In Britain, and across Europe, concern has been increasingly expressed over the implications of marriage-related migration for integration. Children and grandchildren of former immigrants marrying partners from their ancestral ‘homelands’ is often presented as problematic in forming a ‘first generation in every generation,’ and inhibiting processes of individual and group integration, impeding socio-economic participation and cultural change. As a result, immigration restrictions have been justified on the grounds of promoting integration, despite limited evidence.

Marriage Migration and Integration provides much needed new grounding for both academic and policy debates. The authors examine processes in multiple interacting domains, such as employment, education, social networks, extended family living, gender relations and belonging. Marriage Migration and Integration is available to order. See this link to order the e-book, click here to order a hard copy.

About the speakers

Katharine Charsley is Professor of Migration Studies in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Before this, she taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford. She was PI on the ESRC ‘Marriage Migration and Integration’ project. She has published widely, including over twenty articles and two previous books: the ethnographic monograph Transnational Pakistani Connections: Marrying ‘back home’ (Routledge 2013), and an edited collection Transnational Marriage: new perspectives from Europe and beyond (Routledge 2012).

Sarah Spencer is Director of Strategy and a Senior Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford. She is Chair of the Board of Directors of IMISCOE, the European network of migration research institutes and scholars, and a member of Kellogg College, Oxford’s most international graduate college. Sarah was a co-founder of the network of equality and human rights organisations in Britain, the Equality and Diversity Forum (now ‘Equally Ours’) and its Chair for ten years; a Commissioner and Deputy Chair of a statutory body, the Commission for Racial Equality; Programme Director at the Institute for Public Policy Research; and Director of the human rights NGO, Liberty.

Evelyn Ersanilli is Senior Researcher at the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on migration policy development and immigrant integration, in particular citizenship, identity, migrant families. She holds a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). She is also a Co-Investigator in the MOBILISE project “Determinants of ‘Mobilisation’ at Home & Abroad: Analysing the Micro-Foundations of Out-Migration & Mass Protest”.