Cultural Precarity: Migrants’ Positionalities in the Light of Current Anti-immigrant Populism in Europe

ABSTRACT

The Brexit referendum was an earthquake to those in otherwise privileged positions: white intra-European migrants. Poles form the largest among these groups in the UK. As much as they are vulnerable to discrimination as non-British citizens, these migrants benefit from their whiteness and European heritage. They are objects of anti-immigrant campaigns, but they are not free of anti-immigrant sentiments and racist attitudes. This article uses the notion of ‘cultural precarity’ to highlight their ambivalent positionalities in Britain and how those have been changing since the Brexit vote. Drawing on three studies conducted among Poles in England between 2010 and 2017, it explores how the neoliberal and culturalist logics of belonging determine the migrants’ conditions. By applying the lens of ‘cultural precarity’, the article is attentive to both to the migrants’ vulnerability and the moments of everyday resistance to anti-immigrant populism now at work across Europe. The Brexit case is instructive for other contexts for it demonstrates how migrants construct their own cultural and racial proximity to dominant groups to counter vulnerability and secure inclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural precarity
• Brexit
• vulnerability
• anti-immigrant populism
• migration
• ‘race’
• whiteness
• positionalities

Introduction

The terrorist attacks in Brussels and Paris, Berlin, Stockholm and London, and the arrival of some hundred thousand refugees every month on the territory of the European Union between October 2015 and September 2016 (Eurostat 2017a) fuelled anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant racism and xenophobia in Europe. As Eriksen rightly noticed, such dramatic events expose the vulnerability of immigrants: ‘the condition when, irrespectively of immigrants’ solid legal and economic status, their belonging to the imagined national community becomes subject to negotiation whenever the culturally hegemonic see fit’ (Eriksen 2015: 3). Thereby, anti-immigrant populism is not restricted to Europe, and its current resurgence is a global challenge.

The Brexit referendum in June 2016, preceded by the harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric employed by the Leave campaign (Goodwin and Heath 2016), was one such event. No matter how close it was¹, the Brexit vote made the question of ethnic and racial hierarchies pressing once again (King 2016) and reminded us of the power of resentment for loss and the longing for a world order in which white (males) – in opposition to devaluated others – are ‘the defining trait of humanity and the physical environment’ (Braidotii 2001). Similar mechanisms to those leading to Brexit have been identified in other neoliberal, multicultural contexts, such as Australia and the USA (Hogan and Haltinner 2015). Yet unlike other victories of anti-immigrant populism so far, the Brexit vote was an earthquake to those who are otherwise in privileged positions – white, predominantly Christian immigrants, the ‘free movers’ (Favell 2008), the citizens of the European Union. Brexit shows thus that anybody could be an enemy, for otherness is not a matter of a particular skin colour, religion or legal status.

This fact drew the attention of media and science to the condition of the Eastern Europeans in present-day Britain. Their vulnerability cannot be denied, yet this one-sided perspective does not fully reflect their situation. The discursive exposure of the vulnerability of immigrants, their victimisation in public debates, not only fails to solve the problem of anti-immigrant sentiments but might even play into the hands of populists that fuel the majorities’ sense of the elite’s disregard of their (economic) disadvantage. It is thus necessary to complicate the debates on vulnerability to better understand the complexity of the relationship between the majorities and the migrant populations in multicultural societies.

In this paper, the story of vulnerability and privilege is told from the position of Polish migrants in England. Poles are the largest foreign-born group in the UK, far outnumbering other intra-European migrants, among them the Irish and the Germans (Eurostat 2017b). These migrants are clearly in an ambivalent position now. They were the main target of the anti-immigrant Leave campaign (Goodwin and Milazzo 2015). The public discourse alluding to their whiteness and cultural fit (Cekalova 2008) stresses their ‘market value’ and constructs these migrants as well-fitted workers, fuelling the perceived division within the working class (Vickers and Rutter 2016). The research proves that as white European migrants, they profit from a system of white privilege which constructs the ethnic and racialised other as the dialectic part of his hegemonic identity (Fox 2013). Still, the majority of Eastern Europeans in Britain perform low-paid, unqualified jobs (Frattini 2017).

