New PhD Candidate explores the development in British and Danish migration policies

On 1 september 2008 Katrine Borg Albertsen joined the research unit Migration

Katrine Borg Albertsen, has joined the Danish Institute for International Studies and the SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen. Her PhD project will focus on the relationship between migration management and societal security.

Making Great Britain and Denmark her cases, she will be researching on how the national control based migration and integration policies of recent years combine with Europeanization and account for legalization and possible desecuritisation of certain types of migration.

Over the years migration has become a strongly securitised and politicised field in the European countries. The extension of the European Union means that migration control is increasingly carried out at the external boarders of the EU and in the migrants’ countries of origin. Migration management, a so called soft control policy, is taking over from a more physical migration control. Despite this scenario, a strongly securitised perception of the migration- or stranger-phenomenon still founds national legislation and the popular discourse on immigration and integration.

The national and EU-based control policies have resulted in a non-favourable damming of wanted migration and transnational movement. An aging population, negative population growth, and increasing labour shortages in the European countries have caused an acute and long termed need of immigration. This situation means that the countries are placed in a legislative field of tension. By different means, the European states guard their national sovereignty and autonomy, both politically and in a national-cultural manner. Simultaneously, the countries are increasingly depending on immigration in order to sustain functions in the systems of the existing societies and promote economic growth. This means that to a certain degree divergence has arisen between laws which prescribe closed borders from a perspective of national security and special arrangements that open the doors to the wanted migrants.

The PhD dissertation will examine the development in the integration and migration policies of the chosen countries, when the countries are forced to open up and legalise migration which, from being perceived as the incarnation of the threat, now is becoming an absolute necessity for the sustenance of the structure which both creates and is created by the nation.

Katrine Borg Albertsen is BA in English and Ethnology and MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Southern Denmark. Besides her academic involvement with fields of study related to migration and integration, she has been working on integration and citizenship education in Vollsmose in the city of Odense during her student years.

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