In this decision is the implicit suggestion that when it comes to the advantages offered by the UK’s welfare state, citizenship is less relevant than nationality. What is even more interesting than the reporting of the research is the decision by the UK’s government to begin recording the nationality of benefit claimants in the first place, a move which made this research possible. However, this did not stop the UK’s press from reporting the research along what Roxanne Lynn Doty would describe as “anti-immigrantist” lines (2003), for example calling it a “scandal” that any migrants should be able to claim the benefits which should be reserved for UK nationals (The Sun, 2012), and failing to report the fact that half of the migrants claiming benefits had become UK citizens since entering the country. The significance of the report’s findings were unclear, seemingly pointing to the fact that migrants were actually more likely to be in work, and thus not claiming benefits, than UK nationals. On the 20th January 2012, the UK government published a report it had undertaken into the number of “foreign-born” people claiming working-age benefits from the state (BBC, 2012). What do Western immigration regimes tell us about the contemporary international world order?
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