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Historically, immigrants from different parts of the world were welcomed to Britain and at times even seduced into coming to live and work here. However, when their population increased, or other issues of the time were connected to their presence in the country, political and public concerns began to emerge in relation to demographics, health, the economy and crime.2 This paper will explore the temporal aspects of connecting foreign nationals to different non-immigration criminal offences by tracking the historical role of immigration policy and political debates in immigrant criminality in order to understand the background to this issue, which has predominated on the political discourses and immigration policy changes. The historical journey this article takes will shed some light on the economic and social restrictions placed on foreign nationals' activities, and the role of public sentiment and media coverage in connecting foreign nationals to non-immigration criminal offences with a special focus on the criminality of the Irish in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rent-seeking has been an important concept in economics since the 1950s but has not been sufficiently mined in the field of social policy. This paper aims to address this by employing a UK case study to illustrate the relevance of rent-seeking in this context. In doing so it attempts to set out a means of identifying where rents are sought, by whom and the levers they use to extract them. In the UK rent-seeking and welfare is often implicitly linked to 'welfare scrounging'. Here we show that this is not necessarily the case and that rent-seeking has much greater explanatory power in relation to social policy processes and transfers. By also introducing a contextual dimension we demonstrate that market and bureaucratic forms of rent-seeking can operate simultaneously. More work remains to be done to fully articulate these processes, however this constitutes one starting point for this work to develop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]