By Shayan Gul, MPS Diversity in Policymaking Intern

March 2026

I came to this internship as someone who cared about migration — personally, politically, and academically. Growing up in Pakistan, home to one of the largest refugee populations in the world, migration was never an abstract concept. The quiet understanding that for many people, movement is not a choice but a necessity, and that the systems designed to govern it are rarely built with those people in mind. What I did not have, arriving at MPS, was a precise language for that understanding. I had instinct and indignation. What the internship gave me — slowly, and sometimes uncomfortably — was rigour.

The first thing that genuinely surprised me was how much of migration policy operates in the space between what the law says and what people actually experience. I had studied international frameworks, human rights instruments, the broad architecture of protection — but Migration Policy Scotland (MPS) showed me how rights function, or fail to function, in practice.

What struck me most was how much of this is invisible to people who are not directly affected. You can live in a city like Edinburgh, walk past asylum seekers every day, and have almost no understanding of the administrative reality of their lives. One of the things MPS does  is make that reality legible. Writing it up, researching it, putting numbers and stories alongside each other: that work felt genuinely important to me, and I am glad I got to be a small part of it.

Policy research, I discovered, is a discipline with its own habits of mind. It is not enough to identify a problem. You must understand its history, its political context, who benefits from its continuation, and what a realistic alternative might look like. You must hold complexity without losing clarity. And you must write in a way that a civil servant, a journalist, and a community organiser might all find useful — which, as it turns out, is genuinely difficult.

I worked on background research that involved reading through government consultations, academic literature, and stakeholder submissions — learning to identify where the evidence was strong and where claims were running ahead of it. I learned how to structure an argument so that the most important point is not buried, and how to acknowledge different perspectives. These sound like small skills. In practice, they require constant attention and a willingness to revise.

But what MPS showed me is that the accumulation of rigorous, well-communicated evidence does eventually shift what is possible — it changes the terms of debate, gives advocates better ammunition, and creates the conditions for reform even when reform feels distant. There is something quietly hopeful about that, and I held onto it on the harder days.

I observed how MPS navigates a balance by staying close enough to governmental stakeholders while maintaining the independence that makes its research trustworthy. That tension between influence and integrity, is one I had not thought much about before. I now think it is one of the most important things any advocacy organisation has to manage, and one of the most fragile.

I will be returning to Pakistan with a set of skills I am genuinely excited to use. The underlying challenges of translating evidence into policy, of making rights legible, of advocating for people who are structurally excluded from the decisions that shape their lives, are challenges that exist everywhere.

The way of working I have absorbed at MPS — the insistence on evidence, the attention to whose voices are present and whose are missing, the understanding that good research and effective communication are both necessary and neither alone is sufficient — these feel to me like tools with wide application. In Pakistan, whether working on displacement, on labour rights, on access to legal protections, or on any number of the policy challenges that matter deeply to me, I will be drawing on what I have learned here.

I came to Edinburgh curious. I am leaving with a clearer sense of what I want to do with that curiosity, and something close to a plan.

That feels like a good place to start.