Migration deal: ‘Really a scheme around political diplomacy between UK & France in post-Brexit era’

Erin Ogunkeye is pleased to welcome Parvati Nair, Professor of Hispanic, Cultural and Migration Studies at Queen Mary University of London. She sees the UK-France migration agreement as a small but revealing element of a much wider post-Brexit relationship, in which questions of migration are intertwined with diplomacy, security, intelligence and surveillance. She warns that the scheme risks trivialising a complex human plight it into deterrence and a numbers game. She argues humans have always moved, and migration can profoundly enrich societies. The challenge is to build systems that recognise both national sovereignty and human dignity.