The racialization of whiteness in migrants’ residential decisions: the case of Polish migrants in England

ABSTRACT

There is a dearth of information on the link between racialised whiteness and migrants’ residential decisions in England. This article aims to address this knowledge gap by analysing the narratives of 41 Polish migrants who resided in England between 2015 and 2016. The investigation uncovers that race influenced their residential decisions in two primary ways: firstly, by the migrants relying on potentially harmful stereotypes to classify their neighbourhoods as safe or unsafe, and secondly, by how other residents racialised their whiteness, affecting their visibility and making them vulnerable to discrimination and racism. These experiences led to intricate spatial strategies of inclusion and exclusion, which have temporal dimensions and are shaped by the migrants’ interpretation of threat and their likelihood of encountering additional harmful encounters. The study's results hold significant implications for policymakers who are concerned with migrant integration, emphasizing the need for more inclusive spaces between migrants and existing residents.

KEYWORDS:

• Polish migration
• race
• racialisation
• racialised threat
• whiteness
• residential decisions

Introduction

Since 2004, significant numbers of Polish citizens have migrated to England, adding to the country's racial diversity (Shankley, Hannemann, and Simpson 2020). Unlike migrants from former British colonies, Poles do not fit into a colour-coded register of race and are characterized as Catholic and Polish-speaking, resulting in their categorization as Other white (Botterill and Hancock 2019). Additionally, they have settled in a variety of neighbourhoods due to their employment opportunities, including gateway neighbourhoods common among newly arrived immigrants, and suburban and rural neighbourhoods with limited histories of immigration (Scott and Brindley 2012).

Polish and other Eastern European migrants’ entry into predominantly low-paid, low-skilled employment has contributed to their essentialisation as lower-class whites and their racialization as others and as an economic threat to British workers over job competition (Böröcz and Sarkar 2017; Botterill and Hancock 2019). Their racialization has intensified in the run-up to and after the EU referendum, which drew on their construction as an economic threat as a key reason for the country to leave the EU system (Rzepnikowska 2019). Their racialization has subsequently resulted in some migrants experiencing discrimination and racism (Botterill and Hancock 2019; Rzepnikowska 2019), while others have shown a mixed response to England's racial diversity, given Poland's limited racial diversity and differences in socially constructing race (Gawlewicz 2016). Nonetheless, no known study has examined how Polish migrants’ racialization and experiences of racial difference have shaped their residential decisions across their settlement.

Understanding the location and mobility of migrants is crucial in the context of race, as historical practices of racial segregation have dictated where certain groups can live, such as Jewish ghettos and black residents in apartheid South Africa. In certain contexts, migrants have self-segregated as a means of avoiding discrimination and racism, and this has been a key driver of their residential geographies (Reny and Newman 2018). Thus, the Racial Threat Theory (RTT) is an instructive framework for explaining how race affects migrants’ residential decisions through threat perception. However, these threat constructions are not uniform but rather historically and culturally embedded and contextually informed (Hopkins and Smith 2016). The RTT also falls short when applied to Polish migrants because the theory focuses on fixed racial categories, rather than a socially constructed one whereby Polish migrants’ whiteness is mutable and differentiated by its intersections with class (Blachnicka-Ciacek and Budginaite-Mackine 2022). Moreover, prior studies using the theory primarily relied on quantitative methods and ignored culturally embedded, socially constructed categories of race, and how immigration has transformed race in a multiracial context in England (Modood and Sealy 2022).

Therefore, this article aims to fill the gaps in existing research by examining 41 Polish people’s interviews and exploring how race influences their decisions regarding where to live. This study provides a unique contribution to the existing literature by offering empirical data on the linkage between race, racialization processes, and residential decisions. The findings of this study are important for policymakers, especially those working towards migrant integration and reducing residential segregation as it sheds light on the mechanisms that determine where these migrants choose to live and how their decisions are influenced by constructions of race in a multiracial setting.

Race, residence and new migrants

A significant theory used to understand the linkages between race and residential decisions is the Racial Threat Theory (Key and Heard 1949). The theory explains how threats triggered between two groups – a majority group and a minority group – can directly structure where both groups’ members choose to live. The theory outlines that majority-group members come to perceive increasing numbers of minority-group members as a threat. Accordingly, notions of threat are constructed as economic threats (e.g. jobs and housing), to their political position or as a criminal threat, whereby they are under physical threat (Liska 1992). This can result in majority-group members acting against minority-group members in the form of discrimination, racism and even physical aggression, which can prompt minority-group members to decide to move to another neighbourhood. Within this view, minority-group members may decide to move to residentially segregated neighbourhoods to live among other minority-group members as a protective measure against further acts from the majority group (Blalock 1967; Quillian 2002). Importantly, while useful in outlining how constructions of threat link to residential decisions, these constructions are culturally embedded and contextually informed, and thus these threat perceptions must be interpreted in situ.

While the RTT theory is instructive for understanding the mechanisms underlying race relations and the formation of certain residential geographies, it may not adequately explain the linkages between race, threat, and residence among Polish migrants for several reasons.