While the decision on Brexit will change their future in Britain in yet unknown ways, these migrants are not free from the same kind of resentments against immigrants that made British citizens vote Leave. Some observers familiar with the political and societal situation in Poland noticed that, ‘After Brexit, Poles get a taste of their own country’s hostility to minorities’ (Kurasinska 2016). Paradoxically, during the harshest point of the Leave campaign in February 2016, Polish migrants demonstrated arm-in-arm with Britain First supporters in Dewsbury. What (many) British right-wing populists (Treadwell 2012; Pilkington 2016; Cleland et al. 2018) and (some) Polish migrants share is the conviction that Muslims should be banned from Europe.

By focussing on such ambivalences, I argue for a perspective which acknowledges that the post-Brexit vote dynamics of migrants’ conditions in Europe reach beyond their economic (de)privilege. Instead, I discuss the positionalities (Anthias 2001) of Polish migrants in terms of their ‘cultural precarity’ (Eriksen 2015). This term offers an alternative to the vocabulary of immigrant integration, which carries utilitarian connotations (Favell 1998) and prioritises the factual over the affective. Not facts but the ‘rhetoric of fear’ (Wodak 2015) on the side of majorities, and migrants’ own aspirations and ‘fantasies of belonging’ (Ahmed 1999), shape their positionalities. Racism perpetuated by migrants (Nowicka 2017) is a part of this puzzle that has gained little attention in the literature thus far.

I have been studying Polish post-accession migrants in Britain for the past eight years (Nowicka 2010, 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2017; Lisiak and Nowicka 2017; Nowicka and Krzyżowski 2017). Against this empirical background I argue that it is neither correct nor desirable to regard Polish migrants as simply either victims of anti-immigrant populism or accomplices in racial privilege. Yet the focus on the seemingly contradictory positions these migrants take can help us to address pressing issues such as the persistence of exclusionary logics of nationalism in the everyday (Bonikowski 2016), and the new constellations of racial inequalities (Back et al. 2012; Erel et al. 2016). Studying intra-European migrants in post-Brexit-vote Britain also shows us how whiteness as a marker of privilege (McDowell 2009; Fox et al. 2012; Guðjónsdóttir and Loftsdóttir 2017) is currently changing to encompass its new shades.

New European ‘Free Movers’

The free movement of people has long been at the core of the European integration process; the introduction of European Union (EU) citizenship with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, and the implementation of the Schengen area in 1997, granted all EU citizens the right to live and work in any member state. Yet only with the accession of the Central and Eastern European countries² to the EU in May 2004 has intra-European migration increased significantly. In 2013 half of all intra-EU migrants were from the new member states (Castro-Martín and Cortina 2015). The population of UK residents born in the countries that joined the European Union in May 2004 has steadily increased over the years, reaching circa 1.8 million residents in the first quarter of 2016, while another 700,000 people work and reside in the UK on a temporary basis (Vargas-Silva and Markaki 2016). Twenty-nine per cent of all EU nationals in the UK are Polish-born.

Various authors drew our attention to the fact that a significant number of the migrants from the new accession countries work below their qualifications, in the lowest segments of the labour market, for a minimum wage (Anderson et al. 2006; Nowicka 2012; Frattini 2017). Different public and private institutions such as employment agencies had a great share in such transforming of migrants’ ‘work first’ motivation (Green 2007) into a cheap labour force that is remedying regional and sectoral shortages in low-paid and hard-to-fill occupations (Stenning and Dawley 2009; McCollum and Findlay 2015).

We have sufficient evidence that Poles profit from the labour market in its current state of segmentation along racial and ethnic difference (Salt and Okólski 2014). Because of their European heritage and whiteness, these migrants are privileged as ‘more desirable’ than non-white migrants (Fox et al. 2012). At the same time, East Europeans are ‘less desirable’ workers, when compared to the domestic labour force and western migrants (McDowell 2009). Attitudinal surveys show that fear of job competition continues to shape majorities’ negative attitudes towards this group of migrants (Hellwig and Sinno 2017), while Western European professionals, expatriates and retirees are widely accepted (Lundström 2014). The questions of (de)privilege need thus to also consider, alongside migrants’ whiteness, their class belonging (Colic-Peisker 2005). However, in the case of migrants, and in particular Polish migrants in Britain, social class ceases to be an easily identifiable form of belonging, and instead becomes fluid (Nowicka 2014b, 2015). In this context, it is thus important to consider, next to the material realm, the symbolic realm (Anthias 2001): migrants’ aspirations for occupational and educational improvement, schooling, and housing. The actual positioning of migrants is an outcome of their idea of their own, appropriate, ‘natural’ place in the society realised vis-à-vis anti-immigrant rhetoric, and legal, occupational, and educational status within (racialised and gendered) structures of labour, education and residential markets. At the same time, migrants’ positionalities need to be considered translocally (Anthias 2008); it is from a perspective which considers the places of origin of migrants as well.

