Unpacking the immigration hierarchy: postcolonial imaginaries of labour migrants

ABSTRACT

This article examines and unpacks how postcolonial imaginaries shape migrants’ experiences of the labour market. Drawing on qualitative primary research the article compares the narratives of Romanians and temporary Australians working in London to explore experiences of paid employment. The article finds that postcolonial imaginaries play a role in how migrants experience and understand the labour market, and that these imaginaries inform migrant agency which are used to navigate the labour market, legitimise positioning in the division of labour, and at times utilised and exchanged as a form of capital. The findings imply a need for a layered understanding of how the postcolonial shapes the macro, meso and micro phenomena of labour immigration, and a better understanding how these imaginaries intersect with relational identities in informing the experience of the labour market.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• immigration
• labour market
• postcolonial

Introduction

A key question in migration studies is how racial, ethnic and immigration hierarchies are constructed; that is the structural forces and constructions of labouring bodies underpinning the migrant division of labour, and how these are manufactured and reinforced by the state. A wealth of research in migration studies has demonstrated the role of various socio-demographic factors in the division of migrant labour, and how socioeconomic structures and the institutions fortifying them, construct immigration hierarchies (Anderson 2010; McDowell 2008; Zwysen and Demireva 2020; Johnston, Khattab, and Manley 2015). While this provides us with a comprehensive understanding of the socio-economic structures dividing migrant labour, there is limited work on how migrants interact with and sustain these hierarchies. As a result, migrants are usually cast as passive receptors of these structural forces, with little room for migrant agency (Rydzik and Anitha 2020). And while migration studies have developed important insights into how hierarchies are shaped by gender, age and life stage, class, language, ethnicity and immigration status, understandings of these racial and ethnic hierarchies are rarely understood to be a reproduction of, or rooted in, enduring legacies of colonialism. More widely, migration studies has been criticised for its ‘colonial blind spot’ (Mayblin and Turner 2021) and for ‘hermetically sealing itself off from racism studies’ (Virdee 2019, 5).

Building on and contributing to the emerging scholarship on intersectional processes of racialisation (Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy 2015; Sime et al. 2022; Lewicki 2023: Samaluk 2016; Varriale 2021) this article brings the agency of migrant workers to the fore through a postcolonial lens, by unpacking how postcolonial legacies pattern the subjective experience of migrants in the labour market. Drawing on the narratives of two different and understudied labour migrant groups – Romanians and youth mobility Australians – who occupy differing positions in the UK's migrant division of labour, this study explores the lived experience of labour migration and how migrants understand, mediate and legitimise their own position in the immigration hierarchy. While the literature on work and employment has largely overlooked postcolonial theory, post-colonial theorists rarely engage with the labour market as an arena of colonial reproduction; this original empirical analysis is one of the first to bridge and synthesis these fields.

The research exposed how historical relationships between migrants’ origin and destination states and the postcolonial legacies that accompany these, shape how migrants understood, navigated and experienced the labour market. The article argues that intersectionality, and in particular what I call the postcolonial imaginary, plays a key role in patterning how migrants experience paid employment, and how migrants use these imaginaries as a framework to understand their experiences. The article shows how migrants embody these narratives to navigate livelihood strategies, understand and legitimise their own positioning in the division of labour, and at times utilise and exchange these constructions as a form of capital. The findings demonstrate that postcolonialism is a critical, yet overlooked, discourse in how migrants understand the division of labour, which implies a need for a more layered and interlaced understanding of how the postcolonial shapes not only the macro political structure but also the micro, everyday subjective experience, and how these reinforce each other.

We start by unpacking the intersectional processes that construct immigration hierarchies, outlining the operationalisation of postcolonialism, and the linkages between the postcolonial and the labour market. The paper then turns to how postcolonial legacies have manifested in the relationship between Australia and the UK, and Romania and the UK, specifically. The methodology is then outlined before moving to the narratives of interviewees, which are presented thematically − work ethic, precariousness, pay, discrimination − before concluding.

Immigration hierarchies: postcolonial layers in the labour market

While migrants generally face ‘penalties’ in the labour market (Zwysen and Demireva 2020), labour migrants are not treated homogenously. Migrant divisions of labour have evolved, constructing and channelling particular migrants into particular jobs (Anderson 2010; McDowell, Batnitzky, and Dyer 2007). Previous studies have placed explanatory weight on different socio-economic structures and social categories to explain migrant division of labour including gender (Rydzikm and Antitha 2020), age and life stage (O'Reilly et al. 2018), class (Bonjour and Chauvin 2018; Varriale 2021), language (Johnston, Khattab, and Manley 2015), immigration status (Anderson 2010) and ethnicity (Zwysen and Demireva 2020). Racialisation plays a key role in constructing racial and ethnic hierarchies in the labour market, with black Caribbean and African minorities generally most disadvantaged in the UK (Zwysen and Demireva 2020) and migrants from outside the EU discriminated against and disproportionally channelled into lower paid jobs (Migration Observatory 2022). In turn, the ‘invisible knapsack of white privilege’ (McIntosh 1988 ) is a form of capital in the UK immigration hierarchy. Racialisation of labour migrants transcends any nominal binary of white/non-white, it rather operates across shades of whiteness of differently ‘othered’ racial minorities (McDowell 2008, 2009; Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy 2012; Sime et al. 2022). In the UK, persistent differences in labour market experience are found amongst predominantly white European migrants. In particular in comparison to other EU migrants from ‘old’ member states, Eastern European migrants are disproportionately concentrated in low paid jobs, face higher levels of discrimination and exploitation, and are over skilled in the jobs they occupy (Johnston, Khattab, and Manley 2015; Migration Observatory 2022).

Yet racialisation only operates relationally and situationally in intersection with other socially constructed categories. In turn, it is only by adopting an intersectional lens that acknowledges that identities are not discrete essentialist attributes but rather subjective and fragmented sets of dynamics (Levine-Rasky 2011, 242), that scholars can begin to unpack the differential experiences of labour migrants (Tapia and Alberti 2019). Some of these intersections remain underexplored in migration studies, in particular, the intersections between ‘class and nationally specific inflections of whiteness’, and the relational colonial legacies in which racialisation is rooted (Varriale 2021, 297).

