There is already a rich sociological literature that provides different ways of understanding immigration control, and can help us appreciate debates about this issue in social and political life. My objective in this chapter is to provide a selective review of the main approaches being pursued by British sociologists, but also to put forward a case for the interpretive approach adopted in the rest of this book.

The structure of the chapter will be as follows. I will begin with a short historical summary of immigration control in Britain, which is necessary to provide some context for the arguments of different sociologists. I will then review some of the main theoretical perspectives on immigration in the sociology of racial and ethnic relations, concentrating on the traditions of neo-Marxism and poststructuralism that currently dominate research and theorising in this field. In the second half of the chapter, I will identify a problem in this literature: the gap between the perspective of theorists and our everyday experience of the world. I will suggest that Robin Cohen’s (1994) study of British policy towards asylum-seekers bridges this gap, through its focus on the actions and perspectives of government officials, pressure groups and politicians. This study takes this interpretive approach a step further by examining a range of institutional and practical perspectives in the immigration courts.

A short history of immigration control in Britain

Britain has experienced three waves of mass immigration in recent history. During the middle of the 19th century, the potato famine caused large numbers of Irish immigrants to come to Britain. The Censuses of 1841 and 1861 indicate an increase in those of Irish origin from 415,000 to almost 750,000. Towards the end of the century, political persecution, and later famine, and war, resulted in about 300,000 Russian Jews settling in Britain between the period 1870 and 1914 (Pollins, 1989), and they were joined by a smaller number of Jewish refugees from Germany prior to the Second World War. In the post-war period, Britain has experienced what one writer calls “nothing less than a rapid and quite unprecedented demographic and cultural transformation” (Spencer, 1997). Large numbers of citizens from Britain’s ex-colonies in the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and Africa came seeking economic opportunities in the 1950s and 1960s, and have since brought over dependants, and raised families.