First, researchers routinely test the Racial Threat Theory between white and racialised minority groups, treating these categories as immutable (see, Reny and Newman 2018). As a consequence, this approach has obscured considering race as socially constructed and associated with complex racialising processes. Developments in critical race studies, especially critical whiteness studies, have resulted in whiteness being dethroned from invisible, unnoticed, and static to being understood as differentiated, visible, and mutable (Garner 2015; Hickman and Ryan 2020). In England, this move has occurred in light of recognition of the textured accounts of racialised other white groups who have encountered discrimination and racism and displayed patterns of residential segregation in the country, notably, the Irish (Hickman and Ryan 2020), whose experiences have routinely been side-lined in race relations research. The inclusion of this research has had significant implications for our understanding of the way race structures the lives of newer migrant groups, such as Polish migrants. In addition, these studies couch their understanding of race relations between two groups about how they play out in a binary racial context; however, we know that England continues to become more racially diverse due to the diversification of its immigration patterns and natural growth (Shankley, Hannemann, and Simpson 2020). Therefore, these studies need updating to examine how race structures migrants’ residential geographies in multiracial contexts.

Second, most studies have tested the Racial Threat Theory using quantitative approaches using population censuses linked to large-scale social surveys or administrative data. While this approach offers benefits, not least providing data on residential configurations at a neighbourhood geographical scale, it is confined by how much it can tell us about the evolving and temporal dimensions of the ways in which their race and associated processes of racialization may structure their residential geographies. Alternatively, migrants’ residential decisions may offer a more flexible and dynamic approach to exploring how race structures their residential geographies. Similar migrant studies, for example, Asad and Rosen's (2019) research into undocumented migrants’ residential decisions in the US, shed light on the complex ways in which interlocking factors can structure their residential geographies at various moments across their settlement.

The racialization of Polish whiteness complicates links between race and residence

The established understanding of linkages between migrants’ race and residence is built on threat perceptions leading to residential changes. Yet, research into Polish living in England shows that their whiteness is routinely contested and challenged, and they are commonly othered (McDowell 2009). It is critical to unpack how their whiteness is constructed to understand precisely how racialization processes concerning whiteness structure their residential decisions.

Studies investigating Polish migrants’ whiteness have suggested that it is conditional and contingent on its intersections with other social signifiers (Böröcz and Sarkar 2017; Botterill and Hancock 2019; Blachnicka-Ciacek and Budginaite-Mackine 2022). Migrants, especially those from professional backgrounds and students, can often pass as a result of their access to economic and/or cultural resources, which allows them to avoid harmful racialization processes (Böröcz and Sarkar 2017). Nevertheless, other migrants, largely those working in lower-class industries, are commonly othered as a result of their occupation being indicative of their class position and demarcating a lack of respectability (Böröcz and Sarkar 2017; Botterill and Burrell 2019). Therefore, the migrants’ visibility is contingent on a complicated process of racialization whereby their otherness may expose them to discrimination or racism and subsequently foster conditions that may structure a change in their residential geographies.

Multiple studies have documented an escalation in Polish migrants’ experiences of discrimination and racism against a contextual frame in which they have been vilified as an economic threat and emblematic problems with EU free movement to England (Phillips et al. 2014; Botterill and Hancock 2019; Rzepnikowska 2019). However, no known research has established an empirical link between these experiences playing a significant role in their residential decisions.

A racial threat, harmful stereotyping, and socio-spatial subjectivities

The concept of race may influence migrants’ residential decisions in two ways. Firstly, it may affect how they perceive the race of other residents and whether this triggers emotions that lead to a move. Studies suggest that race relations between Polish migrants and other residents can be fragile, but how Polish migrants interpret new forms of diversity may explain how race shapes their residential decisions. When migrating, people often move from one racial context to another where race is constructed differently. According to Gawlewicz (2016), newly arrived Polish migrants, especially those from rural areas in Poland, were often surprised by the different forms of diversity they encountered in England. As Poland was not part of a colonial empire, it did not receive large-scale immigration of people racialised as “other” in a colour-coded register. Instead, race in Poland is constructed based on religious, linguistic, and nationality lines, such as with Roma minorities (Kapralski 2016). Consequently, Polish migrants in England interpret residents from other backgrounds based on these two racial frames. Unfortunately, people often rely on racial stereotypes when they have limited direct experience with people from certain backgrounds, some of which reinforce harmful beliefs (Narkowicz 2023). In England, prevalent stereotypes include associating blackness with criminality (Hall et al. 2017) or Muslim men with bodily policing (Bhattacharyya 2009). These stereotypes are not limited to race but also intersect with gender and class. Day's (2006) research in the US, while in a different context, found that white and Asian men were typically viewed as safe and less risky, whereas black or Latino men were often racialised based on stereotypes linking them to crime and physical danger. Additionally, Garner (2015) found that certain white working-class men also routinely inspired feelings of threat and a lack of respectability. These intersecting stereotypes and how they shape people's interpretation of other residents may inform how Polish migrants structure their residential decisions in multiracial settings.