Whilst postcolonialism is a disparate field, postcolonial theory is unified in its assertion that racialisation can only be understood in the context of historical, cultural, political legacies of domination and oppression. Postcolonialism transcends any specific geographic focus between coloniser and colonised; rather the postcolonial is, as Young (2001, 4) argues, ‘concerned with colonial history only to the extent that that history has determined the configurations and power structures of the present’. Postcolonial studies give us a lens to understand how a political history of oppression, suppression and domination constructed the current global world order, and how these legacies imprint on the subjective experience. With historic racialised violence as its starting point, the postcolonial lens makes visible the legacies of Western oppression and the sustainment of these legacies as reflected in geopolitical inequalities.

Colonial legacies have sustained racial inequalities through constructions of inferiority by discursive processes of ‘othering’ and colonisation of culture. Said’s (1993) ground-breaking work demonstrated how the West dominates by depicting itself as civilised and advanced which is transposed against and authoritative over the ‘Other’, discursively framing the East as barbaric, backwards, monolithic, ahistorical and inherently anti-modern. Thus, the East framing is as inferior to, and only to be understood in reference to the superior West, synthesising coloniality and modernity as one and the same. Building on Said, postcolonial theorist, Bhabha (1994), shows how the West dominates through discursive representation of western culture being framed as the original to be copied, placing the mimicking colonised subject in the position of ‘otherness’, and allowing the West to dominate as the copy can always be ‘identified and therefore controlled’ (Mayblin and Turner 2021, 19). This creates a powerful duality, what Bhabha called a hybridity and ambivalence of culture which splits the identity of the colonised ‘others’; the colonial presence remains ambivalent, divided between its appearance as original and authoritative and its repetition and difference. Bhabha (1994) lays out how the colonialised imitate the culture of the colonisers stemming from a desire for a recognised Other, giving the colonised a partial presence as a strategy of colonial subjugation, a process which he calls mimicry, where colonised subjects are ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (1994, 68).

This colonising framing of the West as the superior modernising project polarised against the inferior East is entrenched in the economic system in which the world operates today. In other words, the West’s domination of economic power is anchored in colonial history. While decolonisation may have fostered political independence, ‘political liberation did not bring economic liberation – and without economic liberation, there can be no political liberation’ (Young 2001, 5). Racialised violence to the new world was core to the emergence of the world system; thus while ‘colonialism is presented merely as a companion to the emergence of capitalism’ (Bhambra 2020, 308), this racial violence was not a regrettable by-product of capitalism, rather as Shilliam (2015, 185) puts it ‘global capital starts with colonialism’. To understand how migrant divisions of labour are experienced and understood by migrants then, we need an appreciation of how colonialism is foundational to capitalism and how these relational and situational colonial inflections, or what Mignolo (2007) calls ‘hierarchies of imperial difference’, are in turn institutionalised in the labour market.

The postcolonial shapes employer perceptions through both positive and negative cultural stereotypes, derived from institutionalised relationships and history between different states. For example, employers have long identified work ethic as a characteristic attributed to Eastern European migrants (McDowell, Batnitzky, and Dyer 2007), but this stereotype stems from the postcolonial transition in Eastern Europe, specifically the modelling of the neoliberal meritocratic model as the ideal (Samaluk 2016), and the fractured, unequal geopolitical relations where migrants’ qualifications are not necessarily recognised. A colonial relationship also shapes practical details such as recruitment networks (Oommen 2021), where labour market intermediaries take advantage of inequalities among countries (White and Ryan 2008; Samaluk 2016), and employer perceptions of skills where historically constructed characteristics stemming from postcolonial tropes serve as proxies for soft skills particularly ‘work ethic’.

Yet the structural forces reflected in the labour market only partially explain how the postcolonial shapes immigration hierarchies. Existing research has shown how Eastern European migrants use stereotypes and tropes as livelihood strategies and as a form of capital in the labour market (see Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy 2012; Samaluk 2016). Yet as McDowell, Batnitzky, and Dyer (2007, 21–22) observe, ‘too many studies of economic global change continue to ignore the emotions, feelings and daily lives of embodied global workers’. Building on and developing the arguments on migrants as active agents as set out by Rydzikm and Antitha (2020), where agency is reconceptualised as acts of resilience, resistance and reworking, this research illustrates how migrants are active agents and how postcolonial discourses are used to navigate and make sense of experiences of the labour market.

Australia and Britain: an emblem of empire

Colonialism has historically determined Britain’s immigration regime; the story of Britain’s immigration policy in the twentieth century is one of a political elite trying to preserve Empire through selective racialisation of citizenship. In a last-ditch attempt to retain Empire and the Commonwealth project, the government enacted the 1945 British Nationality Act which conferred citizenship to all citizens of the UK colonies. However, unforeseen was that the Act would facilitate immigration, let alone immigration from New Commonwealth countries. What followed was decades of deplorable Acts designed to limit non-white immigration while facilitating immigration from the ‘Old’ − defacto ‘white’ − Commonwealth.

As the legacy of Empire, of decolonisation, the Commonwealth project has never been just a political community; the nostalgic and political pull has always been an inherently racialised project. The separation between the so-called ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Commonwealth were inherently racialised distinctions and these racialised-constructed binaries continue to underpin much of the geopolitical inequalities that exist today. The imagined geopolitical bloc of the ‘five eyes’ of the Anglosphere for instance – UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – have dominated international politics for the past 200 years, with citizens making up less than seven per cent of the world’s population yet their economies producing more than a third of gross domestic product (Vucetic 2011, 3).

