LSE Review of Books Blog: The Migrant's Paradox

In The Migrant’s Paradox: Street Livelihoods and Marginal Citizenship in Britain, Suzanne M. Hall draws on interviews with migrant shopkeepers in five UK cities to explore the formation of street livelihoods and edge economies in the urban margins. Through the process of ‘writing the street as world’, this book brings the migrant experience – and the migrant’s paradox – to life for readers, writes Yasemin Karsli.

Connects global migration with urban marginalization, exploring how “race” maps onto place across the globe, state, and street

Throughout The Migrant’s Paradox, the author ‘write[s] the street as world’ through walking, looking, listening and talking in the streets of Birmingham, Manchester, London, Bristol and Leicester. Hall invites the reader to enter into the world of migrants and residents of edge territories. These are brought to life by Julia King’s maps, which neatly capture street diversity in visual form. Readers visit the urban rooms of shops, local planning offices, conference halls in the street: the streets on the edge where political economies connect with multiple displacements under the sovereign constitutions of power enacted through everyday life. This approach to research really brings the migrant experience – and the migrant’s paradox – to life for the reader.

Read the review at the LSE Review of Books Blog.