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This paper discusses race, racialisation and whiteness in relation to Eastern European migrants living in Western Europe. Focusing on Poles in the UK, it examines both Polish migrants' experiences of racism as well as their own investment into racial exclusions of other racialised groups. The paper interrogates how migrants navigate their peripheral whiteness in broader racial hierarchies of Eastern European in-betweenness that are both historically rooted and constantly negotiated. Benefitting from relatively easy access to the UK, Polish migrants occupy at once a racially privileged and racially marginal position that echoes historical tensions around the place of Eastern Europe in wider racial hierarchies of Europeanness. While being white enough to engage in racial exclusions Eastern Europeans are at the same time not white enough to escape racialisation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Poles in the UK conducted between 2019–2020 the paper offers insight into complex racialising practices of Polish migrants when they are both racialised and able to benefit from their position as 'paler migrants' to distance themselves from other migrants as well as 'darker citizens'. It contributes to scholarship on racialisation of East–West movers within Europe, in-betweenness and whiteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For asylum route refugees, the existence and persistence of structural barriers to navigating statutory systems are well-documented. Even when initial barriers are overcome, further transitions may disrupt refugees' lives. One such is the arrival in the UK of family members from whom they had been separated during their flight from persecution. This paper draws upon data gathered using a Social Connections Mapping Tool methodology with reunited refugee families to make three contributions to the field of refugee studies. Firstly, families' accounts of navigating statutory systems confirm the multi-directionality of integration. Refugees' efforts to build and leverage social links proceed differentially across key statutory domains and cannot alone overcome systems barriers that require adaptation on the part of public services. Secondly, our findings contribute to scholarship that critiques the division of social relationships into categories of bonds, bridges and links, and the distinctions made between these based on ethnicity or nationality. Rather, refugees' social relationships are more appropriately understood as a fluid continuum, with their nature and purpose subject to change. Finally, refugee families' descriptions of settling in the UK highlight the influence of time on integration and the importance to refugees of re-building independence in a new country context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper draws on Rosa's three dimensions of the structured phenomenology of time – daily time, longer time, and historical time – as a conceptual lens to analyse the lived experiences and structural framing of temporary farm work in the UK and to address the question: how is it that short-term precarious work remains the accepted solution for agricultural work even under conditions that challenge the status quo. We draw on qualitative research with farmers and workers conducted prior to and during Brexit and Covid-19. We note that farmers and workers alike have found ways to accept and adjust to seasonal migrant labour as a taken-for-granted solution to the pressures of daily farm life. Further, farmers contend that seasonal migrant work is essential to secure the longer-term viability of their farms, while migrant workers' longer-term view involves delayed gratification in a 'dual frame of reference'. Local workers, alternatively, cannot imagine farm work as providing a long-term future. When looking historically at farm life, farmers and workers alike invoke changing epochs, to explain current conditions as the conditions of our times, and thus to deny their own agency. Structural-economic shifts are thus never addressed and other ways of doing things never imagined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While international and national policies, strategies and legislation have been designed to address the problems of forced displacement, they also form a vital role in the discursive construction, governance and regulation of those who have been displaced. This paper critically interrogates the 'UK Safeguarding Strategy: Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking and Refugee Children' to highlight the ways in which unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC) are implicitly constructed as a policy problem. Drawing on Foucault, and using a novel analytic method (WPR) for studying problematisation within policy, this paper moves beyond the policy definition of an unaccompanied asylum seeking child to unearth characterisations that the policy ascribes to this group of children, and in particular the conceptual boundaries established for the way society thinks about UASC. These conceptual boundaries are divisive in nature, including suspicion around routes of arrival to the UK; constructions of risk; and questions about the responsibility of providing care and of being in need of care. The significance of the paper lies in its aim to use the examination of the discursive practices of the UK's Safeguarding Strategy as a starting point to open a broader discussion around how UASC are constructed and governed, nationally and internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses how 'justice' is understood, sought, and experienced by Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) victims/survivors of Gender Based Violence (GBV) within the UK. The key aims of this paper are to explore (a) experiences of GBV for BME victim/survivors, (b) their experiences and perceptions of justice, and (c) factors enabling, or posing barriers to justice, including immigration status. We situate BME women's experiences and conceptualisations of justice within an ecological approach [Hagemann-White, C., et al. 2010. "Factors at Play in the Perpetration of Violence Against Women, Violence Against Children and Sexual Orientation Violence – A Multi-Level Interactive Model (Part of the Feasibility Study to Assess the Possibilities, Opportunities and Needs to Standardise National Legislation on Gender Violence and Violence Against Children for the European Commission – JLS/2009/D4/01." Publications of the European Union, Luxembourg] and within Bourdieu's conceptualisation of 'social capital' [1986. "The Forms of Capital." In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by J. Richardson, 241–258. Westport, CT: Greenwood]. We found that migrant women lack access to vital aspects of social capital, that make access to justice particularly challenging, and that immigration status poses key barriers in migrant women's experiences of accessing justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores whether family transitions among descendants of post second-world-war immigrants are converging towards those of white British young adults by examining family formation expectations among 16–21 year-olds collected within the 2009–2015 waves of Understanding Society. The paper asks: Do current adolescents' cohabitation, marriage and parenthood expectations differ by ethnic group? Are differences similar for men and women? Are ethnic differences mediated by individual or parental socio-economic characteristics? We find that expectations for marriage and parenthood are unanimously high, but that there is greater uncertainty among white British and black Caribbean adolescents as to the age at which these transitions will occur. We find large ethnic differences in expectations for cohabitation, especially for women. There is evidence for a divergence in expectations within the south-Asian community. Second-generation Indians have lower expectations for marriage and higher expectations for cohabitation than second-generation Bangladeshis or Pakistanis. Ethnic group differences remain when religiosity, parental background and individual characteristics are controlled. Further research is required regarding the mechanisms which underlie the differential transmission of family formation attitudes across ethnic minority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores London-based third sector practitioners' engagement with vulnerability in their work with refugee and migrant women during pregnancy and in the post-natal period. Practitioners draw on notions of vulnerability that signal weakness and passivity as a strategy, which enables them to secure resources for the women they support as well as to sustain their own organisational existence in a third sector landscape that has been transformed by a range of neoliberal measures. Despite this invoking of essentialised vulnerability practitioners possess an awareness of how the broader context of women's lives, including government policies and structural disadvantage, acts to shape their vulnerability. The paper argues practitioners' contextual understanding of refuge and migrant women's vulnerability resonates with theoretical approaches that conceptualise vulnerability as an ontological characteristic of human existence. Strategic use of essentialised vulnerability is central to accessing resources, while an ontological understanding of vulnerability as a universal potential activated by socially mediated unequal power relations enables practitioners to address the specific factors that are producing women's vulnerability to harm. Crucially, this includes challenging the effects of the UK government's anti-immigrant 'hostile environment' policy and neoliberal austerity measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the relatively underexplored field of educated first-generation Bangladeshi immigrant women's labour market experience in Britain. Applying an intersectional lens using Pierre Bourdieu's notion of 'capital', 'habitus' and 'field' [1986. "The Forms of Capital." In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John G. Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood] and Nira Yuval-Davis's 'situational intersectionality' [2015. "Situated Intersectionality and Social Inequality." Raisons Politiques 2 (58): 91–100], the paper examines immigrant women's employment barriers and their diverse strategies to deal with the barriers in the UK labour market. Analysing twenty-eight participants' narratives into three categories: (i) Full-time professionals, (ii) Part-time wage earners and (iii) Economically inactive women, the paper highlights how the issue of capital mobilisation affected South Asian immigrant women's employment choices. The participants' situational differences within a complex nexus of unequal capital portability, non-recognition of skills, and their limited familiarity with British cultural capital, family's economy and their lifecycle stages shaped the immediate and long-term choices they could make. The analysis emphasises the necessity to examine contemporary first-generation Bangladeshi as well as South Asian, Muslim women's employment from a capital mobilisation perspective taking into account the situations within which they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are important gaps in our knowledge about