The story of MRN (so far...)

Where are we and what are the challenges for the future?

If you relied on the popular media for your picture of life in the UK you would be given the clear impression that this is a country unremittingly hostile to migration. Eager to pick on stories that emphasise ‘costs’ in terms of access to public services and welfare, news coverage which sets out the evidence of the benefits of migration has been pretty hard to come by.

Yet that evidence exists. Knowledge of it is often locked up in the reports and personal experiences of local groups across the country, seldom finding its way out the wider audiences who might just be persuaded to look at things differently if they knew more about what is exactly going on at community, grassroot levels.

When MRN was set up in the final months of 2006 it hoped that it would be making a contribution to this task of prising open the evidence base on migration and reading this into an ongoing narrative on how local communities were dealing with the challenges of migrant integration into the social and economic mainstream of life. 

Turning up the volume

The perspective for its early work had been set out in a report the Barrow Cadbury Trust had commissioned on the state of the migrants’ rights sector across the country.  Migrant Voices, Migrant Rights, which emerged from six months of discussion with groups around the country, set out the case for a new project which worked for the explicit objective of increasing the level of contact and communication across the range of migrant supporting groups, and building from the record of their work an explicit narrative, developed week-by-week and day-by-day, on the ways in which migrants and host communities were meeting the challenges of the period.

Since this time MRN’s core work of discussion and sharing of experience has been recorded in over 130 editions of its newsletter. Published monthly until 2010, and thereafter on a weekly basis, this email publication provides a record of the policy issues, research reports, activities, conferences, seminars and public meetings and events over the time since its first edition in July 2007.

As a networking project, looking for opportunities to strengthen and develop conversations which potentially involve thousands of people, we were keen to make use of all the opportunities to be got from the fast-developing social media.  Regular blogs have been a feature of our work since the days of our first website, launched in March 2009. A year later we added Migration Pulse to our communication repertoire, with the open invitation to activists across the country to fill this space with reports, thoughts and reflections on the issues they were dealing with.

The Migration Pulse archive now lists nearly one hundred contributions from colleagues, covering issues ranging from detention, the operation of the Points-Based System, the feminisation of migration, through to reports on the situation in other countries.

Primarily a UK network, MRN is also uncompromisingly internationalist in its outlook. It has made significant contributions to the United Nations sponsored Global Forum on Migration and Development from the date of its first meeting in Brussels in 2007.  It has also worked as a part of the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM), assisting it in finding supporters in the UK who could assist in its campaigning and research work.  Between 2009-2011 MRN also led a six country partnership looking at integration policies across the EU for the European Network Against Racism (ENAR).        

We will be publishing a report on our first five years of work within the next few weeks. Using a set of infographics, the report sets out an account of the structures we have built up over these years and the things we have learnt. It comes to some conclusions about what seems to us to have been part of our most robust, positive experiences and what we hope to carry forward into future activities.

The key thing for us remains a genuinely collaborative approach, working with colleagues and network partners on activities and projects in an open fashion. The tasks of challenging and containing the threat of a further spate of restrictive policies and developing a progressive narrative will require to draw on a wide range of alliances.

Come to our launch and meet us

Our report PROGRESS: 2006-2011 will be launched at a social event in central London taking place on 15 March, to which all our supporters are invited. As well as the opportunity to receive a copy of the document we also intend that it will be the chance for friends to socialise, network, and catch-up on our schedule of activity for the coming months.