Brexit and Immigration

Migration was one of the most heatedly debated issues throughout the EU referendum campaign (Jamali 2016; Balch and Balabanova 2017). The UK Independence Party (UKiP) rhetoric implied that Brexit would help reduce immigration to Britain (Dennison and Goodwin 2015; Jones et al. 2017). This message played on earlier concerns about immigration, which the public considered the most important issue facing Britain (Goodwin and Milazzo 2015). In communities where people mostly voted Leave, anti-immigrant sentiments have been increasing since 2004 (Dennison and Goodwin 2015; Becker et al. 2016). The polls around the Brexit referendum showed that immigration and national sovereignty were the main reasons behind the choice to vote Leave (Glencross 2016; Hobolt 2016; Owen and Walter 2017).

The results of the Brexit vote reflect the polarisation in the public discourse around immigration and its impact on Britain. While a number of British newspapers, most notably The Daily Mail, applied metaphors of ‘flooding’ and ‘invasion’ to depict immigration that followed the EU enlargement in 2004, liberal sources – exemplarily The Guardian – stressed the benefits of new immigrants for the British economy (Halej 2014; Hoops et al. 2016). In the public discourse, thus, East European immigrants existed simultaneously as a threat to social cohesion, national values, and local labour markets, and as valuable workers – young, flexible, well-educated, skilled, hard-working, diligent, and enthusiastic. Both perspectives operate within a neoliberal frame (Anderson 2015; Vickers and Rutter 2016). At the same time, the Brexit narratives correspond with the moralising discourse on ‘shirkers and strivers’, the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ of welfare claimants, hence better and worse citizens (Romano 2017).

Cultural Precarity

The Brexit turmoil sharpens migrants’ vulnerable positions, yet ‘vulnerability’ only insufficiently reflects migrants’ positionalities within the context of increasing populisms in Europe. Instead, I argue that the term precarity better accounts for the ambivalences of migrants’ positionalities.

The notion of precarity has been used in the social sciences to depict an embodied condition related to labour markets in advanced capitalist economies (Bourdieu 1998; Standing 2011). The adjective ‘cultural’ which I add before the term precarity shifts its meaning, emphasising the relevance of the realm of belonging. Until now, the concept of cultural precarity exclusively related to non-white, non-Christian migrants of the first and second generation (Eriksen 2015). I argue that the term helps us to accentuate interrelated issues such as anti-immigrant populism, economic (de)privilege, self-perceptions, and aspirations of white intra-European migrants. The term ‘precarity’ also points towards the interdependency of migrants’ aspirations and statuses and recognition from others. Unlike vulnerability, which focuses on migrants’ exposure to harmful conditions and their defencelessness, the term precarity draws our attention to the possibilities for migrants’ resistance and envisioning of alternatives to dominant discourses and structures (Waite 2009).

I propose to consider cultural precarity along two dimensions: the first one relates to the workings of institutionalised structures of (un)recognition and how these are embodied by migrants. I see cultural precarity thus as nested in a neoliberal and culturalist logic of belonging (Vertovec 2011). The second dimension relates to the understanding of migrants as reactive/passive objects of neoliberal and national imperatives of integration policies and markets, or active agents capable of resistance. While the literature considering migrants as vulnerable subjects tends to focus on how structural conditions determine their positioning and turns them into racists towards other migrants (Back et al. 2012), I instead assume the perspective of migrants and how they actively position themselves towards the imperative of an ‘integrated subject’ (Cederberg 2014) and the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Brexit referendum. While I am interested in the everyday moments of resistance (Scott 1985), I restrain from a too hasty conclusion that acts of resistance are positive; instead, I see them as (at times ambivalent) ways in which Poles in Britain attempt to disrupt anti-immigrant and racial rhetoric which objectifies them as Britain’s excluded other.