Like Britain, colonialism is a foundational basis of Australia’s national history; the beginnings of Australia’s colonial history lie squarely with Britain when in the eighteenth century it took the decision to form a convict imperial colony. The first ‘golden age’ in Australia recalls the time when convicts, free men and women, settlers and pioneers developed the British colonies, constituting the ‘chosen people’ who emigrated from Britain (Tranter and Donoghue 2007, 165). The ANZAC soldiers form a cornerstone in national mythology as figureheads of converted ill-disciplined Bushmen transformed to loyal defenders of the Empire (Tranter and Donoghue 2007, 166). Settler colonialism involved the elimination of indigenous people violently or through assimilation, thus colonialism is integral to Australia’s modern mythscape constituted by a narrative of Australia’s discovery, British colonisation and ‘white’ settlement, convict transportation, bushmen and pioneers, bushrangers and ANZACs (Tranter and Donoghue 2007, 168). British colonisation, specifically settler colonialism, is at the heart of Australia’s national mythology then; in turn the colonial relationship between Britain and Australia endures.

With Britain anchored as the ‘Motherland’ of Australians, the ‘original’ of which to be mirrored, colonial exportation means that Australia’s institutions mimicked Britain’s. The postcolonial shapes Australian migrants’ relationship with Britain through a privileging that is founded on this colonial history, the consequential exportation of culture including shared language celebrated as a ‘colonial triumph’ (Vucetic 2011, 3), copied and shared institutions such as education systems and the monarchy, and a liberal, protestant, free market and democratic political culture. These postcolonial imaginaries of shared history, mirrored culture and institutions permeate the narratives of Australians immigrants.

The UK state has long filtered immigrants geographically and geopolitically, according to the ‘status’ of the migrant-sending country (Scott 2017). These filters which bestow facilitation or restrictions on entry and access to the labour market are marked when comparing Australians and Romanians historically. As a result of the colonial ties between the nations, immigration between Australia and the UK has a long history. In addition to the YMS visa outlined below, the UK’s ancestral visa exclusively for Commonwealth citizens who had a parent born in the UK, has facilitated Australian migration and meant that many Australians have faced fewer restrictions than other migrants in the labour market. As an English-speaking nation, Australians have also held a privileged status in all iterations of the UK points-based system(s) where English language proficiency earns points. The UK has long been the Australia Diasporas’ top destination with an estimated 165,000 Australians living in the UK in 2021 (ONS 2021), and likewise Australia remains the top choice of UK emigrants. This is in part because of family chain migration and facilitations through ancestral visas; essentially Empire continuing to exert its influence on settlement patterns. Australians working in the UK have the highest annualised earnings compared to other migrants, and the majority work in high skilled jobs (Migration Observatory 2022).

Australians interviewed for this research were resident in the UK on the Tier 5 Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS) − previously known as Working Holidaymakers − a scheme that is a vestige of Empire. Established in the 1970s it was designed in an attempt to preserve ties between ‘Old’ Commonwealth nations by facilitating movement. While the YMS was designed principally as a cultural exchange programme for young Commonwealth citizens, the scheme evolved into a labour migration route and now includes non-commonwealth states. However, Australia is allocated the majority of YMS quota (50 per cent of total YMS visas in 2022–30,000) (Home Office 2022) and is not subject to additional eligibility requirements unlike other states, reflective of the colonial favouritism inherent in the YMS (Oommen 2021). The visa is strictly temporary with a two-year limit, exclusively for those aged 18–30, with permission to work in most sectors without a job offer (thus making this arguably the most liberal visa) and few post-entry controls.

Romania and Britain: the denigrated ‘Other' Europe

While the postcolonial has anchored Australians as privileged in the UK'simmigration hierarchy, Romania’s imperial history means it remains denigrated as the ‘Other’. If we understand colonialism as the practice and attitudes of a dominating metropolitan ruling a distant territory (Said 1993) then Romania has been historically subjugated to a dyadic colonialism from the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the European Union on the other, which has placed Romania as ‘in between’ the West and East, ambiguously placed between post communism and capitalism, and always on the outside, neither wholly ‘Eastern’ nor ‘Western’.

The framing of Romania as an ambiguous and ‘in-between’ hybrid state has roots as far back as the eighteenth Century (Todorova 1997). During the Cold War Romania was seen as a ‘thorn in the flesh of the Soviet Union’ (Percival 1995, 67) due to its independent foreign policy, and pursuit of industrialisation and economic trade with the West. The end of the Cold War and the integration of Eastern Europe into Western institutions through the EU’s civilising mission ‘has shifted attention to the (neo)colonial structures between the East and the West’ (Heikkinen 2021, 24).

The EU commandeers what it is to be European − defining the values, norms and practices of Europeanness − through its disciplinary power of conditionality in the process of enlargement, and in this respect, some argue that the EU acts as a colonising force or what Kiossev (2008) calls ‘self-colonization’. With the Balkan region framed as ‘problematic’ and needing European guidance, the EU exported ‘European’ values, norms and practices through enlargement. This exportation enables a new kind of disciplinary power for the EU as countries are categorised as ascribing to different degrees of Eastness and Europeanness, producing ‘hierarchies of Europeanness’ (Lewicki 2023), depending on how well they converge to European norms. Critical has been the ideological veneration of European neoliberalism through the transition to capitalist liberal market economy as the benchmark for structural accommodation, constructing ‘Western capitalist economies as ideal types, the standardised norm that CEE countries, [and therefore citizens], should strive towards’ (Samaluk 2016, 458). The informal threat of failure to converge is to confine the Balkans to their ‘dystoptic present: stagnation, corruption, instability and insecurity’ (Heikkinen 2021, 85).

The EU’s civilising mission of Romania meant it has been cast not as the ‘absolute Other’ but a ‘lesser’ Europe; it is framed as part of a region to be controlled, tamed and replicated to EU norms, in need of ‘catching up’ with the West (Samaluk 2016). This has fortified, institutionalised and normalised the power imbalance between East and West Europe. This hybridity – a hybrid democracy, a hybrid economy – from communist to postcommunist, European but not quite European enough, is a process which has kept Romania suspended in the ‘realm of the beyond’ of which Homi Bhaba spoke, ‘neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past’ (Bhabha 1994, 1), ambiguously situated between. As Lewicki (2023) argues, this positioning of Eastern Europe as on the political-economic periphery is co-constitutive of the racialisation of Eastern Europeans.

