Rescaling Migration Studies: Migration Policy-Making and Implementation at the Local Government Level

ABSTRACT

How ‘the state’ perceives and responds to migration is gaining increasing attention. This analysis seeks to encourage debate on scales of governance in migration studies through a focus on policy-making and implementation on the part of local government officials in Scotland. Contributions include the elucidation of how immigrants are differentiated by individual local state actors and how this relates to the wider practices of local government towards them, and a typology conceptualising the heterogeneity of local state responses to immigration. This analytic emphasis on local state perceptions of, and responses to, migration and migrants hopes to inspire more nuanced and policy relevant understandings of ‘the state’ in migration research.

KEYWORDS:

• local government
• migration
• policy
• scale
• Scotland
• the state

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Allan Findlay for his comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted by researchers in the Centre for Population Centre, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) [grant number RES-625-28-0001].