The Case of Polish Migrants in England

I derive my argument from the rich empirical material I collected over the past eight years within three separate studies.³ Participants in all three studies were selected among the post-accession migrants according to the principle of maximum differentiation of the sample. The first study encompassed in-depth interviews with twenty-five migrants from Poland in London, and nineteen in various towns in the Midlands, all conducted between November 2010 and August 2011 (Nowicka 2012, 2014a, 2014b). The interview transcripts were coded following the grounded theory (Corbin and Strauss 2008). The second project was located in London and Birmingham; in each city, the project team conducted interviews with thirty-one Polish migrants, whom we met three times, in spring 2014 and a year and two years after. Despite some differences in the interview scripts, both projects prompted accounts of informants’ everyday practices, and their opinions of and encounters with people of different skin colours, ethnicities, national backgrounds and religions than their own (Nowicka and Krzyżowski 2017). In line with the procedure of theoretical sampling in grounded theory (Corbin and Strauss 2008), I selected cases from the second study in the light of the categories that have emerged from the first study, to challenge or elaborate the claims generated earlier.

The third study, with twelve Poles residing in London and nine in Birmingham, included two online focus group interviews (Stewart and Shamdasani 2014) in March 2017 and aimed to learn about participants’ perceptions of life after the Brexit vote. The participants logged-in with a nickname of their choice to a secure chat room; the discussion was moderated and proceeded similarly to the traditional face-to-face focus group (Soutar et al. 2015). Each of the discussions lasted approximately 120 minutes. The generated data is a mixture of self-talk and public discourse; accordingly, I first analysed individual cases (as I would approach an interview), and then the conversations (Wilkinson 2016). The identified categories were triangulated with those generated in the first two studies in the last step of analysis.

The overview of the three samples is provided in Table 1.

Table 1. Sample overview.

		Study I	Study II	Study III
	males	41%	45%	38%
	females	59%	55%	62%
	average age and age range	28 (21–43)	34 (24–58)	(23–55)
education	higher	54%	56%	15
	general secondary	22%	28%	4
	primary or vocational	7%	16%	2
	students	17%	–	–

The samples correspond well to the general characteristics of Polish migrant population in the UK which is relatively young and well-educated. It is worth noticing that most of the studies’ participants worked at positions not corresponding their work experience, formal education and aspirations. If at all, the workplace matters for research participants’ opinions, and it correlated with the place of residence in Britain (Nowicka and Krzyżowski 2017). Gender matters insofar women often provided more elaborated narrations than man and reflect upon the aspects related to child rearing. Whenever it is relevant, I draw the readers’ attention to gender, educational, occupational or place-related differences.

Valuable Workers, or: ‘Simply White Negros’

It is known that Poles in Britain present themselves as makers of their own professional careers (Garapich 2008). This stance fits the post-socialist idea of a neoliberal, active and empowered subject (Dunn 2004). As Eade (2007) showed, many of the newly arrived Poles in Britain cherished a set of individualistic, egalitarian, market-oriented values and the conviction that the British market – and society – guarantees equal chances and positions to anybody who works hard. While the Poles constructed their own capability to work hard as an ethnic feature (Datta and Brickell 2009), the narrations I collected in 2010 and 2011 demonstrated that the Poles largely lacked a sense of the workings of the racialised system of class privilege in Britain (Nowicka 2014b).

The more recent narrations reveal that the Poles now do sense ethnic hierarchies in Britain, a trend that the following quotation from an interview recorded in London in April 2015 represents best:

So us, residing in such areas like this one, in such places as this one, in this London we don’t want to leave, because outside it is horrible, because outside all white [people] are Brits and they speak too fast and for them you are a stranger and they will stare at you on a street and point a finger at your kids. Why do my kids not go to a better school, where there are only white, British kids, though they could? Or to a private one, though they are talented? Because their mom and dad don’t want that someone points a finger at them and says: you cannot afford it. These are the things we cannot afford. We both have decent jobs and we cannot complain. We can pay all bills, the rent, and there is something left for a holiday, small pleasures. But still … But still, considering our [good] education, here we are simply white Negros, yes, this has to be said.