Related research suggests that people's interpretation of other people may be salient enough for them to extrapolate these sentiments onto their reading of space, which, in turn, may provide a window into the mechanisms driving migrants’ residential decisions (Sibley 1981; Hopkins and Smith 2016). This is built on significant research into neighbourhood safety, which explains how constructions of threat may shape an important dimension of people's residential decisions (Hedman and Van Ham 2012; Asad and Rosen 2019). To alleviate feelings of threat and lack of safety, people may choose to move to a different neighbourhood as a safekeeping strategy to mitigate these feelings (Hopkins and Smith 2016). According to Sibley (1981), people's fear located in social processes is not confined to this scale but can be extrapolated up geographical scales to shape people's perceptions of their neighbourhoods. Within this view, feelings of threat invoked from attitudes towards certain racialised residents may explain why some Polish migrants decide to move based on their coding of certain residents which use to demarcate their neighbourhoods as safe or not. Ehrkamp's (2008) study on Turkish men's place-making work in a German neighbourhood provides an example of this mechanism. Turkish men commonly smoked on the sidewalk or hung out in teashops across the neighbourhood. Some German residents and women stated they interpreted these practices as threatening, causing them to avoid these spaces and code them as dangerous. Thus, the same mechanism may occur for Polish migrants and their encounters with certain residents in neighbourhoods.

A second way in which racialization processes may shape Polish migrants’ residential decisions involves how they are racialised as others, which multiple studies have found has intensified against them in the politically fraught frame surrounding the EU referendum (Phillips et al. 2014; Botterill and Hancock 2019; Rzepnikowska 2019). However, rather than these harmful experiences directly triggering a residential move, migrants’ moves and where they move may be emblematic of broader and active processes to forge belonging at different moments of their settlement.

Several studies on EU migrants in England outline the complex strategies of inclusion and exclusion that migrants deploy. For example, Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy (2015) examined Hungarian and Romanian migrants’ strategies to belong and found that they deployed a repertoire of strategies to elevate their status if their whiteness and belonging were contested. These strategies included verbally claiming they were from a country held in higher regard. They also found that others used strategies to exclude and denigrate others as a way of improving their status, such as Romanians denigrating Roma to shift attention onto another othered group. Mogilnicka (2022) found that Polish migrants used similar strategies. Thus, their residential decisions and destinations may act similarly, albeit spatially, and rather than being passive, their residential decisions may be part of this broader repertoire of belonging. Hopkins and Smith's (2016) research among ethnic minority men living in Glasgow suggests how this may play out over space. Their interviews found that these men's residential decisions were designed to increase their inclusion and avoid further exclusion. Several interviewees described previous experiences of racism in majority-white neighbourhoods across the city. They, therefore, sought to live in Pollockshields, a diverse neighbourhood in Glasgow, as the diversity and level of segregation in specific residential clusters made them feel less othered and visible, and thus safer. However, this was contingent on their experience of racism and interpretation of visibility. Therefore, the location and associated residential decisions that Polish migrants make may be built around the logic of simultaneously belonging and experiencing further racism.

Data and methods

This article is based on narrative interviews with Polish migrants whereby their race is understood as a social construction that has no biological foundation and is culturally embedded and contextually contingent (Fairbanks 2015). That is not to say that race does not exist; rather, racialization processes are critical to the boundary-making between and within groups and directly structure racism (see Jaskulowski and Pawlak 2020).

The sample used was collected using purposive sampling, whereby migrants were selected who had moved to England after 2004, lived in Greater Manchester, and self-identified as ethnically Polish, so as not to capture a Polish minority group or self-impose an ethnic identity onto an interviewee. All interviewees were recruited via two migrant support charities where the researcher volunteered. The researcher placed recruitment adverts in these organizations and used a snowball sampling strategy to recruit interviewees through contacts of those already interviewed. The total sample comprised 41 Polish people (22 women and 19 men) whose education, occupation, marital status, and housing tenure varied. The migrants’ ages also varied, with the youngest being nineteen and the oldest being sixty-six. The interviewees received no financial payment for their participation, but they were compensated for their travel and time (using shopping vouchers). The researcher carried out the interviews in public places across Greater Manchester, and the interviews were collected between January and February 2016.

The project used narrative interviews which facilitated migrants recounting their residential decisions in a story-like form and in sequential order. This approach allowed the researcher to capture the way race imbued the migrant's residential decisions in a dynamic and textured way. The researcher considered narrative interviews the optimal approach to capture the factors that were significant to the migrants’ residential decisions at various stages of their migration trajectories, allowing for an examination of temporal dimensions of race. These include how processes of racialization (of them and others) may evolve and how this subsequently shapes their residential patterns in various ways. The researcher asked interviewees questions, including: “So tell me when you first moved to the UK and what factors shaped where you decided to move to?” The interviews varied in length and were conditional on the length of settlement in England. Most interviews lasted approximately two hours long, and an interpreter was used for those interviewees with poor English language proficiency (six interviews). The researcher asked each interviewee if they preferred the research be conducted in English or Polish, and if they requested an interpreter, a professionally qualified interpreter was used. Although some of the subtleties of race may have been lost in interviews with Polish migrants using an interpreter or those with poor language skills, it was necessary to offer interviewees the option within a person-centred approach and to build rapport.

The researcher used thematic analysis to examine the interviews for common themes related to the migrants’ residential decisions. The approach relied on the researcher's subjectivity and an open and iterative process, whereby the researcher reflected on how factors concerning race infiltrated their residential decisions. The researcher coded the interview data, interpreting patterns of shared meanings across the narratives, which they used to generate broader themes and collate them to form the analysis section (Terry et al. 2017).

