Blog post by Malgosia Machowska-Kosciak and Maria Barry, Dublin City University, Ireland

In recent years, Ireland has witnessed worrying headlines: anti-immigrant protests, arson attacks on refugee accommodation, and growing online disinformation campaigns. Such incidents jar with the country’s self-image as the land of céad míle fáilte – a hundred thousand welcomes – and force us to ask: who gets to be considered Irish today?

For young people born in Ireland to migrant parents, or who arrived as children, this question is lived daily. Our Identities article, ‘Forty shades of ‘otherness’ – engaging with second-generation migrant young people’s identities through intersectionality, power and agency’, explores how second-generation youth navigate these tensions – and, crucially, how they refuse to let rigid labels define them.

In our study, participants described microaggressions and exclusions: a foreign-sounding name, a distinctive accent, a hijab in school, each sparking questions about their belonging. But these stories are not simply about being positioned as ‘other’. They are also about how young people resist, reinterpret and reshape what Irishness means.

Blog post by Idreas Khandy, Anglia Ruskin University, UK
 
The British Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, previewed what her ‘moral mission’ would look like when she laid out the broad contours of the measures concerning legal migration to the UK. The proposed measures, if adopted, would be the ‘biggest overhaul of legal migration model in 50 years’. The announcement amounted to the Home Office tipping its hat towards the far-right, whose rhetoric on immigration now openly advocates mass deportation. Crucially, this unfolded at a time when hate crimes against racial and religious minorities are rising in hospitals, schools and public transport.

Given this context, the announcement, coupled with its endorsement by Farage’s Reform, deepened existing concerns among racialised migrants. Within days of the announcement, as The Guardian reported, some immigrants in fear stopped accessing the support they are legally eligible for, despite strict eligibility conditions. Online, the immediate response to the announcement was that of shock, disbelief and confusion. For instance, discussions on a highly active subreddit (r/SkilledWorkerVisaUK, about 23K weekly visitors) focusing on immigration to the UK expressed feelings of betrayal, feeling unwanted, being asked to ‘prove’ one’s ‘worth’ again, and frustration at the vagueness of the proposal and the accompanying consultation.

​A closer reading of the proposed changes and the accompanying consultation suggests that both are rooted in a racial logic, and that a flawed consultation process may be used to legitimise their implementation, with serious consequences for the UK in the coming years.

Blog post by Owen McNamara, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
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Just as consumers around the world have begun to realize that Mexican food is more than ‘TexMex’ style tacos and burritos, so too have Mexicans themselves undertaken a critical revaluation of their traditional cuisine. Increasingly, foods and drinks that were previously (disparagingly) associated with Indigenous, rural and poor communities are being reappraised within Mexican society.

These two revaluations are linked. The attention garnered by Mexican cuisine among international gourmands (and acts of institutional recognition, such as UNESCO’s 2010 designation of Mexican cooking as part of humanity’s ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage) have created demand in cities across Mexico for a supposedly more ‘authentic’ Mexican cuisine, not only among tourists but among Mexican consumers as well.

Simultaneous with this boom in interest in native corn and traditional cuisine, the stigma which has traditionally been attached to southern Mexican identities has likewise been rethought. Mexican racial geographies commonly divide the country between a relatively prosperous north, associated with European or mestizo culture, and a poor, Indigenous south. This understanding is supported by the higher prevalence of Indigenous people in southern states (particularly Oaxaca, Chiapas and Yucatán), and the historical investment in infrastructure and industry that has favoured the north, driving migration from southern states towards central and northern Mexico.