These Othering processes were reinforced by the politics of immigration in the UK in the 2000s, positioning Romanians as on ‘the margins of whiteness’ (Sime et al. 2022, 4). Through the UK’s geographic filtering of migration controls unlike Australians, Romanians have comparatively faced high barriers in accessing the UK labour market, with any limited access strictly temporary and restricted to low paid, manual sectors. Prior to Romania’s accession and the lapsing of transitional controls immigration from Romania to the UK had been limited. Framed as on the political-economic periphery, Romanians, like other Eastern Europeans, had been positioned as the West’s ‘reservoir of cheap labour’ (Lewicki 2023) and traditionally migrated to other neighbouring and southern EU countries where jobs are available in the shadow economy and languages are similar. The 2004 migration from Central and Eastern European (CEE) (so-called A8) were denoted as an economic utility while their racial affinities made them ‘as socially integrated as possible’ (Home Office 2005, 21) and the government consequently did not impose transitional controls (Consterdine 2017). Yet A2 citizens from Romania and Bulgaria that acceded in 2007 paid the price for public anxieties over A8 migration and the politicisation of EU mobility through full transitional controls, denigrating Romanians as unwanted, stripping them of their Europeaness, and symbolically denuded of their whiteness’ (Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy 2012, 685). Romanians were therefore limited to certain low skilled schemes that had previously been the reserve of non-EU workers, namely the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme from 2007 until its closure in 2014.

In 2014 transitional controls were lifted, and the tabloid press and populist Party UKIP created a moral panic over the notion of millions of Romanians migrating to the UK (Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy 2012). Stemming from earlier depictions of Romanians as ‘poor, corrupt, conflict-prone and culturally stunted’ (Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy 2012, 688), Romanians continue to be subjected to crime framings, portrayed as dangerous criminals or welfare tourists. Such framings are bound up with postcolonial historical imageries, with Eastern European countries being depicted as second-class, under-developed and poor. While immigration from Romania to the UK was not the dramatic migration the press predicted, over the last decade Romanians have steadily migrated, and Romania is now the fourth most common non-UK country of birth, and the second largest group of applicants for settled status (ONS 2021). Despite the lifting of labour market restrictions in 2014, Romanians still earn one of the lowest median wages among different migrant groups, are disproportionately underemployed working in low skilled sectors, and are more likely to be in precarious work (Migration Observatory 2022).

Methods

The research was conducted as part of the Temper project which examined key differences between temporary and permanent types of migration. Our research toolkit comprised of two methods: a closed-question survey and 30 in-depth semi-structured interviews (15 Romanian, 15 Australian). We conducted a non-representative survey with 85 Romanians and 75 YMS Australians working in London between 2015 and 2017. Interviews were semi-structured but often evolved into open-ended interviews, lasting between 1.5 and 3 hours across various locations in London. Interviews with Romanian participants were conducted in Romanian and translated to English. The research adopted snowball sampling through personal networks and a diaspora group ‘Australians living in London’.

YMS Australians and Romanians were selected as comparison populations for two reasons. Firstly, as the project sought to assess key patterns in temporariness and permanency in immigration, these two populations served as an effective comparison group as Tier 5 Australians were strictly temporary migrants in contrast to Romanians exercising free movement who were therefore potentially permanent. Secondly, both populations – young Australians and Romanians – have limited restrictions in the labour market but were assumed by government to be filling labour market shortages in low- and mid-skilled sectors (HM Government 2018), thus their labour market experiences were assumed to be comparable. However, because YMS migrants can undertake almost any type of employment, there are no sponsorship requirements for YMS visas and therefore no data on their labour market activity.

The demographic profiles of the two sample survey populations (n = 160) can be found in Table 1. The majority of respondents in both sample groups identified as ‘White’ ethnicity. YMS Australians were employed in higher skilled professions overall and had slightly higher educational acquisitions than Romanians. Despite being subject to immigration controls, the majority of YMS survey respondents (and all interviewees) were working in professional occupations (see Table 1), particularly as teachers (40 per cent). Other jobs our Australian interviewees held included legal secretary, planning officer and communications planning manager. Data have consistently shown that Romanians are over represented in low-skilled occupations in the UK such as cleaners, waiters or packers (Migration Observatory 2022), and our survey results broadly reflected this with the majority of our sample working as cleaners, refuse workers, care workersor working in construction and manufacturing (59 per cent). While a significant minority of Romanian survey respondents were working in professional occupations, due to snowball sampling the majority of the Romanian interviewees were working in low paid jobs.

Table 1. Sample profile (n = ).

	YMS Australians	Romanians
Female	43	36
Male	32	49
Education (Degree level)	46	20
Education (Further – above secondary level)	15	45
Job: Professional or clerical	49	15
Job: Services or retail	14	6
Job: Elementary	3	57
Total	75	85

The survey sought to provide a comparable overview of the labour market activity and migration trajectories of these populations to avoid speculative or anecdotal claims on employment patterns. Adopting grounded theory, we then used the initial survey results to inform interview questions, building on the key themes of recruitment, employment status, and pay. Further themes were found inductively emerging from the interviews including discrimination, belonging, and work ethic. A basic coding scheme was used to analyse interview data using the identified themes, which was then developed into a framework that expressed different experiences and responses such as ‘meritocracy’, ‘migration motivation’, and ‘exploitation’. We then compared these extracts of the populations of interviews thematically to draw our key findings. In this article, we draw mainly from the interview data to expose the narratives of Australian and Romanian migrants respectively.

Work ethic

A key trope used by our interviewees to understand, justify and legitimise their own position in the migrant division of labour was their work ethic, and specifically how UK employers perceived the work ethic of Australians on the one hand and Romanians on the other as both different to Britons and other migrant groups. While work ethic and perceptions of work ethic can be a subjective attribute, there was a consistency in the narratives of our interviewees that revealed an underlying colonial inflection to what they thought their employers perceived as ‘good’ work ethic that they attributed to their specific nationality. These nationally derived tropes of types of work ethic were even at time utilised as a form of capital in the labour market.