Importantly, the researcher is not Polish and identifies ethnically as Ecuadorian, and this presented a challenge when conducting research into Polish migrants. This approach differed substantially from the majority of studies focusing on Polish migrants, which have been undertaken by predominantly female Polish and white British researchers (see Jaskulowski and Pawlak 2020). Yet, Gunaratnam (2003) writes that research positionality does not hinge on one social dimension and that other signifiers are equally important in the dialogic process between the researcher and the researched, and in rapport building. Subsequently, the researcher invested time volunteering for a year in Polish charities and became familiar with local Polish community members. The researcher also produced a detailed biography, which he attached to the recruitment posters to explain his background and highlighted his migrant background and interest in the Polish migrant population. The researcher felt that this work facilitated rapport building and positioned him in a liminal space where his position was constructed along multiple axes, and facilitated a friendly space where interviewees felt comfortable expressing their experiences of discrimination and racism.

The researcher felt at times that his non-Polish position was a resource that facilitated migrants’ sharing of more information about race and Polish constructions of race and racism. These insights are in keeping with Wray and Bartholomew's (2014) suggestion that participants may be more inclined to expand on issues relating to their culture than those not considered part of the in-group. The researcher recognised how the research processes involved aspects of the co-production of knowledge between interviewer and interviewee and that any collection of data and its interpretation remains subjective. Yet, the care and attention the researcher placed on forging rapport and understanding Polish culture offers an important contribution to scholarship, nevertheless.

Analysis

The temporality of race in Polish migrants’ residential decisions

The act of migration ignited some migrants’ focus on race as a significant factor in their residential decisions, which became more pronounced after they migrated to England and entered a new racial context. Focusing on the temporalities of race shows how it influenced migrants at different stages of their settlement. For instance, some migrants mentioned that matters of race first emerged after moving to England. They described race as significant following their surprise at encountering residents from different backgrounds, unfamiliar to them, which led to race playing a significant role in their perception of these strangers and how they perceived living in diverse neighbourhoods across England. During his interview, Adam, who was twenty-seven, recounted how unexpected encounters with certain residents from various racial backgrounds affected him after his initial move to the country.

[I]t was an eye-opener. I didn’t experience this before in my life. I always consider myself an open-minded individual, but this was something new when I came to the UK […] We don't have too many nationalities in Poland. It's hard, to meet some black people or Asian [labels used by interviewee]. It's very rare in Poland.

Similarly, at the age of twenty-five, Justyna described the revelation of being confronted with local diversity across her neighbourhood.

So straight away we went to the city (laughs) and I thought this is not an English city. There is a big community of Polish, Indian and Pakistani people […] We have a lot of informal words, for different communities. So, in the Hindu community, we just call them ‘Ciapak’ … Which means you have stains on your body. I think that's just the way we discuss these people in Polish. […] It's so different in Poland. In the town nearby we have got a district where they [Roma] settled– it’s almost like a ghetto – so you had a Jewish ghetto, but in my city, you have like a Roma ghetto.

Migrants were surprised to encounter residents from unfamiliar backgrounds, which was different from the construction of race in Poland. In many cases, this led them to make sense of the new diversity using language and constructs which they extrapolated from Poland. For instance, Justyna appeared to interpret racial differences by drawing on words used to construct racial differences in Poland and using them to make sense of the South Asian residents she encountered. This approach aligns with Mogilnicka's (2022) suggestion that migrants’ racial understandings are not blank slates but are constructed using a combination of how race is constructed in Poland and England. This included focusing on linguistic differences and blending them with how race is constructed in a colour-coded repertoire. Moreover, the act of migration ignited some migrants’ focus on race as a significant factor in their residential decisions.

Migrants’ encounters with new racial contexts not only involved coming into contact with residents from unfamiliar backgrounds but also, for many, included them first becoming aware of their racial difference. For example, Oliwia, who was thirty-six at the time and worked as a research scientist, explained how she only noticed her otherness after spending some time living in England. Oliwia’s account highlights the benefits of focusing on the temporalities of race in migrants’ settlement experiences, which is rarely explored in quantitative studies. She initially described her life in Poland and then Germany and did not touch on race in this discussion as shaping where she lived. It was only when she moved to England that she first discussed the otherness she experienced.

I felt discriminated [against], not directly but indirectly … I sometimes have the impression there is a model nationality, and English people and other nationalities that are from Western Europe, are not interested in what is going on in central European countries.

While in Poland, migrants like Oliwia would have occupied the upper echelons of racial hierarchies given their position in the racial majority and from working in a profession as a research scientist. Her status prevented her from considering race as a salient matter in her social world. However, after migrating, many interviewees candidly admitted that this was the first time they were aware of their difference, which was surprising for migrants like Oliwia whereby they continued to occupy professional roles and spoke proficient English. They, thus expected to retain their status but instead found they were racialised. Indeed, migration acted as an inflexion point in their racial consciousness, whereby they were racialised and positioned (sometimes subordinately) in England’s existing hierarchies of race and migration.

Polish migrants’ shifting racial status and feeling threatened

Once the migrants moved to England, they were living in a new racial frame, whereby they had to navigate racialization processes and residence. For some, this involved being confronted with racism. Racialization processes made them visible and susceptible to discrimination and racism, which ultimately shaped their residential decisions. For instance, Stavi, who was twenty-two years old, recounted his family's move to a city centre neighbourhood after his parents’ found employment in the UK.

