Mike Slaven

Colonialism and Migration in Global Perspective: I am the principal investigator of this international and interdisciplinary research project which will run through April 2026, funded by a £228,000 grant from the British Academy through its Knowledge Frontiers program. I’m excited to work on this project with Dr Anita Huizar-Hernández (Arizona State University, USA), Dr Mayra Feddersen and Dr Carla Sepúlveda (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile), Dr Evan Smith (Flinders University, Australia), Dr Yasmin Shearmur (independent researcher, Canada) and my Lincoln colleague Dr Hamoon Khelghat-Doost.

Much more news on this project will be forthcoming, but here is a short description:

Colonialism has fundamentally shaped human mobility. Yet analysis of colonialism’s influence on contemporary migration politics and governance is highly uneven, being frequently discussed in some countries with evident colonial legacies, while rarely in others. Amid claims that settler and ex-metropole societies are “converging” in migration approaches, this project redresses major limitations in these debates by deepening analysis historically and broadening it geographically. Drawing on the humanities to excavate complex social meanings and identities surrounding colonialism, and on the social sciences to analyse how these are mobilised, this project analyses diverse settler and ex-metropole contexts on all six inhabited continents, many of which are infrequently compared. This project breaks new ground through a historically rooted, global study illuminating the complexity of how colonialism shapes migration governance today.

Arizona Project: Securing Borders, Securing Power: The Rise and Decline of Arizona's Border Politics (Columbia University Press, 2022; see my Book page).

Seeing “Illegal” Immigrants: For this project, I completed several months of research at the UK's National Archives in London, looking at how UK politicians and Home Office policymakers began to conceptualize -- and make policy about -- unauthorized migration during a time of great policy change between 1965 and 1973. (Here's a blog post on a presentation I made about some of this archival work.) After that, I interviewed former UK immigration policymakers about how they approached issues of asylum and irregular immigration, mostly during the '90s.

I have presented this research at the UK’s Home Office, discussing how the UK immigration control system worked in the 1960s and relied on very different standards of individual documentation and monitoring.

My research from this project has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Current research: The Institutional Origins of the Hostile Environment

In the aftermath of the UK’s “Windrush Scandal,” I’m working to try to understand the emergence of the “hostile environment” — where authorities rely on other social actors (employers, welfare providers, etc.) to enforce immigration rules — as an immigration policy approach in Britain. I’m analyzing recently released official documents to understand what the emergence of this approach can teach us about the “hostile environment” today. This will hopefully shed light on an approach to immigration governance that has become pronounced in the UK and many other places.

Fulbright Project: At the University of Edinburgh during 2011-2012, I researched the restrictive change in direction of UK immigration policy in the 2000s decade. This project focused on how Home Office policymakers understood and sought to address negative public opinion, as a factor in the political landscape that became hugely more relevant to them during this time. Similar in method to my PhD, I completed extensive documentary study while also interviewing policymakers in the UK Home Office.