These were expressed by interviewees in terms of how they assumed employers perceived work ethic. According to our interviewees, employers ascribe Romanians’ work ethic as hard working more attuned to a willingness to undertake tougher, labour demanding jobs. Many of our interviewees expressed these narratives counterpoising their ethic to their English colleagues who were deemed as lazy because they take shorter shifts or recreational pub visits. The expectations that the migrants and their local workers have from employers differ, and so do practices of work and leisure: ‘At work, Romanians are Romanians. They are well seen, they are hardworking’. (Romanian, Male 35). Romanians work longer hours, secure lower returns of their educational and training qualifications, often for lower wages than Australians and other migrants. Their willingness to do so was often utilised as a form of capital where performance of the neoliberal work ethic as the ideal benchmark became a strategy to compete for lower paid entry jobs, to signal productivity. Essentially, their ‘hardworking’ work ethic was synonymous with their potential exploitability.

While our Romanian interviewees did not perceive or frame their work ethic as leading to potential exploitability, they frequently spoke with pride about their willingness to undertake difficult work, which other workers shied from. Their exclamations of hard work were an exercise of demonstrating their integration and embracing the meritocratic capitalist ideals imported from the EU, exemplified by the hallmark of the UK labour market; an affirmation of shedding any Othering associated with their post-communist past. Yet at the same time, these were not necessarily narratives of passive victims open to exploitation. Rather some of our interviewees utilised this ‘Othering’ identity as a livelihood strategy, performing the role of the hardworking migrant willing to absorb the precarious costs of capitalism in order to gain employment, positioned uniquely as the in-between migrants between post communism and capitalism, willing to absorb the precarious costs of the capitalist labour market.

In contrast, Australian interviewees compared themselves against British workers who they also perceived as lazy; they perceived that employers stereotyped them as hard working but also ‘friendly’. Many interviewees explained how they capitalised on the stereotypes of the friendly Aussie to secure employment. Yet when unpacking what interviewees meant by ‘friendly’, we unveiled the ways in which friendly was a coded discourse for culturally akin to Britons, deemed not as a ‘Other’, nor as a threat, but ‘just like us’. Like our Romanian interviewees, Australians used these imaginaries to their advantage as a form of capital, deploying banal nationalism by exerting these Australian stereotypes in their behaviour and approach to employment:

The stereotype of Australians is hard working. I know for a fact that Australians when going through agencies get paid more than European or British counterparts because we’re more respected for our work ethic – they know we’ll get the job done, and we’re friendly people (Australian, Female, 25)

These soft skills underpinned by stereotypes − that are specific to origin and destination state − particularly appeal to employers in sectors where social interaction and emotion management skills are critical, such as the service sector where many of the Australian respondents worked. The intersectionality of YMS Australians explains much of the tropes they experienced, as their appeal to employers is partly due to desirable characteristics of youth and with this employer perception of flexibility and other soft skills. The combination of youth, the stereotype of being ‘friendly’, and English proficiency, means YMS Australians intersectional identities culminate in a highly marketable labouring body.

Postcolonial imaginaries were expressed often explicitly in the idealisation of Western capitalism, imitated by Romanians’ narratives through their motivations to migrate. Many of our survey respondents had previously migrated to another country before arriving in the UK. Reflective of the established migration patterns of Romanians, many of our interviewees had previously worked in Italy’s shadow economy, especially in domestic care (principally female interviewees). Romanian interviewees embodied ideas of the entrepreneurial self, and reflected on how their migration to the UK was a process of ‘upgrading’ to a more ‘civilised country’, citing opportunities and freedom, suggestive of an idealising of the UK neoliberal labour market, as one interviewee said, ‘There are lots of possibilities here to grow and develop professionally, the situation […] and the money you earn [allows you] to’ (Romanian, Female 25). This sense that migration to the UK represented growth echoed the postcolonial discourses of EU accession – that Western Europe was the hallmark of modern, superior capitalism. This was especially acute in contrasting experiences of working in Italy, which was often framed as a testing ground before migrating to Western Europe.

The transition from socialism to capitalism has constructed the UK's neoliberal labour market as something to conquer for many of the Romanian interviewees – the ideas surrounding the EU’s civilising, modernising mission of Romania and in particular the discourses of capitalist accommodation became clear in how Romanian interviewees spoke about leaving Romania, migrating to the UK, and indeed their wider idea of what the UK is. The UK was glorified as a place to work hard, upskill yourself and start your own business, as one interviewee put it ‘It makes you be ambitious … it makes you want to work hard and do what it takes to gain respect’ (Romanian, Male, 30s). This was contrasted against the homeland as a place of substandard living, not keeping pace with the West.

This veneration of the UKas a place of growth was demonstrated with entrepreneurial plans; most Romanian interviewees spoke about ambitions to start a business in the UK, and the majority had undertaken training or studies. A number of Romanian interviewees explicitly talked about ‘evolving’, echoing ideals of meritocracy and the fruits that capitalism can bring if you work hard enough:

I braced myself and cleaned the suit that I wore as a groom, and started to look around, for clients. To start a small business. And based on credibility and on the fact that people, in this country, are open and give one a chance, I managed to get my first big job … With lots of work and honesty, and patience, that job brought me another one and then another one (Romanian, male 30)

Meritocracy and entrepreneurship were key themes in all interviews with Romanians, and specifically the underlying faith in meritocracy in the conviction that if one works hard enough the aspirations of entrepreneurship will come to fruition. These narratives of meritocracy worked as a livelihood strategy of denial of their lower status associated with the unskilled jobs they occupied, and as a blueprint to understand their stratification. Emphasising an ethic of hard work was a way to circumvent this and assimilate performatively to what they believed the neoliberal labour market prizes. These narratives of performativity channelled the EU’s norms of superior, modern, prosperity driven through their visionary and aspirations of capitalist entrepreneurship. Reflective of the EU’s commandeering of what it is to be European, interviewees embodied or mimicked this prosperity driven ideal figurehead.