The neighbourhood was okay, but certain people living in the street were less welcoming … everyone kept to themselves apart from the English. I mean Chavs [used by interviewee]. They were also aggressive towards the Czech people. It seemed for them we were the same … One of the Czech neighbour's cars got broken into and set on fire … eggs were thrown at our windows, and it was a mixture of calling us nasty names and scaring us … It made us feel very unsafe and after some time my parents decided to move closer to the city.

Stavi's narrative not only suggests an empirical link between discrimination/racism and residential decisions but also indicates that the ways in which he used specifically classed and racialised terms for his English neighbours showing how his racial understandings were influenced by his longevity of settlement in the country and by interpreting others using a local racial frame. Stavi's use of the word Chav may also have been a way of maintaining some sort of status through class distinctions in a context in which his whiteness no longer delivered status. Stavi also connects his family's experience of racialization to his Czech neighbours and exposes how Poles were racialised in a similar way to Czech migrants, which was a common process among EU accession migrants showing not only their racialization but also the essentialisation of Eastern Europeans.

Piotr, who was twenty-eight recounted his experiences of racism.

[I]t was such a difficult time because English lads, they know I’m from Poland. They always shouted horrible things at me and my mates, like “Oh you Polish, you are stealing our jobs.” … I just came here to sort my life out and never stopped anyone from getting a job! There were a few awful situations where I was attacked on my street by English lads. It got too much even though there were four of us [Polish] lads living in the same house, and we decided to move closer to the city centre to get away from this awful situation. The new place was also easier for work … Things have [gotten] a lot better now.

Similarly, Sara, twenty-nine, shared her experiences of racism and what amounted to a racial hate crime after she took her daughter to play in the playground directly behind her house where she was attacked.

Nine months ago, I was attacked by an English woman in the park behind my house. I had taken my daughter and her friends to play … I was pushing my daughter on the swings and another mother in the playground started shouting and calling me names. I don’t know what happened … my daughter said she had wanted her children to play on the swings … . She started screaming at me and pulling my hair and beating me. She wouldn’t stop … she wouldn’t listen to me. I’m glad she didn’t have a knife … This scared me a lot and I didn't want to come out of my house. I told my husband that I wanted to move … eventually, we moved from the area as I didn’t feel safe … it's been a very difficult time for me.

The migrants’ interviews shed light on the processes of othering, whereby their whiteness was differentiated, and they experienced discrimination, which ultimately shaped their decision to move elsewhere. Their racialization showed that their whiteness was mutable and shifted according to the context. In both accounts, the migrant's class and language seemed to be the social signifiers that intersected with their whiteness and demarcated it as other. Piotr’s account showed how classic tropes about Polish migrants as economic threats to English people’s jobs are routinely used to legitimise discrimination against them. Indeed, Poles’ differential whiteness opened them up to the possibility of racism, causing some to feel threatened enough to move. This finding corresponds to the research by Hedman and Van Ham (2012) and Asad and Rosen (2019), who found that migrants’ feelings of threat played an important role in how they interpreted their neighbourhoods and subsequently influenced their residential decisions. It also accords with historical findings among other racialised migrant groups, including Hickman and Ryan's (2020) research into Irish migrants’ experiences in the 19th and early 20th centuries, where they routinely faced othering and racism that shaped their residential geographies.

Several interviewees recalled how their differentiated white status shed light on the complex hierarchisation of Polish whiteness against other constructions of race, whereby, in specific contexts, their whiteness was placed in a subordinate status. Edmira, twenty-eight, showed how her whiteness was contested and negotiated at a local level. Edmira worked as a supermarket manager and lived with her three sons in a neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city.

I was playing with my kids in the park and a girl who was a similar age to my boys started shouting at us … She's done this many times before … she was swearing and saying: “Go back to your country” and “You don't belong here” … I kept saying please stop [and] not to upset my boys … but she wouldn’t stop … it’s strange because it came from a black girl … sorry I say black. In Poland, that's what we call … This happened many times and makes me feel we’re not welcome in this area … This is one case, but it makes me upset all the time and I eventually decide to move away and away from these people.

Edmira's account sheds light on how her fraught encounter with a girl in her neighbourhood revealed the fragility of her position. Her surprise at the girl's comments was centred around the girl's ethnicity, as the account positioned her as a migrant and not fully belonging, even though the girl possibly was British-born. It also sheds light on the racialization of Englishness and who is included in this category and who is placed on the boundaries or outside. The girl's sustained remarks caused Edmira to move to another neighbourhood and revealed the temporalities of new forms of whiteness like Edmira's, and how they are ordered across migrant and racial hierarchies, depending on how long they have been in the country.

Although several migrants who were racialised shed light on the potent ways that race structured their residential decisions, not all migrants voiced this sentiment. These migrants were typically from professional backgrounds, affluent, and possessed a high level of cultural capital (e.g. English language proficiency), which permitted them to pass relatively unnoticed, thus showing the mutable status of constructions of whiteness. For example, Aleks, who was thirty-four, recalled the factors that shaped her residential decisions in England. She had previously been working as a barrister in Poland before relocating to an affluent suburb on the fringe of the city.

I used to live in [neighbourhood] which is quite posh- it's a quite middle-class sort of area and it's not multicultural at all. I had quite a lot of support there and I didn't feel like an outsider at all I'm probably quite well-travelled, and I don't mind that. Well, the [affluent neighbourhood] was comparable to living back home and the only issue was unstable lodging rather than any environmental issue.

