1st Edition
Disabling Migration Controls Shared Learning, Solidarity, and Collective Resistance
When people are prevented from meeting their needs, the impact is disabling, whether in the immigration system or in the wider population. Drawing on many years of research and activism, this book argues that insights from the disabled people’s movement, particularly the original Social Model of Disability, can be usefully extended to focus resistance on the disabling restrictions imposed on people subject to asylum and immigration controls.
While acknowledging the pain and discomfort of many impairments and of forced displacement, the book focuses on injustices that can be changed. It does not catalogue the hostility of the ‘hostile environment’. Nor does it promote inclusive asylum restrictions. An unjust system is not transformed by including disabled people. Policies designed to deprive people of essential needs and to stoke hatred among the wider population are core elements of the rise of fascism. In this context, bringing together movements for disability and migrant justice could help build urgently needed solidarity and resistance with which to develop a society based on equity and common humanity.
Quotations and images are used to convey the messages and priorities of disabled people seeking asylum, ensuring that the book is both engaging and grounded in the insights of lived experience. This book will interest people seeking to improve social justice, including scholars of disability, migration, sociology, and politics.
0.Introduction. 1.Struggles for survival and resistance. 2.Exceptions to universal rights and the promotion of individual responsibility. 3.Austerity, the hostile environment and entrenchment of individualism. 4.Implementation or resistance to the increasingly hostile environment. 5.Omission or distortion of insights from the disabled people’s movement. 6.Extending the social model to build collective resistance. x.Concluding Comments – Building a movement for justice.
Biography
Rebecca Yeo is an activist and academic specialising in issues of disability and migrant justice. She worked on issues of disability and international poverty for many years before turning to focus more on the UK context. Her doctoral and postdoctoral work included bringing people in the asylum system and the disabled people’s movement into conversation with each other. She explores the relevance of insights and achievements of the disabled people’s movement for wider social justice movements.
Ellen Clifford, Disabled activist, member of the national Steering Group of Disabled People Against Cuts and author of The War on Disabled People published by Zed Books which won the 2021 Bread and Roses award.
We’ve needed this book for a long time! Immigration activists have much to learn from the disabled people’s movement, and particularly from disabled asylum seekers. Rebecca Yeo is a committed, inspiring and comprehensive guide to this important emerging field.
Professor Bridget Anderson, Director Migration Mobilities Bristol, University of Bristol
In this thoroughly well-argued book, Rebecca Yeo shows both how asylum systems produce injustice for disabled people, and that migration studies has much to learn from disability studies. This is a treasure trove not just for migration studies, but also for activists fighting for justice.
Willem Schinkel, Professor of Social Theory, Erasmus University Rotterdam
This book and Rebecca Yeo's work more generally is essential for anyone trying to make sense of the current state of oppression and its intersectional nature. Crucially, it also provides a template to explore ways out of it.
Dr Aurelien Mondon, Senior lecturer, Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies. University of Bath
This book offers compelling insights into the potential to bring together disabled citizens with people in the asylum system, refugees and allies in a much-needed movement of solidarity to resist and reimagine the current systems that debilitate, disable and devalue vast swathes of people – and planet – in the narrow pursuit of profit
Dr Sarah Bell, Senior Lecturer, Disability & Climate. University of Exeter