This narration points to the sense of misfit between the idea of self-belonging that places Polish migrants on an equal footing with the white British middle class, and their economic position which decides on where they live, and thus also on school choices and possibilities for socialising. It also indicates the difficulties of Polish migrants to blend into the British white middle class, for the workings of both the neoliberal logic and a cultural logic which gives priority to ethnic commonality and heritage. At the same time, the awareness of racism and the sarcastic self-labelling as ‘white Negro’ is a sign of unknowingly subverting (Scott 1985) the dominant narrative of the economic fit of new migrants in the UK (Essed 1991).

The latest narrations, collected in March 2017 during the online focus group discussions, include a much stronger and explicit dis-identification of Poles with those ‘bad’ migrants who misuse the welfare state, and who ‘got too many rights, nhs, and got lazy’. This rhetorical strategy reflects the neo-liberally underpinned assimilative logics of immigration policies, citizenship and language tests, and national ideas of belonging (Wodak 2013; Cederberg 2014). The participants employ the figure of a well-integrated ‘model migrant’ both to validate themselves as respectable citizens (Skeggs 2002) and to counter the stereotype of migrants as a burden on the welfare system mobilised during the EU referendum campaign (Jones et al. 2017). But what is new, the discussants write that a migrant is someone whose English proficiency is not sufficient to enable the person to socialise outside of her/his own national and/or language community. In contrast to migrants, the participants stress that their competences allow them to ‘build a bridge across cultures’ and participate in society on what the discussants regard as equal terms. This strategy also relies on racialised understanding of a migrant who, as one of the participants writes, is ‘someone from different culture and of different skin colour’. Thus, the growing awareness displayed by Poles of how ethnic hierarchies and discrimination work against them goes hand in hand with othering of non-white people in Britain as culturally (and socially) distant.

There are striking similarities between these narrations and the ones collected by Clarke (2015) among white British middle-class citizens (also Garner 2012). Cultural proximity, linguistic fluency, accent and style, and skin colour are markers of difference for both British white middle class and Polish migrants (white and middle class or aspiring to it) alike. In their eyes, someone is not a migrant when she or he is invisible, or her/his difference is imperceptible. This commonality between migrants’ and non-migrants’ views can signify one or more of three processes: migrants’ cultural conformity in Britain and adoption of British (white middle-class) values; migrants’ aspirations to the British white middle class which makes them ‘act like them’ and use mimicry as inclusionary tactics; and migrants’ habitus rooted in a Polish ‘cultural repertoire’ which contains similar worldviews (Nowicka 2017). At this point, I do not want to give priority to any of these three interpretations but instead seek to look closer into the culturalist logic of belonging.

Valuable Europeans, or: Good Patriots

In the narrations of Poles in the last seven years, I have found two further variants of the culturalist logic of belonging. The first one concerns ‘thinking through the nation’ and its sovereignty (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008); it is employed by the research participants from the 2010/2011 study to rationalise discrimination, as the following example shows:

I don’t blame them [the British] because I would do the same if there were a Belarussian [woman] working with me [in Poland] who completed her studies – I would treat her worse [than Polish colleagues]. She would always be a stranger. Even if better educated and a better worker than me, she would always be a stranger. I think it would be only human to react that way.

This narration refers to a ‘natural right’ of citizens to discriminate against foreigners if they work on their territory inherent in the exclusionary logic of nationalism, which operates as a cognitive schema (Bonikowski 2016). Similarly, another interviewee in the same study excused the British employers’ discriminatory practice with their lack of understanding of the educational system in Poland, and thus the skills and competences she brought with her to Britain.

In the most recent study, Poles no longer imagine themselves outside of the British nation; instead, in the context of Brexit, the neo-liberal active attitude serves them as a marker marking them as true British patriots. One of the participants in the focus group interview in Birmingham in March 2017 wrote:

one neighbour whom I was helping because he had no job voted against the EU. because supposedly immigrants take his job. but he would not work for any money. preferred to be unemployed and to complain. I told him in his face what I think of him.

In comparison to her neighbour, the interviewee is ‘more a national’ (Hage 1998) than he. By juxtaposing the self-image of Poles as hard-working ‘good migrants’ with an image of a British neighbour who draws social benefits AND who voted Leave, this narration points towards the Polish migrants’ sense of their own value vis-à-vis British citizens, as better workers, better (because active) British citizens, but also as better Europeans. Such narrations are backed up with distancing from the British Leave-voters:

they want to leave [the EU] for they want Great Britain to be like in the past: rich, homogenous, secure. unfortunately they do not realise this has nothing to do with the european union.