children who migrate. Even in societies which employ technologically sophisticated systems for monitoring and measuring migration, data on child migrants are incomplete and focused on specific groups of vulnerable children and young people. The lack of data and research on processes underpinning child migration and on the experiences of children who migrate are rooted in hegemonic Westernised assumptions about, and constructions of, childhood, family migration, and migration in general. Migrant children are represented as passive, needy and different; their accounts of themselves and their lives are silenced through adultist discourses about migration decision-making and experiences. The papers in this special edition of JEMS challenge these constructions of migrant children by focusing on the children's experiences in a multiplicity of migratory contexts. Presented first at the international conference 'Children and Migration: Identities, Mobilities, Belonging' organised by the Marie Curie Migrant Children Project at University College Cork, Ireland, in April 2008, the papers showcase emerging research which challenges the adult-centric nature of migration research and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women in ethnic businesses have often been heralded as a critical labour resource but at the same time exploited and unacknowledged for their significant contribution. This paper considers the role of women in Asian businesses by adopting a very different perspective. The cases reviewed consider family businesses (defined as having two or more generations involved in the ownership and management of the business) and the role of the mother as a mediator between both generations. Previous research on working dynamics in the family business field has focused almost exclusively on the power struggles between the founder (typically the father) and the heir (usually the son). The central thrust of this paper is to explore these working dynamics by focusing on the involvement and subsequent impact of the mother of the successor (also the wife of the founder). The research identifies the mother's role as a critical buffer between the generations, which is generally not recognised, let alone acknowledged by the family members experiencing transition. This paper adopts an unusual approach in its methodology by interviewing the founder and successor only, rather than the mother as well. By following this somewhat unorthodox approach I argue that the involvement of the mother is critical to the business. However, how it is perceived by key family members in the business is even more important as this will determine whether she has a platform to assert herself as an equal party or needs to adopt a dexterous approach in order to balance relations. The paper draws on data collected from Asian family firms based in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper, drawing on narrative analysis of qualitative research with Irish highly qualified migrants in Britain, examines the processes of friendship-making in contexts of mobility. In so doing, I consider what stories of making new friends in new places, reveal about interconnections between selection opportunities but also obstacles, as well as the role of preferences and shared interests. My work contributes to the recent resurgence of interest in place by exploring the salience of proximate, situated, local relationships as sources of emotional support and sociality, even among migrant professionals. Adopting a focus on friendship-making, I seek to go beyond a narrow notion of homophily—defined by an ethnic lens—to understand how migrants draw upon different aspects of identities to forge links and build relationships with a diverse range of people. The paper lies at the nexus of related but distinct bodies of literature—migration, social network analysis and friendship—to explore where, how, why and with who migrants form new friendship networks. I suggest that by connecting these approaches there is potential not only to develop a more thorough understanding of sociality in mobility but also to overcome some gaps within each of these approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to identify whether differences exist in local and national news framing of immigration. Using 12 years (2001–2012) of print media data from 15 Canadian and British print media sources, this article presents the first attempt to look for systematic differences in cross-city, within-country and cross-national framing on the subject of immigration. Contextual variables such as change in the unemployment rate and in the rate of foreign-born within cities and countries are introduced to test the robustness of the findings from a computer-automated content analysis. Findings suggest that, contrary to expectations, there is little by way of systematic evidence that national and local newspapers frame immigration according to different concerns. Furthermore, cross-city news coverage does not vary based on local contextual factors such as changes in the unemployment rate or rate of foreign-born. Indeed, it would appear that there is little evidence to support hypotheses that local coverage attends only to the ‘local consequences’ of immigration such as crime and unemployment, and that national concerns such as border security and broader economic outlook are solely the purview of national media. Rather, there are far fewer differences in the content and tone of immigration framing among print news sources than conventional wisdom might suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The process of deciding who is in need of international protection is well established most western