Bridget Anderson is Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship, and head of the interdisciplinary research institute Migration Mobility Bristol (MMB) at the University of Bristol. Her research is based on a recognition that the differences between ‘migrant’ and ‘citizen’ are constructed through law as well as social and political practices. Everyday assumptions about who a migrant is make visible the underlying logic of migration policies, that they are racialised and aimed at the global poor. Ultimately, Anderson argues, migration exposes and challenges global inequalities.
Anderson gave the keynote speech at a conference organised by REMESO to mark LiU’s 50th anniversary in 2025. The conference was titled: ”Migration in an Era of Crisis” and Andersson´s focus on questions such as Who counts as a migrant and why? What movement matters? How do we denaturalise the border?.
“When migrants cross borders they're both demonstrating that we do live in a very unequal world and challenging the basis of that inequality. If they are moving illegally, they are doing it in defiance of the law that tells them that they have to stay and be unequal and just put up with it. They’re not accepting that.”
With the political shift across Europe dominated by nationalist, right wing agendas, this logic has become blatantly outspoken. More often than not ’migrants’ are positioned as a threat. A threat to culture, to economy, to politics, to the nation state – and to the labour market. Bridget Anderson notes that ”whatever they say, there's only going to be more people on the move as inequality increases and as the climate crisis bites.”
A World Without ‘Migrants’
What would happen if the deconstruction she encourages of migration as a concept would succeed? Bridget Anderson says succeeding would ”require a lot of other things to fall in place”, and that questioning the concept by necessity opens broader discussions about governance, inequality and the structure of global capitalism.
Critics say open borders are incompatible with strong welfare systems, a very good example of when movement is noticed, as maintained by Anderson:
”We notice movement if it's a migrant who's using the welfare state. We don't notice movement when it's the money from taxation of an arms company that has been put into the welfare state. That movement is completely invisibilised.”
For Anderson the central question is how societies can build fair systems of redistribution and democratic decision-making in a world defined by movement rather than containment.
“I honestly don’t know what the answer is, but I know it has got to be a central question. I mean it's easier to imagine the end of the world than a world without borders. That's why we need to have interdisciplinary work that encourages and feeds our political imagination. To find solutions, we need to identify the right questions. And migration is where many of those questions begin.”
The Hydra Rising
One way to learn from migration without ratifying the concept, she says, is to situate analysis of human movement within the broader landscape of social processes and relations, connecting migration scholars' work with other fields. Her latest book, the edited collection Rethinking Migration does just that.
Her current project is turning those insights into new scholarly inquiry. She is editing a forthcoming volume titled Hydra Rising, inspired by the influential history The Many-Headed Hydra (2000) that examined revolutionary alliances and experiments in communal living in the 1600s. Radicals of the period challenged marriage, gender roles and racial hierarchies, before capitalism was fully entrenched.
The new volume explores how those traditions continue today, especially in contemporary movements advocating for freedom of movement, mutual aid and ‘no borders’.
