EU post-accession Polish migrants trajectories and their settlement practices in Scotland

ABSTRACT

The presence and the apparent permanence of post-accession EU migrants in the UK is of significant interest to both academics and politicians. Studies have debated whether migration from new accession countries to the UK mark a new type of migration often described as ‘liquid’ and ‘open ended’, or whether these migrants will settle in the new destination countries. Based on a qualitative study of Poles who have lived in Scotland for at least six years, we observed four typologies of what we call migrants’ settling practices: (1) stayers, (2) over-stayers, (3) circular and transnational migrants and (4) economic migrants. The findings from this study demonstrate that Polish migrants do not have fixed ideas about the duration of their migration (in terms of a sense of permanence) but instead focus on diverse links, anchors or attachments in Scotland and Poland in describing their settling practices. Thus, the main contribution the article makes is to present an in-depth understanding of what settlement means from the perspective of migrants themselves. This paper concludes by providing a short comment on implications of the outcome of the Referendum on EU membership ‘Brexit’ in June 2016 on Polish migrants settling practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Settlement
• settling practices
• EU post-accession migration
• Polish migrants
• Brexit

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Corrigendum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. EU post-accession migrants (also called as Accession Countries) are the citizens of the eight countries that joined the EU in 2004 (Czech, Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia) and in 2007 (Romania and Bulgaria).

2. Excluding those born in Ireland.

3. Work Registration Scheme was a scheme introduced by UK Government between 1 May 2004 and 30 April 2011 for A8 countries. Workers from these countries were required to register on the WRS scheme within a month of joining a new employer.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number RES-625–25-001].