Recruitment channels

Patterns of recruitment revealed similar embedded colonial relationships that were different for Romanians and Australians, which fed into interviewee’s experiences and perceptions of the UK labour market. Where Australians had dedicated recruitment channels reflecting the long history of colonial migration between Britain and Australia and in turn Australians established and encouraged mobility, Romanians were recruited sporadically, almost entirely informally, through word of mouth and social networks. Australians perceived that they were wanted in the UK, sought out after, scouted specifically. In contrast, Romanian interviewees spoke of the exertion, strive, and determination in acquiring regular work. As a result, Australians perceptions and approach to acquiring employment was effortless, they perceived that they had purchase power in the labour market. Romanians saw the UK labour market as likewise somewhere one can easily obtain work, but they saw little choice in the type of work, or much autonomy in their labour market experience. Their experiences and perceptions were dramatically different and reflected the colonial reproduction of privileging Australians in contrast to Romanian migrants who had very low or no expectations or experiences of formal facilitated recruitment channels.

The majority of Australian respondents used a specialist recruitment company before leaving Australia to secure employment before arrival. A typical trajectory from Australian interviewees was minimal scoping of recruitment agencies in Australia, and multiple job offers on arrival in the UK. Many survey respondents were working in the teaching profession (n = 25), principally as substitute teachers through specialist agencies, reflective of the similar education systems in Australia and the UK as a result of the colonial imprint on Australia’s public institutions. Organised transnational supply chains, with dedicated recruitment organisations and networks based in Australia and the UK supply young Australians to the teaching market, and many young Australians use these recruitment agencies for their entire stay. The colonial imprint of Britain’s education institutions on to Australia not only explains why Australians are recruited as teachers, but also demonstrates the pervasiveness of the postcolonial on immigration patterns, experiences and division of labour.

In contrast, the majority of Romanian respondents found employment through informal social networks (n = 46), reflecting a longstanding pattern of migration recruitment among CEE migrants where state corruption has engrained a sense of distrust of formal institutions among CEE migrants (White and Ryan 2008). This informal mode of acquiring employment speaks to the entrepreneurship of Romanians who were used to obtaining employment through difficult means. Nonetheless, the contrast in the challenges of acquiring employment between Romanians and Australians was very stark. The following was a typical response from Romanian interviewees when asked how they get work:

You got out on the street and see what the situation is. You go out and start distributing CVs and ask, ‘are you looking for work?’ You do that with the minimal language skills you have. Where I had to speak Italian, I spoke Italian, where I needed Romanian, I spoke Romanian, and when I needed Russian, I spoke Russian. And it’s just like that. (Romanian interviewee, female 25).

In contrast to Australians who acquired short-term job security, Romanians had to frequently find new jobs, often on a weekly basis, as much of their employment was concentrated in the transient labour market, with short-term, ad-hoc, casual, piece meal work.

These divergent recruitment channels and working arrangements highlight a pattern of facilitated and dedicated supply chains in contrast to spontaneous, informal social networks. While Australians are welcomed, encouraged – some interviewees were even head-hunted – and facilitated through institutional networks embedded from a long history of colonial mobility, Romanians are the tolerated Other utilised as commodified products to plug short-term gaps. These recruitment processes (or lack thereof) nudge migrants into particular sectors and job roles, marking certain bodies as more or less appropriate in the labour market, thus stratifying on the basis of nationality, ethnicity and ultimately the postcolonial.

Acceptable precariousness

While the employment and recruitment of Romanians and YMS Australians may be different, both groups faced similar levels of precariousness. The majority of YMS Australians were working on fixed term or casual contracts (n = 47; majority fixed term contract n = 27). Similarly, 40 Romanian respondents were working on a non-permanent contract, and the majority of Romanian interviewees were working on ad hoc zero-hour contracts or no formal contract, as one interviewee put it, ‘What contracts? There are no contracts … . This is the trend here’ (Romanian female 33). Both Australians and Romanians were overall content with their employment and did not aspire to a more permanent position. The majority of Australians were working in either their ideal job or sector, while Romanians were more mixed. However, their reasons for accepting precariousness diverged and had roots in both postcolonial imaginaries of the global order but also the axis of their intersectional identities.

Australians had the purchase power to be somewhat selective with where they chose to take their labour, as one interviewee told us when reflecting on finding work: 'There’s no problem getting a job if anything it’s that there are too many … I haven’t applied for any jobs, three days after I was here they [recruitment agency] called and said you’re starting tomorrow' (Australian, Female 29). Conversely, Romanian interviewees often expressed the need to take work whenever it was available: ‘You haven’t got many options … If they need you, you can’t say no. you can say no a couple of times, but somebody has to do the job, and if it isn’t you, it’s somebody else’ (Romanian, male 32)

YMS Australians accepted their precariousness in exchange for the commodities of travel and tourism highlighting their migration as arite of passage as well as reflecting their broader life stage. Conversely, Romanians accepted their precariousness as a trade-off for migration and the aspirations of conquering the neoliberal labour market with the hopes and promise of a capital return in later life. For Australians then their precariousness was acceptable because of their intersectional identities of age, life-stage, temporality and tourist motivation for migration. The intersection of life-stage and age in particular seemed to underpin not only the acceptance of precariousness but embracing precariousness to reflect their fluid life stage and refashioning of the self:

It was not for work, and it wasn’t really for a holiday. It’s actually linked to personal growth … . A rite of passage and a chance to leave Australia to a place that was sort of comfortable and easy to move to … I think there was a bit about me that needed to do exploring and a lot of my friends were settling in Perth – they had long-term boyfriends and getting married, one of my friends was pregnant. I just wasn’t ready to do that yet.., I thought if I get myself to actually do it I’d be really proud of myself of what I did … I feel like I need to get this all out of system before I’m 30-ish (Australian, Female 25)

