Out of Place: Racial-Ethnic Legacies and Migration in Advanced Democracies
Fri, 25 Oct
|Shinjuku City
This project presents a threefold typology based in colonial histories and racial-ethnic legacies to explain from where elite and popular views about these issues have come and why they resonate, often in incendiary ways, with these states’ electorates.
Date and Venue
25 Oct 2019, 16:30 – 18:00 GMT+9
Shinjuku City, Japan, 〒169-0051 Tokyo, Shinjuku City, Nishiwaseda, 1-chōme−21−1 早稲田大学 西早稲田ビルディング
About the Event
Speaker: Dr. Desmond King
Dr. Desmond King holds the Andrew W Mellon Chair of American Government at the University of Oxford, where he is also a Fellow of Nuffield College and St John’s College. He is the author of ten books, nine edited volumes and close to a 100 articles / chapters. Among his influential works are books on US immigration policy such as Making Americans: Immigration, Race and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (HUP 2000), and The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation (OUP 2005), and on racial inequalities and politics such as Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the US Federal Government (OUP 1995/2007).
Date: 25 October 2019
Time: 16:30–18:00
Venue: Building 19, Room 710 Waseda Campus
Free attendance, no registration required
The number of people moving, and continuing to move, toward advanced democracies in the last decade combined with the post-2008 Great Recession rise of populist parties and leaders have transformed the politics of migration. Advanced democracies are in a new era.
The regulation of immigration, the role of integration in advanced democracies, and the terms of assimilation are rarely off the news agenda. Few political elites are unengaged with these issues. To analyse these developments this project presents a threefold typology based in colonial histories and racial-ethnic legacies to explain from where elite and popular views about these issues have come and why they resonate, often in incendiary ways, with these states’ electorates. Because the language of assimilation and associated policies, which by definition set up categories of inclusion and exclusion or of belonging versus stranger, have dominated the politics of immigration and migrant integration, political elites have mostly fostered hostility to migrants, often intentionally. Showing how assimilation is a
concept rooted in outdated forms of colonial-era classification and harmful racial-ethnic legacies increases our understanding of the transformative effects of immigration on the politics of advanced democracies.