̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - asylum

Displaced lives: Investigating Europe's handling of the refugee crisis and giving voice to asylum-seeking migrants

ta385 — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 08:00:00 +0000

For the last three years, the RESPOND project has been investigating migration governance in 11 countries by foregrounding the insights of asylum-seeking migrants. Now principal investigator Dr Naures Atto has launched a digital exhibition featuring work by migrant artists.

Now we’re talking: the project helping teenage refugees and asylum-seekers build a new life in Britain

ta385 — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 07:00:00 +0000

A new collaboration involving Cambridge linguists and a student-led charitable group is helping young refugees and asylum-seekers develop their confidence and communication skills.

Migration: Britain’s hospitable past

lw355 — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 08:58:33 +0000

A global trend to legislate for immigration restriction began in the middle decades of the 19th century. It was prompted by two large and sudden global movements – of Irish across the Atlantic during and after the famine of 1845, and of Chinese gold-seekers across the Pacific, to the West Coast of the Americas and to Australasia. California in the US and Victoria in Australia were the first jurisdictions to restrict entry on racial grounds. While the ‘white Australia policy’ became infamous, in fact by 1900 race-based immigration restriction was more ordinary than extraordinary. In most Anglophone jurisdictions – the Canadian provinces, all the Australian colonies, New Zealand, Newfoundland, the US – race-based border control became law and policy with little debate or resistance, sometimes none at all.

Not so in the UK. Pogroms in the 1890s had sparked a great emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe into the UK, mainly en route to the US. It is true and well documented that a freshly visible British anti-Semitism materialised as violently voiced calls for immigration restriction, modelled on US, Australian and New Zealand law. But what was different in Britain was the equally loud objection to closing off borders, indeed to regulating movement at all. In other words, whereas immigration acts were sailing through jurisdictions all over the globe by 1900, in Britain they met fierce, principled and, for a time, successful resistance.

Aliens bills put to Parliament over the 1890s and early 1900s were roundly defeated, argued down mainly by Liberals. By 1904, this included the then-Liberal Winston Churchill.

British politicians opposed immigration restriction on several grounds. For many, free human movement over borders was the necessary corollary of free trade of goods. For others, a moral and political principle of freedom of movement accompanied this more expedient economic rationale. This is where it gets both interesting and strangely unfamiliar to 21st-century political sensibilities.

Not a few parliamentarians proclaimed Great Britain as the last bastion of freedom because it had no immigration restriction policy. Conversely, the US could not, or should not, proclaim itself the land of the free, because it did. British nationalism was thus defined by a commitment to open borders; a stunning reversal of the current situation.

More than this, British liberal opposition to aliens acts and immigration acts rested on a tradition of extending asylum to the politically and religiously persecuted. This had long manifested with respect to European Protestants (religiously) and to those fleeing revolution (politically). A much-treasured hospitable past was mobilised powerfully, and with proud nationalist fervour around 1900, as argument against immigration restriction, setting Britain apart entirely from all other jurisdictions at the time, including all of its own settler colonies. There was simply no comparable discussion.

British opponents of immigration restriction could only hold out so long, however, in the face of this global trend. ̽��ֱ��Aliens Act was passed in 1905 aiming to restrict the entry of European Jews. Historians have long assessed the Aliens Act as a high point (low point) of British anti-Semitism. But the law was more ambiguous than this. For hiding inside the statute itself was an asylum clause that enabled the entry of persons religiously or politically persecuted. It read thus: '[I]n the case of an immigrant who proves that he is seeking admission to this country solely to avoid prosecution or punishment on religious or political grounds or for an offence of a political character, or persecution, involving danger of imprisonment or danger to life or limb, on account of religious belief, leave to land shall not be refused on the ground merely of want of means, or the probability of his becoming a charge on the rates.'

This was a compromise clause, the result of lobbying by Jewish MPs, including Lord Rothschild, and Liberal MPs such as Churchill. ̽��ֱ��job of implementing the new law from 1906 fell to William Gladstone’s son. It was not an easy task, given that Britain had no border control infrastructure to speak of. But one of his earliest instructions to authorities on the ground was that claimants of religious persecution be given the benefit of the doubt, and be permitted to enter without any of the other restrictions applying.

British international lawyers at the time hailed this as the first codification of an individual’s right to asylum (as opposed to asylum being bestowed as the privilege of a state). It also made American legal scholars understand their own federal law as ‘rigid and inelastic’, perhaps requiring relaxation ‘as a concession to humanity.’ In fact, by World War I, both the US and the UK hardened their laws on immigration and aliens, the British repealing the Aliens Act and replacing it with an Enemy Aliens statute.

It is common for historians to view the 1905 Aliens Act as the sinister thin edge of the immigration restriction wedge. But scholars and policy makers might do well to focus on the counterintuitive history of the statute, which codified, albeit for a short time, the right to asylum when in danger of religious or political persecution or prosecution. Of all the global locations where race-based immigration restriction laws proliferated c. 1900, it was in the British parliament, behind the scenes in Whitehall, as well as in the East End, that resistance was strongest and clearest. Is this not the history that should hold current policy makers to task?

Alison Bashford is the recently elected Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History in Cambridge’s Faculty of History, and is completing a study of the legal history of immigration restriction with Professor Jane McAdam, Director of the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the ̽��ֱ�� of New South Wales, Australia.