Pay

Similarly, the colonial inflections of the immigration hierarchy were reflected in our interviewees’ acceptance or dissatisfaction of low pay and the narratives of their relative positions in these stratification processes. While Australian interviewees were often frustrated, finding their low pay inequitable, Romanians accepted low pay even in the knowledge they were being paid less than a UK national for the same job and/or being exploited. Contrarily, many of the Romanian participants were working informally usually for an (often Romanian) employer who was self-employed, which was used as a justification by the employer for paying below minimum wage:

[Employment rights] exist for the English, but they are not respected for the immigrants. Because the migrants always work for an intermediary, someone else who is either Romanian/Polish/Indian/Albanian, who often exploit their workers. And they tell you that they run a small business and can’t afford to pay more because they are an immigrant, just like you are, and they try to squeeze as much out of you as they possibly can. So they work you and don’t pay you, not even minimum wage. (Romanian, Female 27)

The potential higher wage in the UK was the main migration driver for the majority of Romanians (n = 41 per cent), even when this meant being significantly underemployed and/or undertaking work outside their desired and trained profession, as one interviewee explained, ‘While I did my qualification [chemistry] I also did nails, and when I finished school I worked in the laboratory for a while … . Doing nails paid better’ (Romanian, female 25)

The different perceptions Romanians and Austrlians had of the UK and the purpose of their migration was reflective of the differing relationships between destination and origin states. While Romanians migrated to the UK almost exclusively for work and what they perceived as high pay in contrast to Romanian wages, Australians told us that their migration was principally for ‘play’ and that what they regarded as low pay in the UK was the trade-off for their recreation. In the former case, the accession to the EU has converted the capitalist norms of prosperity acquisition to Romania, and with the UK's highly liberal labour market, it is in many ways framed by Romanians as the hallmark of West European capitalism, as one interviewee put it,

people here come for the money, and all they think about is the money. Whether they talk to you with a smile on their face or not, it’s all they think about. It’s what they come for and it’s what’s on their minds. (Romanian female 25)

Evidently, the wage differential between Romania and the UK that drives this immigration is underpinned by wider geopolitical inequalities.

For young Australians their low pay was deemed an acceptable trade-off for the gains of cultural experience and tourism highlighting the intersectionality between class, nationality and life stage. YMS Australians use the visa as a way to travel Europe, with the majority citing travelling Europe as the main reason for migrating, and the overwhelming majority having travelled to mainland Europe during their stay multiple times. Australians embody and reproduce narratives and characteristics associated with Australian culture – travel, fluidity, adventure, resourcefulness. Earnings are rarely if ever saved, instead spent on travel and consumption and work is entirely for play, as one interviewee put it ‘You just have to work to sustain travel’ (Australian Female 25). This is a privileged form of mobility, reserved for the middle class thus their intersectionality – their class and nationality – explain the YMS narratives built around travel, adventure and self-exploration revealing their vantage in the immigration hierarchy. In contrast, for Romanians earnings far from being spent on travel and consumption are either used to ‘just survive’ or saved. Many of interviewees aspired to save earnings to buy a property or start a business back in Romania, a symbolic commitment to remaining in the homeland (White and Ryan 2008) and symptomatic of how this migration and the precarious working conditions are pursued as a wider livelihood strategy.

The privileged positions Australians held respective to Romanians and their legitimisation and understanding of this stratification was expressed in their perceptions of employers. Rarely did Romanian interviewees hold their employers responsible for precariousness. Internalising the idea that the liberal labour market means to be held accountable for all aspects of employrment from the unavailability of jobs, to lower salaries. For example, one interviewee spoke of being fired due to poor management decisions, where he told us ‘I had no problems with this, I respected his decision’ (Romanian male 30). Another interviewee working in construction searched for work on a weekly basis, experiencing periods of homelessness between jobs, yet throughout the interview he was keen to demonstrate his meritocratic values, explaining, ‘if you are good, you can always get more work’ (Romanian male 40s). Australians on the other hand while accepting of their precariousness, were at times disgruntled that employers could be dissuaded by their temporary visa and at times or aggrieved that they were not working in their ideal sector or job:

I’m slightly dissatisfied with my job because … it’s just not in my career field and it takes me 1 hour to get there every day. I’ve tried hundreds of different offers and it’s always the same thing – no you’re on a temporary visa’ (Australian male, 26)

While YMS Australians were content with their precarious employment due to their primary motivation to migrate as tourists, Romanians accept their precariousness as part of the process of acquiring higher status, by embracing the capitalism norms and values of individual ability, ambitious and tenacity. The CEE colonial narrative promoting the entrepreneurial self, stemming from the aspirational benchmark of neoliberalism makes precariousness seem an inevitable stepping-stone, as one interviewee told us when reflecting on her precarious contract, ‘it’s fine by me. I know a contract has more advantages but I’m pleased with what I’ve got’ (Romanian female). Australians are able to choose precariousness to fit their travel plans; Romanians are forced but accept it as a necessary endurance on the ladder to capitalist success.

Discrimination & belonging

Interviewees’ experiences and understandings of any discrimination or racism they faced mapped on to the colonial inflections of racialisation in the immigration hierarchy. Australians did not report experiencing any discrimination and embodied an imagined sameness, including a sense of belonging rooted in the colonial shared history. In contrast, Romanians were exposed to some levels of discrimination but they often denied that these episodes involved racial discrimination, resorting back to their understandings of the UK’s idealised meritocratic system in what they perceived as a racially blind labour market. Romanians did not feel a sense of belonging but again perceived this to be their own failure − particularly English language deficiencies − that integration was something to be earned, and drawing on the good/bad Romanian distinction, that any hostility to Romanians was due to ‘bad Romanians’. Similarly, to Sime et al. (2022, 14) findings, Romanian interviewees adopted ‘new forms of racism as part of their integration repertoire’. Romanians’ narratives revealed a desire to express their willingness to integrate, something to be cherished and prized. Conversely, Australians felt a sense of entitlement to belong, even aggrieved at the rights of EU citizens (at the time of interviews) comparatively, as one interviewee exclaimed, ‘I find it ridiculous that EU citizens can come and live here forever but we don’t in the Commonwealth’ (Australian female, 25).