Aleks and other migrants’ stories suggest how their whiteness and its intersections with other social signifiers structured their residential decisions in distinct ways. The lack of othering and the granting of access to hegemonic forms of whiteness allowed them to not have to consider their race in their residential decisions, but also made more neighbourhoods accessible to them should they have wanted to move into them.

Racialising other residents, harmful stereotyping, and neighbourhood safety

The interviews with the migrants revealed two processes: being racialised and racialising others, which also played a significant role in the residential decisions of Poles. Some of the migrants discussed how they interpreted the residents from certain backgrounds based on the stereotypes they held about certain groups, which linked them to certain threatening practices. The strength of some of these stereotypes made them feel threatened, which played an important role in their residential decisions. For instance, Jakub, who was twenty-five, recalled feeling threatened after moving into a specific racially diverse neighbourhood.

I moved out from this [neighbourhood] because it was very dangerous because many black men who have no job and lots of free time always hang around the streets smoking and drinking. I think they get stupid ideas and might try to rob me and my wife. This made us feel scared, so we decided to move to a different neighbourhood. We now live in [affluent city centre neighbourhood] and we love it.

Similarly, Maja, who was twenty-seven and worked as a community development worker spoke about her experiences of living in an Asian-dominated neighbourhood.

I didn’t feel safe or secure living there at all … . I had a bus stop just literally 2–3 minutes walk from my door and I was feeling so uncomfortable walking to the bus stop. I was constantly stopped by men beeping their car or offering me a ride even though it was nice weather. I always checked what I'm wearing to limit the attention on the street, so I tried to copy the clothes South Asian women wore on the street … I felt so uncomfortable all the time that I decided to move.

The shock and surprise that some of the migrants felt when they came across other residents from certain backgrounds and their accompanying comments showed how they drew on certain harmful stereotypes when making sense of the context. These stereotypes reinforced problematic connections between blackness and criminality, for example. Jakub's experiences showed that his understanding of racialised black men in his neighbourhood was also gendered and evoked feelings of threat, which inspired and perpetuated linkages between blackness and criminality (Hall et al. 2017). Together, this fostered a feeling of danger that he extrapolated from the social onto the spatial context vis-à-vis how he interpreted his neighbourhood.

The intersecting ways in which several migrants made sense of certain residents showed the complex ways in which these stereotypes shaped how migrants constructed a sense of threat in their multiracial environments, and how, in turn, these stereotypes shaped their residential decisions. For example, Jakub's story showed how he constructed a threat based on physical and criminal threats connected to black residents in his neighbourhood. Comparatively, Maja's construction of the threat was based on certain racialised, and gendered stereotypes commonly used to construct Muslim men in England as a threat based on their bodily policing of women (Bhattacharyya 2009). These findings were consistent with research on the ways in which US men appraise other men in public spaces. In Day's (2006) study, the white men she interviewed interpreted other white men and East Asian men as safe and non-threatening, while racialising black and Latino men as dangerous by drawing on harmful and intersecting stereotypes linked to criminality.

Other interviews showed that some migrants perceived other residents from specific backgrounds as threatening their cultural values, and, in turn, influenced their residential decisions. This was clear in Marcin's account.

[W]hen I go to the shops and try to buy […] a beer … and many Muslim people, the men, look at me like it's not allowed. I feel I cannot be myself. We Polish people like to drink, and it feels like we cannot be ourselves here [in the neighbourhood] … being free and doing what we like is an important part of Polishness and being European … We do not feel comfortable in this place. So, as a family, we decided to move.

Marcin's account revealed how the construction of the threat faced by migrants in his neighbourhood depended on harmful stereotypes that certain residents drew upon. Marcin perceived Muslim men as a restriction on his cultural values and as directly challenging his Polish identity and the practices he considered important. He viewed Muslim residents as a direct affront to his Polishness, believing that they might impose restrictive regulatory codes such as limiting his drinking. This feeling was so jarring that it shaped his residential decisions. He also situated himself as European, which has been discursively constructed as a white racial formation, and by doing so, he operated to elevate his status and belonging in opposition to his Muslim neighbours. His story resonated with Ehrkamp's (2008) research on Turkish men's place-making practices on other residents in a German neighbourhood, where smoking on the sidewalk and hanging around the coffee shop served as a cultural marker and strategy of both inclusion and exclusion. These practices aimed to foster a sense of belonging among the men and made some Germans and women feel threatened and excluded from these spaces. From this perspective, the mere presence of Muslim residents acted as a visual signal that invaded Marcin's sense of security and challenged the norms and values that he held dear to his Polishness.

Migrants’ future moves involving race: spatial strategies of inclusion and exclusion

The migrants’ interviews revealed that race played a significant role in shaping their residential decisions across their settlement trajectories. Some interviewees showed that race influenced where they decided to move next, based on strategies of inclusion and exclusion. The experiences of discrimination and racism discussed previously led some migrants to choose more racially diverse neighbourhoods. For instance, Edmira, who had experienced prolonged racism from other residents, suggested that her next move would be to a more inclusive and diverse neighbourhood where she felt she could belong.

I decided to move to another area with people from everywhere. I know sometimes these things can happen, but here are people from all over. I don’t want to live near other Polish people although I currently live near another friend who is Polish, and she helps me out with my kids. The Polish community here is quite different compared to when I see the Asian community who are very close and supportive. Polish people here try and ruin your life and always want to sell you something or benefit you in some way.