Other discussants also stressed ‘a complete lack of education’ among British (Leave) voters, their naivety, and lack of sense of the geopolitical situation. Such superiority narrations that has previously been an indication for the empowerment of post-socialist migrant workers in Britain (Datta and Brickell 2009), appear in the new post-Brexit-vote context rather as a manifestation of a new national belonging, and new confidence as patriots contributing to Britain’s economic success on the one hand, and as empowered European citizens on the other.

At this point, however, another form of the vulnerability of Polish migrants is revealed. The participants in the 2017 study see no (acceptable) alternative to their stay in Britain, for they feel that the situation in Poland discourages them from settling back there. As one participant wrote, ‘when the mentality in Poland changes and people become more open then I will start thinking of returning’. These people espoused tolerant and inclusive (compared to Poland) attitudes of multicultural British cities, and they now reject the moral conservatism gaining ground in Poland after the electoral victory of the PiS party in September 2015, as well as the Polish government’s attempts to restore identification with traditional Catholicism (O’Neal 2017). The national protectionism and xenophobia characteristic of Polish new populism, whose natural ‘other’ is decadent Western Europe (Minkenberg 2010), is at odds with migrants’ self-identifications as citizens of the European Union who profited from the freedoms it offers, including mobility.

Finally, economic reasons prevent most of the research participants from returning to Poland. All participants in the 2017 study stressed that their situation in Britain is ‘stable’: they have good jobs, earn money, own a house, are paying off a mortgage, have many British friends, and they have plans for future ‘expansion’, i.e. they intend to buy a new and bigger house, get a better job. A return to Poland would mean a financial loss to them, and a need to re-integrate in the labour market which they left more than ten years ago. The loss also stems from the fact that some are settled in the UK after having invested in improving their language skills, jobs, and residence, and because some did not improve enough:

But if I come back, good. And I do have this [Polish] master’s degree. And what? I am aware of it. Because every employer will ask me what I’ve been doing during the last few years. And what will I tell him? That I was packing goods in a warehouse? It is literally a hole in my vita.

Thus, while European Union citizenship offers the possibility of mobility, it is not only the post-Brexit turmoil and anticipated restrictions to travel and employment options for non-British citizens that ‘immobilise’ Polish migrants. Rather, it is lost skills, gaps in curricula, or successful integration into British society, which increase the costs of mobility, making a return to Poland de facto unattractive. The ‘exit option’, which is often considered a form of protest and resistance (Hoffmann 2010), is thus a less likely strategies of migrants in the post-Brexit vote Europe.

Visibility, or: White Alliances and Resistance

The second facet of culturalist logic I identified in the narrations could be termed after Brubaker (2017) as ‘civilisationalist’, as it relies on the fear of a distinctly and essentially other threatening the European values and Europe’s ‘real character’. This logic excludes those who are visibly others: Muslims but also African and Caribbean blacks, for they do not fit the vision of (Christian and white) Europe (Back et al. 2012). The interviews conducted in London and more strongly in Birmingham in 2010–2016 include plenty of narrations of this kind; they show that Poles in Britain distance themselves most strongly from Muslims and would be less willing to include a Muslim person in their social network (Nowicka and Krzyżowski 2017).

British populism and the Leave campaign have been less preoccupied with Islam⁴ and Muslim refugees than continental (and Polish) populists (Fomina and Kucharczyk 2016; Macklin 2016; Brubaker 2017). Nevertheless, the Poles who participated in the study in March 2017 perceived the Leave vote as driven by rejection of the EU’s, and, in particular the German chancellor Angela Merkel’s politics towards Muslim refugees: ‘[UK citizens voted Leave] because the EU forces them [UK citizens] to accept more immigrants, meaning Syrians’. Some participants reinforced this argument by referring to the opinions of their families and friends in Poland: ‘my father said it was right [that UK citizens voted Leave] because the EU goes too far, and the UK is strong enough and will manage [outside of the EU]’. Rationalising the Leave vote as a voice against Muslim refugees, the participants denied that it was ‘a vote against them’. This stance points towards Polish migrants’ attempt to create commonality with British citizens, signalling belonging to the same (white, British) community which stands for protecting their wealth against foreign influence (Back et al. 2012). However, migrants’ positionalities should not be considered as simply racist⁵; rather, they are transversal, for the migrants share the Islamophobic European racism objectifying Muslims as Europe’s feared others (Cole 2009) but they are also the objects of ‘xeno-racism’ and thus Britain’s ‘parasite’ economic others.

