London the Promised Land Revisited: The Changing Face of the London Migrant Landscape in the Early 21st Century

Some two decades since the publication of London the Promised Land?, which charted and investigated the successes and failures of the migrant experience in London over a period of three hundred years, this book re-examines the migrant landscape in London. While remaining a beacon for immigrants, the migrant face of the city has changed rapidly and dramatically from one which was heavily populated by semi-skilled and unskilled post-colonial incomers, to one which now embraces the EU Accession Countries, refugees from the Middle East and Africa, oligarchs from Russia, the new wealthy from China, economic migrants from Latin America and Ireland, and still, post-colonial immigrants - at the same time witnessing the exodus ’home’ of incomers, or their descendants, who now see opportunities where there were none before. The contributors, all leading academics and practitioners in their diverse fields, examine changes to the migrant landscape of contemporary London at the micro, meso and macro levels. London the Promised Land Revisited thus explores a range of experiences in the capital, including the presence and treatment of illness amongst migrants, the phenomenon of migrant ’invisibility’ and asylum, the migrant marketplace and ethnic ’clustering’, and interaction with local and national government - across a variety of migrant groups, both ’new’ and ’old’. As such, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interest in migration, migrant experiences and the contemporary ’global’ city.

About the Author

Anne J. Kershen is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Migration at Queen Mary University of London, Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, University College London, UK, and founder of the Centre for the Study of Migration. She is the author of Strangers, Aliens and Asians: Huguenots, Jews and Bangladeshis in Spitalfields 1666-2000 and Uniting the Tailors, co-author of Tradition and Change and editor of London the Promised Land? The Migrant Experience in a Capital City, A Question of Identity; Language Labour and Migration and Food in the Migrant Experience, and author of Strangers, Aliens and Asians: Huguenots, Jews and Bangladeshis in Spitalfields.