Spotlight on Dr Erica Consterdine
Research Fellow Politics and Geography
Previous Research
Why people migrate is a really curious thing to me
I’m interested in the phenomena of migration and as my career has developed I’ve focused on policy making and the unintended effects of it. I secured an ESRC funded PhD just after the recession, at the time the labour government was still pursuing an expansive immigration regime. My thesis concentrated on this because it didn’t make any sense – parties can never win by favouring more immigration.
One of the main findings from my PhD research was that expansive immigration policies were an unintended consequence of an intended action.
Globalisation was seen as intrinsically positive and immigrants were its ‘human face’. Government departments pushed forwards different policies, which accidently culminated in a wider migration package. Through my research I received 3 different stories from the Home Office, the Treasury and a Special Advisor as to how the decision in 2004 was made to allow Central and Eastern European member states unfettered access. This highlights the chaotic nature of policy making. Inadvertent implications came from the decisions that were made, and we’re feeling those impacts politically now.
Current Research
My post doc is for the TEMPER project which is investigating the difference between temporary and permanent migration.
The project has been developed off the back of the EU Commission pushing forward the need to encourage temporary and circular migration policies (for example the seasonal pattern of Romanian agricultural workers who come to the UK to work for 3-9 months each year).
We have been interviewing temporary Australian and Romanian immigrants to understand whether temporary integration is possible. It’s not been easy to contact these immigrants, a lot of it has been spontaneous, going to a pub, listening out for Australian accents; probably not the most systematic way of gathering a sample! We found that most Australians feel very much integrated whereas almost no temporary Romanian immigrants felt integrated.
I’m working on a survey with global stakeholders, such as trade unions, on their views of the main issues in temporary migration and their perceptions of what rights temporary migrants should have. This work is in collaboration with Mike Collier in the Sussex Department of Geography. We wrote up a deliverable last year and that’s gone to the European Commission.
I’m also working to expand an immigration policy index, ImPol, in collaboration with James Hampshire. It will measure policy restrictiveness on different types of labour migration, (for example high skilled or seasonal) across four different countries (UK, Spain, France and Italy) from 1990 to 2015. We hope ImPol will become an interactive, online tool, which will provide graphs for students, lawyers, academics and policy makers. The index will be launched in June at the European Parliament in Brussels, which will be really exciting.
We’re also looking at policy implementation, which fascinates me.
Last year I interviewed policy makers in the Home Office to understand the main gaps between policy and actual outcomes. I’m particularly interested in the 2014 immigration act which extended immigration responsibilities to certain NHS staff, landlords, and benefit officers, who are now involved in making recommendations about whether someone is legitimate. This is an example of policy implementation being extended much further out from the state.
The complexity of the UK’s current immigration law is bewildering.
One of the fascinating things that I’ve found whilst collecting data on the UK is our immigration rules are layered on top of each other, instead of just a new law coming into force. This results in incredibly long documents with thousands of pages. Also, whilst the coalition and the Conservative administration have been pursuing a very restrictive policy for net migration, high capital routes are very much open. This means if you have money, you can buy citizenship and access fast track routes, with minimal language requirements.
The Future
My book Labour’s Immigration Policy: The Making of the Migration State is being published with Palgrave Macmillan within a Public Policy series and is going straight to paper back which is exciting. I’ve been writing the epilogue to answer how and why immigration has become such a central, political issue. It’s really important to get the tone right because I’m always worried that the press is going to mis-represent something that I’ve said. All publicity is good publicity but I certainly don’t want to contribute to anti migrant rhetoric that’s everywhere. I’ve also got an article on the feedback effects of Labour’s managed migration policies on the Coalition administration coming out in Political Studies.
There’s a wider challenge for social scientists in the context of Brexit and Trump’s election, we need a better understanding of how and why this protectionist or nativist backlash against cosmopolitanism or perhaps globalisation has come about. I think this opens new challenges methodologically because for example we need better ways to understand what drives anti-migrant sentiment – is it economic self interest or is it actually something much deeper related to culture and identity. Polling alone can’t unveil this so I think focus groups could be a fruitful avenue and really a better ways of grasping the relationships between public attitudes, political rhetoric and policy realities.
It would be nice to do something different to gain practical experience and then maybe come back into academia. Next I’m going to be a researcher at the Institute for Employment Studies in June, which is really exciting! I’m really looking forward to gaining some practical experience, developing my research skills particularly developing my applied quantitative skills and broadening my knowledge. I want to bring my expertise on labour immigration policymaking to IES’s Brexit Observatory whilst learning about employment and labour market policy more generally.