Similarly, Tomasz, whose family encountered racism before moving to another neighbourhood, subsequently described how these experiences shaped their next move.

It was just those stupid Chavs [his terminology] that caused us to move … but, in general, English people are nice [referring to the new neighbourhood]. It was closer to school, nicer, and the house, but it still has a lot of Chavs.

Both accounts demonstrate how the future residential decisions of migrants concerning race are structured based on racialization processes and whether they perceive they can avoid unwanted racialization in the future. Edmira's account suggested how her experience of discrimination did not compel her to seek protection among other Polish migrants by moving to a residentially segregated neighbourhood. Instead, her experience inspired her to move to a racially diverse neighbourhood. Edmira's reasoning appears to reveal that her interpretation of neighbourhood safety and the places she felt comfortable with depending on visibility, which she saw as being less apparent in a racially diverse context. She felt she might avoid similar harmful encounters in a multi-racial context as opposed to a majority-dominated neighbourhood. Her lack of willingness to live near other Polish migrants as a form of residential protection diverges from multiple studies on black residents in the US (see Reny and Newman 2018) but aligns with similar studies on Polish residential geographies. These studies indicate that, although kinship and friendship ties have played a significant role for Polish migrants in terms of where they initially live, the broader community and co-ethnic ties are of little significance given that migrants have commonly cited suspicion and mistrust towards other Polish migrants (Piętka 2011).

Meanwhile, Tomasz's residential decisions shed light on his family's interpretation of safety following the racism they experienced. Their decision hinged on believing they could avoid future discrimination by passing unnoticed in majority-dominated areas. Unlike Edmira's decisions, Tomasz's family believed that their racial whiteness could pass, thus showing the liminality and distinctness of whiteness in matters of residential decisions. These distinct residential moves acted as two types of spatial strategies of inclusion whereby both accounts showcase how these other white migrants chose to move to neighbourhoods based on their perception of safety and whether or not they could avoid harmful racialization processes in the future. These spatial strategies of inclusion accord with several studies on EU accession migrants living in the UK and how they used active strategies to fit in and resist challenges to their status. Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy (2015) found that migrants used a complex repertoire of verbal and discursive strategies to elevate their status and resist challenges to their belonging. Similarly, Polish migrants’ residential decisions could also be categorized as strategies of inclusion and exclusion that operated to reduce their feelings of race-based threat but in a spatial way.

Several other migrants’ residential decisions could be described as active or intentional strategies of exclusion that redirected attention at others to facilitate their belonging in their neighbourhood. These strategies operated to avoid encountering certain residents based on their previous experiences and extant attitudes. For example, Maja recalled how she decided to move away from her previous neighbourhood because of fear of Muslim men, which, in turn, shaped her future residential decisions.

I can tell the difference between this Salford and the proper Salford and this border with the prison- Salford prison [gasps] … I moved to Salford Quays. It's nice, thankfully, otherwise, I don't have loads of nice experience in the other parts of Manchester, the examples I gave you.

Similarly, Oliwia, who was introduced earlier in this article, stated.

[I] wouldn’t choose Rochdale or Oldham [areas with significant South Asian/Muslim communities in Greater Manchester]. It's nothing to do with the colour of their skin … but it's the way they approach Polish women. I don't like it … I'm not saying they are all the same, but I've had some bad experiences with these types of men.

Likewise, Patrycja, forty-two, recollected how her previous feelings of threat associated with Muslim residents shaped her subsequent residential decisions. She explained,

Cheetham Hill was not something I needed. Although they've got loads of Polish shops. Not being … racist but I got a problem with some Asian people … Asian men. They are chatting to girls, but when you just say no, I'm not interested, they do not seem to be bothered … it's awful and I could not live there anymore.

The migrants’ residential decisions involved active attempts to avoid feeling threatened in the future by certain residents, which in these cases centred on avoiding Muslim men. These social processes were extrapolated across geographical scales to shape, as Sibley (1981) suggested, their interpretation of their neighbourhoods. Here, their feelings of threat and lack of safety were used to form a mental typography of neighbourhoods they deemed unsafe versus safe across the urban landscape, based on complex knowledge, including local settlement patterns of Muslim populations and stories from other Polish people. These culminated in shaping their residential decisions, based on avoiding potential future threats across the city. In all of these cases, the women had limited direct experience of visiting these neighbourhoods but based their residential decisions on the potential of future feelings of threat inspired by their perception of the Muslim demography across the cityscape. Again, the findings correspond to Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy's (2015) research into Hungarian and Romanian migrants and their strategies of exclusion. In Fox’s study, Romanian migrants diverted challenges to their status and belonging onto the Roma migrant population, who were even more denigrated and subordinated than they were. This strategy not only helped avoid their racialization and othering, but it also helped elevate their status by claiming a position above another group across the country's migrant and racial hierarchies. Here, the Poles’ strategies operated similarly over space.

Discussion

Increasing migration from Poland to England after 2004 has raised questions about how race and racialised processes of whiteness are linked to migrants’ residential decisions. Existing theories, such as Racial Threat Theory, while informative, have limitations in that they focus on binary race relations, use phenotypical constructs of race, and often position whiteness as dominant and unchanging. Therefore, by examining Polish migrants, we can gain insight into hierarchies of whiteness and explore this further as an instructive case study.

