Perceptions of Eastern European migrants in an English village: the role of the rural place image

ABSTRACT

Since 2004 significant numbers of post-accession EU migrants have arrived in regional towns and rural areas of England to live and work: places that are unaccustomed to large-scale in-migration. These recent migration patterns mean that new intercultural encounters are taking place in a number of provincial and ‘out of the way’ places [Nayak 2011. “Geography, Race and Emotions: Social and Cultural Intersections.” Social and Cultural Geography 12 (6): 548–562]. This article argues that if we are to fully understand the social interactions and practices of exclusion and inclusion between long-term settled populations and migrants in rural areas that are experiencing new migration flows, it is vital to examine such processes at the local scale. The article draws on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including 30 semi-structured qualitative interviews, to explore English village resident's perceptions of Eastern European migrants who live and work at nearby horticultural nurseries. Village residents’ narratives reveal a discourse of migrants ‘fitting in’ with the collectively held place image of the ‘working village’. However, my findings also reveal that, despite this apparent conviviality, a language of invisibility is used to describe the migrants’ presence. Thus, the place image of the working village serves to mask ambivalent attitudes towards migrants and an unequal power relationship that exists between the two groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural English village
• Eastern European migrants
• place image
• perceptions
• invisibility

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the residents of Mayfield, my interviewees and focus-group participants for agreeing to take part in the research. I would also like to thank Andy Smart, Rosemary McKechnie, and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am pleased to acknowledge the support of the ESRC, which funded the initial project through a 1 + 3 Studentship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All place names (except the county of Worcestershire) and given names are pseudonyms.

2 The A8 countries include Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia.