Migrants: The Story of Us All

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It provides valuable insights into the ways in which migration has shaped our world, and challenges readers to reconsider their preconceptions about this complex and often controversial topic. Mukti Jain Campion talks to sociologist Professor Michaela Benson of Lancaster University who studies modern British emigration and hears from a range of British people currently living abroad. Whether you are a student of history, a migrant yourself, or simply interested in the human experience, this book is well worth reading.

Over the past year, young people from across Lewisham have been designing exhibits responding to what migration means to them as part of Moving Stories: Lewisham , a creative competition we ran during Borough of Culture, supported by Landsec.

This powerful portrait—stark, eloquent, and utterly devoid of sentimentality—depicts the arduous, dangerous journeys of migrants all across the globe.

Halfway up the high street in Totnes, a small town on the river Dart in Devon, a modest stone is set into the edge of the road. The Migration Museum explores how the movement of people to and from Britain across the ages has made us who we are – as individuals and as nations. The cultural opprobrium attached to immigration has been building at least since Aristotle’s day, according to former BBC journalist Sam Miller’s flawed, fascinating stab at a global history of migration. She had described immigration as “out of control” and said only the Tories are serious about “stopping the invasion” of the south coast of England, echoing the language of the far right.

When people express anxieties about immigration, they tend to do so in terms of its economic, social or cultural effect on the country – and occasionally all three. Miller’s book is far from a left wing analysis and doesn’t go in depth as much as I would have wanted it to do. While the book is informative and intriguing, it does not significantly improve our understanding of migration. But it does its best to subvert the mainstream arguments that migrants are a problem by reclaiming the lost voices of migrants old and new.