In the aftermath of the EU referendum, Polish migrants’ (in)visibility has become negotiable as is the visibility of Muslim population in the UK and elsewhere. The discussants participating in this study stressed that they had not directly encountered hostility from British people but noted that they had heard of incidents in their towns. In Birmingham, some participants heard from their Polish friends or colleagues of hostile remarks from passersby yelling behind them: ‘Fuck off, you stupid Poles! Go back where you belong’. The discussants agreed that the atmosphere in Britain has changed in the aftermath of the referendum and that British people may now feel encouraged to openly express their negative opinions about migrants. In turn, Polish migrants’ attitude to life in Britain is changing as well, and fewer of them appreciate it in the same way as they once did: ‘I am afraid that this whole Brexit has inflamed hate not of brits towards us but migrants, Poles, to this country’, said one of the participants.

This kind of shift in the relationship between British and Polish people might best be illustrated with examples of how the participants in Birmingham⁶ discussed the self-perceived visibility and audibility of Poles in post-Brexit-vote Britain. One participant shared that she had begun deliberately speaking in Polish with her daughter while in public in order to ‘celebrate our Polishness’. This prompted another participant to write that she had avoided speaking Polish in public immediately after the referendum on the advice of her parents, who live in Poland. A third participant disagreed with this tactic: ‘I could not be blamed for anything, I live here legally, pay taxes, work, if I want to speak Polish then I do so :-)’. This brief exchange between the three participants ended with the following words from the woman who had initiated it: ‘I wanted to demonstrate to myself that I am not afraid and ashamed. Just that nobody reacted to this behaviour and to [me/us] speaking Polish loudly’. It is the (re)turn to ethnic markers of difference that Poles in Britain detect and which makes them feel ‘ontologically insecure’ (Noble 2005) in Britain. But while the concern with own visibility is clearly a part of a new vulnerability as (potential or real) victims of hate crime (Corcoran and Smith 2016), this and similar narrations also point to possibilities for everyday acts of resistance, and the streets as places of struggle (Butler 2014b). While Poles try to escape objectification as an ethnic, racial other, such demonstrations of their own presence in public space is a beginning for further collective resistance (Butler 2014a).

Concluding Remarks

Various studies among Eastern Europeans in Britain have demonstrated how they claim higher social status by embracing the meritocratic values of the white British class, and by emphasising their whiteness (Datta and Brickell 2009; Fox et al. 2015). By analytically disentangling the workings of the neoliberal and culturalist logics of belonging we come to a better understanding of the complexities of such alliances with the white British middle class, and how the strategies of assuming better positions has shifted in the course of the Leave campaign and the Brexit vote. The strategies identified in pre-Brexit interviews with Polish migrants include ‘thinking through the nation’ to deny discrimination; discursive constructions of one’s own identity as a good, desirable worker; and rhetorical distinction from other ethnic groups in the UK with reference to one’s own (ethnicised) intellectual superiority. All these strategies signal alliances with the white British middle class of ‘strivers’ and are directed against immigrant and native British ‘shirkers’. However, these strategies are shifting recently, from more neoliberal to more culturalist patterns of distinction, as Poles increasingly perceive their own positions as inside the British nation. The narrations collected shortly before and after the Brexit vote show that Poles now stress their cultural proximity to the (white) British people more than before, defining other migrants as cultural and racial others. At the same time, they gain respectability though self-identification as pro-European citizens. The narrations I collected suggest that fragile alliances are possible between migrants and dominant groups when they ‘agree’ on the meaning of whiteness as mode of assuring privilege beyond the reference to common heritage or political interests.

