“What is to be done?” is a question that haunts migration scholarship. At a time when academics are under pressure to demonstrate their contribution to the “real world,” the study of migration, like the study of crime, occupies a privileged place. It is “policy relevant,” and attracts grants far more readily than, say, the study of medieval French. This has attendant dangers, and intellectual engagement can be overly shaped by a policy agenda. Immigration policies are structured by binaries such as refugee/economic migrant, legal/illegal, family/worker, and a pathway from temporary migrant, to settlement, to citizenship, and it has been surprisingly difficult for scholarship to move beyond these imaginaries. The critical study of the social exposes a highly fraught relation between the academic and the political. While I do not refuse to answer the question on principle, my book is indeed wary of making the kinds of policy suggestions that funding often requires of empirical researchers.

“What is to be done—about what?” The impacts of migration on the social, the economic, and the political are perceived as profoundly disruptive, but the history of the world is a history of mobility. When does mobility become migration, and why are liberal democracies so consumed with it as a problem? Are the solutions to whatever the problem is, necessarily to do with migration? If, for example, the problem of trafficking is a problem of exploitation and abuse, why is the response framed within immigration controls? In response to Joe Carens’s question, I do advocate for the elimination of anti-trafficking laws: far more constructive to build a firewall between immigration law and employment rights that means migrants’ status as workers is not undermined by immigration controls.

Furthermore, whom are we asking the question of, or telling our answers to? There is a place for policy recommendations to government, but policy recommendations must be realistic, and deciding what is realistic is both limiting and highly political. Votes for women, freedom for slaves, rights for children, must all have seemed unrealistic once. In universities some of us still have the luxury of being unrealistic, free to imagine a world completely differently ordered. It is an imagination I want to share. Like Joe, I am interested in the “ordinary person,” and more particularly, the ordinary person who is disturbed by growing inequality both within and between states, not as an observer but as a social actor. My hope is that Us and Them? brings the exclusions of citizenship, manifest, among other forms, in naturalisation and deportation, to their attention. This is not with a view to eliciting policy solutions, but in order to initiate a debate that is grounded in daily life and in political action. Migration is often separated from issues like homelessness, health, and labour rights, as if migrants are not homeless, sick, exploited, or as if migrants’ experiences of homelessness, sickness, and exploitation have nothing in common with the experiences of marginalised citizens. By exploring those commonalities we are already beginning to answer the question, “what is to be done?”