 According to the Office of National Statistics, in 2013, over a quarter of children born in the UK were born to foreign-born mothers. So what does that mean for the future of UK citizens? Well, public and policy debate on migration often sees migrant families as problematic. They are seen as challenging cultural cohesion or burdening social and health services. Migrant women are seen as transmitting the culture of their country of origin to their children, and therefore they are seen as standing in the way of their children's integration. My research at the Open University over the last seven years has scrutinized this view. I've conducted in-depth qualitative research with Kurdish, Turkish and Polish migrant mothers and their children, and also with European citizen mothers in London. I've also done participatory theater-based research. In this project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council with my colleague Tracy Reynolds from Greenwich University, we explore how an ethnically mixed group of migrant mothers in East London experience dilemmas and opportunities of bringing up children. This method was particularly useful as it allowed the mothers to try out ways of acting as citizens. They chose topics such as family conflict, the challenges of helping children to adjust to a new home and difficulties of accessing health services. I have a mother, I have children, and if I'm looking at a job every time, he says, we need the qualification, we need like that, it's not easy to get as a mother. The theater method gave me more rounded and nuanced insights of how migrant mothers think and do citizenship, which I wouldn't have got through more traditional research methods. My research has found that mothers are often deeply committed to bringing up their children as part of this society. And indeed, they play a key role in enabling their children to develop a sense of multicultural belonging. Yet, social policy on integration and citizenship has a narrow focus on how migrants contribute through their paid work only and doesn't recognize the contributions that migrants make as mothers. Overall, what my research addresses is what happens to our understandings and theories of citizenship if we don't think of migrant mothers as outsiders. Rather than viewing migrant mothers as lacking, such an approach asks what we can learn from them. The big challenge for our contemporary society is if we take seriously migrant mothers' ways of creating participation and belonging, how does this challenge and enhance our understandings of citizenship?