Young temporary Australians felt – surprisingly given the enforced temporariness of their legal status – integrated in the UK due to common language, culture, their ethno-cultural conformity and the historical colonial ties that bind the two nations including similar institutions, as one interviewee told us as she reflected on why she migrated to the UK specifically, ‘I feel more comfortable and at home and at ease in countries that are under the Commonwealth. Similar governments mean similar ways of life’s, similar laws, and similar transport’. (Australian Female 28). Australians did not face any discrimination, and perceived that they were not considered as minorities, cultural outsiders or even migrants, reflecting their advantageous position in the immigration hierarchy and their imagined sameness due to the socio-culturally constructed political identities they inhabit. As one interviewee put it, ‘Nobody gives you grief for being Australian – people love us!’ (Female 23)

In contrast, our interviews with Romanians were mixed on whether they had experienced discrimination, racism or xenophobia, but any unpleasant encounters they had experienced steered clear of attributing this to racism. Many reported that they had never faced discrimination, while others had experienced discrimination first hand:

The first interview I had, when I got there, they looked at my passport and my papers and the first question of the manager was: are you a gypsy? So I answer, no – look at my skin and look at yours [He was Indian]. If I am a gypsy, then so are you (Romanian female, 25)

Discrimination and racism were rarely described in these terms by Romanian interviewees, but being called a ‘gyspy’ was commonplace. Other interviewees spoke of similar stigmatisations due to Romania’s denigrated, inferior status, but this stigmatisation was legitimised by the interviewees as a justified response to Romanian migrants, and in turn some interviewees reproduced the narratives and imaginaries of Romania as poverty stricken, reflecting the ‘colonial gaze’: ‘An English person looking at us sees perhaps poverty … Maybe if I came from my country here for the money, maybe I’d think the same … they smile at you out of pity (Romanian, female 25).

Romanians strove to prove their sense of belonging, as something to be prized and earned through hard work. Echoing the denigrated narratives of the postcolonial and the demoralising framing of Romanians by the tabloid media, many interviewees made a distinction between ‘good’ – hard working and compliant – and ‘bad’ Romanians. These were frequently distinguished and used a justification for any discrimination or xenophobia Romanians might have experienced: 'It’s a shame when you see […] those who don’t honour the place where they came, and who came here with different thoughts, and it, unfortunately, affects us all at some point' (Romanian, Male, 30s). The denigrated status of Romanians permeated interviewees understanding of their position, and their agency, with discrimination legitimised and almost serving as penance for their socialist past or the inferior status they had been castigated. The heralding of the supposed meritocracy of the the UK liberal state seemed to lead Romanians to reject any discrimination they faced. The socio-cultural construction of political identities shaped how Romanian migrants are perceived and treated in the UK – both as commodified utilities and non-deserving, morally inferior citizens − and in turn Romanians’ understanding of their positioning, agency and livelihood strategies. In short, Romanian migrants embody the postcolonial imaginaries and use these narratives to legitimise any discrimination or poor working conditions. The juxtaposition against Australians was striking in this respect, not only did young Australians not experience discrimination they felt 'integrated' after a short stay.

Conclusion

We came to this research trying to unpack the migrant division of labour and specifically to understand how migrants assumed to be in low paid work experienced the labour market. What we inductively found was that migrants use postcolonial discourses as a framework to understand and navigate the labour market. Research on work and employment has been slow to apply postcolonial theory to understand patterns and experiences of employment, and at the same time postcolonial theorists rarely engage with the labour market as an arena of colonial reproduction. This research is one of the first to bridge this gap both empirically and conceptually.

The research revealed the subtle ways in which postcolonial imaginaries intersectionally pattern the migrant experience and understanding of the labour market. These imaginaries were unveiled through interviewees’ signalling of valued work ethic, understanding of pay, acceptable precariousness and what discrimination is −these were subjectively experienced and yet consistently narrated through postcolonial discourses. Migrants both endure and sustain these postcolonial imaginaries in their everyday lived experience. Therefore, to understand immigration hierarchies’ scholars must gauge both the structural (often oppressive) forces but also how agents navigate and at times reinforce those structures. In other words, the postcolonial matters and migrant agency matters − migrants are not passive receivers of these colonially rooted hierarchies but rather use these narratives to make meaning, legitimise, negotiate and understand their experience, and at times use these colonial tropes as capital. This implies then a need for a layered understanding of how the postcolonial shapes the macro, meso and micro (Tapia and Alberti 2019), and the complex interdependency of immigration hierarchies, and the active agents that comprise it.

The migrants interviewed for this study unwittingly represented the dichotomous figureheads in ‘Britain’s identity crisis’ (see Dorling 2019), its soul search for its position in the geopolitical world order and its national mythscape– the competing pulls of Empire and Europe. Britain’s immigration regime, specifically the selective geographic filters it has used to facilitate or restrict movement of specific nationalities, has reflected this wavering of geopolitical indecision, torn between its impulse for retaining Empire and its position in the EU (Consterdine 2017). Brexit has fundamentally transformed the legal status of EU citizens in the UK, turning EU residents ‘into migrants’. The post-Brexit statuses of Romanians both legally and symbolically have reinforced imperial immigration hierarchies, magnifying the ‘othering’ they experience (see Barnard, Fraser Butlin, and Costello 2022). If we are to understand the construction and experience of these hierarchies, Migration Studies must overcome its colonial blind spot and explore how the postcolonial imaginary patterns the migrant experience.

Acknowledgements

This article greatly benefited from the constructive engagement from the three anonymous reviewers, as well as comments and conversations with Liam Stanley and Michael Collyer. Thanks go to Alexandra Urdea and dearly missed Martine Huberty who provided research assistance. Thanks are due to the interviewee participants for agreeing to take part, and to the European Union Seventh Framework Programme for funding (grant agreement: no 613488).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).