These shifts are highly ambivalent. The new ways of claiming belonging to the pro-European white middle class in Britain signal new self-esteem and emancipation and manifest cultural adaptation of the Eastern Europeans in Britain. Yet the Poles’ aspirations to the white British middle class are rooted in their sense of unspoken privilege of whiteness that they enjoyed in Poland. Their claims of cultural proximity take from the ‘old’ repertoire from their context of origin and perpetuate racism transnationally. At the same time, migrant Poles want to emancipate themselves from the Polish society, which they consider less tolerant and less multicultural, and thus to some extent backwards when compared to the west of Europe (Nowicka 2017). This twofold strategy is now intensifying in reaction to conservative populism in Poland, and anti-immigrant populism in Britain.

The notion of ‘cultural precarity’ helps in avoiding a simplistic view on such processes, for it stresses both the vulnerability of migrants, as well as their strategies of resistance. This vulnerability is rooted in cultural rather than neo-liberal logics; while these two logics are interrelated, the vulnerabilities they produce are increasingly disjunctive, for solid economic positions of immigrants do not lend them social and cultural inclusion. Poles’ status as ‘migrant’ or ‘non-migrant’, and ‘belonging’ or ‘not-belonging’ is never fully their own decision (Lloyd 2015). Yet, when attempting to belonging to the British white nation with help of similar exclusionary strategies, migrant Poles display a growing awareness of racial hierarchies in the UK. This knowledge entails potential for everyday resistance (Essed 1991). Paradoxically thus, the Brexit vote gave them a chance to counter vulnerability by appearing in public as conscious, educated European citizens.

To think of the migrants’ condition in terms of ‘cultural precarity’ opens up the discussion on the shifting meaning of whiteness and racism. Parallel racialisation of Poles and their assimilation in the UK produces Poles as non-white and non-black⁷; in turn, their status oscillates between culturally close/distant and racially close/distant. Thereby, racial and cultural closeness might lead to migrants’ strategies of racism turned towards other migrants, in particular in times of economic pressure and anti-immigrant populism. In this sense, racism can be a strategy of inclusion flexibly used by migrants next to their self-identifications as European citizens and ethnic skilled Polish workers. As migrants’ tactics to counter cultural vulnerability are nested both in their assimilation efforts and in aspirations originating in their countries of birth, we need a new lens to study the complexity and dynamics of the migrants’ condition. The Brexit vote shifts the relevance of economic value and labour market fit of Eastern Europeans in Britain and their racial and cultural proximity to the British white middle class. Paradoxically, it increases the migrants’ vulnerability and opens up new possibilities for resistance and inclusion.

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Magdalena Nowicka is professor of Migration and Transnationalism at the Institute of Social Sciences of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research centres on intra-European migration, racism, conviviality and transnationalism. Among her publications are “Migration and Social Remittances in a Global Europe”, co-edited with Vojin Šerbedžija (2016, Palgrave Macmillan) and “Convivial Tools for Research and Practice”, co-edited with Mette Louise Berg (forthcoming, UCL Press). She also published articles on social inequality and on cosmopolitanism in various international journals and edited volumes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FP7 Ideas: European Research Council [grant number ERC Starting Grant 313369].

Notes

1. Fifty-one point nine per cent of UK voters for Leave and 48.1 per cent for Remain. In Birmingham, 50.4 per cent voted Leave, only 3800 more than for Remain. Yet in some constituencies in Birmingham (e.g. Erdington), Remain voters were a clear majority. The City of London voted clearly Remain (75.3 per cent). These local differences were reflected upon by my respondents. Yet despite the results, all study participants perceived the atmosphere in England after the vote as tense, confusing and hard for all immigrants.

2. The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Cyprus and Malta became EU member states on 1 May 2004 as well.

3. The first project was conducted during my research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen; the second and third projects were financed by the European Research Council Starting Grant No. 313369 awarded to me.

4. This is not meant to deny various and changing facets of Islamophobia in Britain (Jackson 2018).

5. On Islamophobia as racism see (Garner and Selod 2015).

6. Elsewhere I wrote that urban context matter for inter-ethnic perceptions, and we observed larger social distance between Poles and minorities in Birmingham than in London (Nowicka and Krzyżowski 2017). In the online group discussions analysed in this paper, participants from London stressed the city’s cosmopolitan character, while Birmingham residents were more likely to perceive themselves as a visible minority, despite being less numerous.

7. There are obvious parallels between Mexican-Americans and Polish migrants in the UK which are worth exploring but this would exceed the scope of this paper.