities and third-party enforcement agents. The following paper describes the internal migration control regime in the UK, focusing on measures developed to impede irregular migrants' access to work, justice, healthcare, education and housing. It also explores the ways in which coordination between actors comprising the "immigration policing family" is hampered by administrative difficulties and, more fundamentally, by a lack of common goals. In response to these issues, successive UK governments have introduced sanctions for non-compliant enforcement agents, which are often discursively linked by immigration authorities to the notion of preventing third parties' exploitation of irregular migrants. However, ultimately it is the developing internal control regime which threatens irregular migrants' survival.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.