With reports about refugees from Syria, Libya, Sudan and other places drowning in dozens during their attempts to cross the Mediterranean in unfit vessels filling the news once again, Bridget Anderson's outspoken and well-argued account of ‘The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control’ seems timelier than ever. Her empirical work concentrates on the British case only and does not include certainly relevant experiences from elsewhere or, indeed, the increasingly powerful role of the EU in creating and managing diverse categories of immigrants in Europe and at Europe's doorsteps. However, ‘Us and Them’ offers an analysis of the historical development, intricacies, complex dynamics and paradoxes of British immigration control that (1) problematises the construction of deserving and undeserving/good and bad/belonging and failed aliens and citizens with implications for policies far beyond the British Isles, (2) is unprecedented in migration studies in its long-term historical view and (3) provides important insights about the close – and dangerous – interrelations between immigration control and social policies.

The monograph starts with a vivid introduction employing the migration fairy tale of a poor woodcutter who searches for a better life in a nearby kingdom. Throughout the book, Anderson engages with various important questions through the lens of her fairy tale: what statuses do statutory policies and practices produce for this poor woodcutter, how so and based on which normative claims, where do they include or exclude his like and against what normative other insiders or outsiders, i.e., who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’, when and why could the woodcutter be legitimately amongst ‘us’, and what effect does any categorisation as such imply for migrants’ and non-migrants’ (!) livelihoods in Britain? By considering these questions, Anderson tears apart many migration studies’ assumption that migrant statuses are given in legislation somewhat reflect migratory and social realities. Her empirically rich problematisation of the ‘us and them’ categories of workers, citizens, detainees, asylum seekers, victims of trafficking, carers and so on adds substantially to recent critical interpretive policy analyses in various subfields of migration studies which deconstruct and explain rather than reify and leave unexplored the production of migrant categories, statuses and rights through policies (e.g. Carmel and Paul, Reference Carmel and Paul2013; Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas, Reference Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas2012; Hansen and Hager, Reference Hansen and Brian Hager2010; Kraler et al., Reference Kraler, Kofman, Kohli and Schmoll2012). Anderson offers an elaboration of the concept of ‘community of value’ to highlight the political constructedness, on-going normative contestation, intrinsic complexity of migrant statuses and conditionalities and knock-on effects of value definitions for other governance objects in the ‘kingdom’.

The book contains eight substantive analytical chapters which build up from a detailed historic account of first statutory controls of human mobility (read: of paupers) in fourteenth century England in regulation such as the Ordinance of Labourers and vagrancy legislation (Chapter 1), the creation of a racialised citizenship and immigration model in colonial and post-colonial Britain (Chapter 2), modern day immigration control policies (Chapter 3), contemporary labour migration policies and labour market dynamics for migrant workers (Chapter 4), naturalisation policies (Chapter 5) and detention/expulsion policies (Chapter 6), the UK's approach to victims of trafficking (Chapter 7) and the framing of migrant domestic workers in policy making as a particular group of immigrants (Chapter 8). It is in her sharp cross-pollination of a long durée view on medieval pauper and labourer legislation with contemporary immigration policy making that Anderson achieves what many more technocratic analyses of current immigration policies cannot: she exposes the complex historical roots of statutory mobility control and brings to plain observation the present-day echoes of the early intermingling of nation-state-based notions of belonging with pre-existing norms around work and welfare.

The impressive historical embedding of her analysis equally informs Anderson's third major contribution, maybe the most interesting for readers of this journal. By tracing the origins of present-day immigration control back to ideas that formed around controlling the mobility of labourers and paupers in medieval Britain, the author is able to make a strong case for the continuing relatedness of immigration and work and welfare debates. The definition of ‘aliens’ as deserving of residence status, a work permit or even naturalisation where they are law-abiding, contribute to economic growth and share the values of the British nation has direct implications for citizens who are seen to not share these values, are guilty of ‘welfare scrounging’ or have committed crimes. In Anderson's words: ‘There is conflict, exclusion, and failure inside as well as outside the kingdom . . . the borders of the nation can also be called upon to exclude the Failed Citizen (who can be presented as not having national values)’ (p. 177).

The distinction of ‘Us and Them’ in immigration control is not only political then and thus deserves much more critical discussion with regard to its underlying normative assumptions about belonging. It is ‘dangerous’ because exclusionary markers of belonging addressed to migrants tend to also fall on the feet of the so-called native population where it does not meet the high-flying standards of the community of value which migrants have to meet in order to belong. It is dangerous because it threatens the societal foundations for solidarity and democracy by, put bluntly, playing off vulnerable groups against one another (see also: Hansen and Hager, Reference Hansen and Brian Hager2010). Anderson's book can thus be read as a critical social policy study, which, through the empirical lens of British migration control, urges scholarship to continue to root, unpick and problematise any categorisation of belonging in modern capitalist societies, be they based on origin, physical or intellectual skills, income, class, religion, race, gender or any other potential marker of good or bad. The book leaves anyone interested in justifications of eligibility in social policies motivated to maintain a critical debate about the very foundations of often taken-for-granted assumptions about deservingness, as well as the global and national distribution effects of particular exclusionary policy choices with regard to individual groups’ rights, life chances and livelihoods. It certainly teaches us not to hide behind legal categories and statuses or formal decision-making procedures in our analyses of policies and politics.