The significant contribution of this article is to provide empirical data on the linkages between race and residential decisions of Polish migrants and to show that race is connected to migrants’ residential decisions in two significant ways based on whether migrants were racialised and their racialization of others, both of which could be read against the backdrop of threat. Firstly, race shaped migrants’ residential decisions in terms of how they interpreted racial difference and how this led to some migrants perceiving specific racialised and intersecting constructions of threat, which were extrapolated onto their reading of neighbourhoods, influencing their residential decisions. Secondly, race triggered migrants’ residential decisions as a response to their racialization and the racism they encountered, which were contingent on the mutable ways in which their whiteness was constructed in various contexts and places. The migrants’ whiteness and its conditionality meant that race seemed to have the most significant impact on those working in low-paid employment whose whiteness was more likely racialised, resulting in racism. Meanwhile, those working in professional backgrounds and with high levels of cultural capital were likely able to pass given their access to hegemonic whiteness, rendering them relatively invisible and, in some cases, preventing them from having to consider race at all in their residential decisions.

Importantly, the analysis highlights the benefits of using narrative interviews to examine migrants’ residential decisions as it revealed that race had distinct temporal dimensions, which would have gone unnoticed and unreported had the study been confined to fixed time intervals commonplace across census and social survey data. These temporal aspects of race emphasize the significance of interpreting race and its connections to migrants’ residential geographies, which should not exclusively be read in situ but are dually constructed on the basis of migrants’ moves between racial contexts, whereby race is constructed along different lines.

Significantly, most studies examining race and residential decisions focus on how racialization processes leading to racism intensify residential segregation. However, the interviews with Poles suggest that a distinct aspect of the conditional and mutable ways in which their whiteness was constructed resulted in them deploying a range of residential moves that were not confined to furthering residential segregation. Instead, they exposed the liminality of Poles’ racialization and their active involvement in harnessing constructions of visibility in deciding where to move to and the qualities of these neighbourhoods. Accordingly, some migrants saw ameliorating the potential for them to experience further racism hinged on whether they perceived they could blend in/pass in a prospective neighbourhood. The migrants’ options seemed a lot more flexible than similar accounts shared by other racialised groups, including racialised ethnic minority men interviewed in Glasgow, where their visibility and threat of further racism were constructed along phenotypical lines (Hopkins and Smith 2016). In many of the interviewee's accounts, the Poles’ mutable whiteness, their shifting and liminal whiteness, offered them more options to avoid future racism, many of which were shown in their active strategies to decide on a place to move based on fitting in. In addition, none of the migrants expressed a desire to live among other Polish migrants in response to their racialization as others, supporting previous studies on the limits many Poles saw in co-ethnic residential concentration.

The range of moves and intentions that migrants deploy when feeling threatened is significant for policymakers, particularly those involved in integration. The findings indicate that some migrants display troubling attitudes towards residents from certain racial backgrounds, resulting in the reinforcement of harmful stereotypes that perpetuate fraught race relations and affect spatial dynamics. These misinformed and harmful constructions of race highlight the need for greater local efforts to foster inclusive spaces that allow migrants and existing residents to meet and dispel these misconceptions. In addition, the varying and active ways in which racialised white migrants respond to their racialization show the importance of harnessing their accounts in our understanding of residential geographies. This is because they demonstrate the common processes made by all migrants and those that are distinct to groups racialised in specific ways. These accounts, along with historical evidence from Irish migrants, show how critical whiteness literature can illustrate how residence corresponds to racialization processes at distinct junctures of migrants’ settlement, and how at different times and places, some of these groups can become incorporated into the racial hegemony, whereas for others, race continues to play a distinct role.

The current study was conducted during a period when England was still part of the European Union (2015–16), and Polish migrants had unrestricted access to settle in the country, but their racialization as “other” continued to intensify. However, since then, the UK has left the EU system, and the government has implemented stricter immigration policies, including anti-migrant legislation such as the Nationality and Borders Act and proposals for an Illegal Migration Bill. In this current climate, where Polish migrants no longer have the benefits of EU membership, it would be useful to examine in future work how the boundaries of whiteness are redrawn for these groups and how this has impacted the likelihood of their racialization, thus resulting in changes and a distinct impact on their residential decisions.

Ethics statement

This study involving human participants adhered to the ethical guidelines outlined by Taylor & Francis. Before data collection, ethical approval was obtained from the University of Manchester ethics committee. Informed consent was obtained from all participants, and their anonymity and confidentiality were ensured throughout the study. Participants were informed about the purpose of the study, their voluntary participation, and their right to withdraw at any time without consequence. The study respected the principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice. All collected data were stored securely and used solely for research purposes. This study upholds the ethical standards necessary to protect the rights and welfare of the participants involved.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and useful suggestions for the article. I would also like to thank Neema Begum, Phil Shankley, Susan Oman, Tania Stein and Scarlet Harris for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. In addition, I am grateful to my PhD supervisors Mark Brown, Nissa Finney, James Rhodes, and Kitty Lymperopoulou for their guidance and support throughout my PhD. Finally, I express my gratitude to the Polish people who participated in this project, shared their experiences and stories, and to whom I am deeply thankful.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The work was funded as part of a PhD project, which received funding from the ESRC’s Large Grants Scheme (Grant ref: ES/K002198/1)