In the midst of current controversies over immigration law and policy, Professor Alison Bashford discusses why it's important to recall Britain’s unique place in the international history of modern border control, suggesting that Britain’s principled politico-legal past calls for cautious celebration, rather than the more common critique.

Wikipedia

Jewish refugees from Russia in Liverpool, 1882

For elaboration of the international context of the 1905 Aliens Act, see

Alison Bashford and Jane McAdam, ‘ ̽��ֱ��Right to Asylum: Britain’s 1905 Aliens Act and the Evolution of Refugee Law’, Law and History Review 32, 2 (2014)

Alison Bashford and Catie Gilchrist, ‘ ̽��ֱ��Colonial History of the 1905 Aliens Act’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40 (2012): 409–37

Alison Bashford, ‘Immigration Restriction: Rethinking Period and Place from Settler Colonies to Postcolonial Nations’, Journal of Global History, 9, 1 (2014)

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Yes

̽��ֱ�� Sermon on ‘Epiphanies of the Human: Faith and Migration’

admin — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:05:50 +0000

Dr Rowlands, who is currently Lecturer in Theology and Ministry at King’s College, London and also a Research Associate of St Edmund’s College, works at the interface of Political, Moral and Practical Theologies.

She has an academic background in social sciences as well as in theology and has engaged with both community and faith-based organisations to promote the application of theology to public discourse in civil society, as well as in academia and the Church.

She was formerly Director of Studies at ̽��ֱ��Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology and spent seven years in Cambridge educating those training for ministry in the Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and United Reformed traditions.

She is the founding Director of a new Centre for Catholic Social Thought and Practice and last year was the organiser of a major symposium on theological ethics and the crisis of capitalism.

Her doctoral research was concerned with the British social philosopher Gillian Rose, and she continues to work with the writings of Gillian Rose, Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt.

Dr Rowlands is currently focusing on responses to migration, and in particular around asylum-seeking and public policy.

All are welcome and there will be a wine-reception in Michaelhouse afterwards for those present.

Members of the ̽��ֱ�� attending should wear their gowns.

Dr Anna Rowlands, who is a member of both Girton College and St Edmund's College, will preach the ̽��ֱ�� Sermon in Great St Mary's, the ̽��ֱ�� Church, at 11.15 am on Sunday 3 February.

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Yes

Care in the community

lw355 — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 17:30:07 +0000

When institutionalised care for the mentally disabled was phased out under Margaret Thatcher in 1983, and the responsibility for care shifted principally to family members, the policy was considered to be one of the biggest political changes in the history of mental healthcare. But the approach to care was really coming full circle.

Mental illness and disability were family problems for English people living between 1660 and 1800. While mental illness was a subject of morbid fascination to the English public, and queues formed to see incarcerated women, the reality was more mundane. Most women and men who were afflicted by mental illness were not institutionalised, as this was the period before the extensive building of asylums. Instead, they were housed at home, and cared for by other family members.

Now a new study by Cambridge historian Dr Elizabeth Foyster will reveal the impact on families of caring for mentally ill and disabled relatives.

Much has been written about the insane themselves but few studies have considered mental illness from the perspective of the carers. ̽��ֱ��lifetime burden of caring for those individuals whose mental development did not progress beyond childhood, and who contemporaries labelled as ‘idiots’, ‘naturals’ or ‘fools’, has been little explored by historians. Foyster’s research, which has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, will unpick the emotional and economic consequences for families at a time when the Poor Law bound them to look after their mentally ill and disabled family members.

By asking key questions about the impact of ‘care in the community’ in the 18th century, Foyster hopes that her research will bridge social and medical history. Specifically, she aims to provide an historical perspective to contemporary debates such as how resources can be stretched to provide for children with learning difficulties and an ageing population.

“ ̽��ֱ��stresses and strains of family life were exacerbated by high infant mortality and low life expectancy, and many individuals were pushed towards mental breakdown,” she explained. “Moreover, inherited conditions, senility and what today would be described as ‘special needs’ could put great emotional demands on family members who had primary responsibility for their sick or disabled relatives.”

̽��ֱ��research will shed light upon how caring for the mentally ill and disabled raised difficult issues for families about the limits of intergenerational responsibility, and whether family ties were weakened or strengthened by the experience. ̽��ֱ��questions of how far shame was attached to having insanity or idiocy within a family, and at what point families began to seek outside help, will also be addressed.

“ ̽��ֱ��family must have seemed an inescapable feature of daily life between 1660 and 1800,” said Foyster. “Although there were those who were abandoned and rejected, for the majority, mental disability was accommodated within the family unit. I aim to get to the heart of what this really meant for people’s lives.”

For more information, please contact Louise Walsh (louise.walsh@admin.cam.ac.uk) at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Office of External Affairs and Communications.

Historians have long recognised that the family were the chief carers of the mentally ill. A new study will investigate the emotional and economic consequences of what care in the community meant to 18th-century families.

Although there were those who were abandoned and rejected, for the majority, mental disability was accommodated within the family unit.

Dr Elizabeth Foyster

Fitzwilliam Museum

'Madness', James McArdell, after Robert Edge Pine 1760

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Yes