liberal democracies, and has been subject to critical scrutiny for decades. And yet asylum seekers remain vulnerable to serious and ongoing flaws in that system. In this paper, based on research conducted in Afghanistan 2012–2018, Schuster explores a number of shortcomings in the asylum decision-making process, specifically with regard to the rejection of claims from Afghans. The analysis of Reasons for Refusal Letters, allows Schuster to examine the use of key tools in that process (previous cases and country of origin reports). Schuster argues that the current adversarial approach, which seeks to prove an applicant is not credible or does not need protection, undermines the legitimacy of the asylum and risks refusing protection to those in need and or condemning others to years of damaging appeals before they are granted asylum. She concludes by arguing for a shift to a more investigative approach, one that seeks to identify those in need of protection, rather than to keep numbers low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are clear differences in labour force participation rates of women of immigrant origins, both first and second generation, across a range of European countries. Many of these differences, particularly for women with low participation rates, are not fully explained in existing studies. I argue that to better understand differences in labour force participation, and the role of 'culture' in shaping them, we need to take account of the context provided by previous generations of women. While mothers may transmit expectations regarding participation directly to their daughters through intergenerational transmission and childhood socialisation, mothers-in-law may also be important in indirectly influencing their daughters-in-law through their sons' behaviours and attitudes. Using the UK large-scale household panel study Understanding Society, the contribution of this paper is to investigate the 'mother-in-law effect' in the UK. I shed light on the extent to which partnered women's participation is affected by the work status of their partner's mother. I find a positive association between a working mother-in-law and female labour force participation, which remains sizeable after accounting for individual-level characteristics. I also show that Pakistani and Bangladeshi women's participation is more sensitive to the work status of their mothers-in-law than that of other groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in many developed countries, in the UK the unemployment rate of ethnic minorities is higher than the unemployment rate of the white British majority. These differences may be due to a higher probability of ethnic minorities entering unemployment by losing a job, or to a lower probability of exiting unemployment by finding a job. Using Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study, this paper analyses what individual and job characteristics contribute to job loss, what contribute to job finding, and to what extent ethnic unemployment differentials can be explained by such characteristics. For both men and women the results show no relevant ethnic differences in the probability to transition from a paid job into unemployment. Only Indian UK born women seem more likely to transition than white British majority women, while for other groups the small differences are in favour of ethnic minorities. Segregation in occupations characterised by low wages and less stable jobs does not seem to contribute to the higher unemployment rate of ethnic minorities. The main determinant of ethnic unemployment differentials seems to be the longer duration of unemployment for ethnic minorities, which, however, remains largely unexplained after the inclusion of individual and household characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with refused asylum seekers from Zimbabwe and Kurds from Turkey, who have stayed in Britain as irregular migrants, this paper examines everyday lives, strategies and fears. The paper focuses on four main areas: individual experiences of the asylum system leading to irregularity; living as an irregular migrant with the constraints on economic participation and limited housing options; social lives, relationships and community activities alongside the ways in which decisions about social interactions intersect with irregularity and subsistence support; the fears and everyday struggles faced by irregular migrant's living in England, and the ways in which this translates into relationships with place and space. The paper draws out both the commonalities and the diversity of experiences among refused asylum seekers living in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to debates on graduate migration, by discussing graduate migrants' career trajectory development, using structure-agency perspectives to explore career path management in a host country. Drawing on qualitative research with Polish graduate migrants in the UK, it demonstrates diverse attitudes towards career trajectories of those who obtained their degree from home country universities, and enrolled into some form of further education in the host country. This paper outlines three Polish graduate types in the UK, based on the time, type and motivations for further training in the UK. These are: Continuers, Switchers and Late Awakeners. It argues that graduates have become accustomed to life's uncertainties, and recognise the need to take diverse and flexible routes to advance their careers, including further education and various types of employment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on qualitative interviews to explore the educational experiences amongst the UK-born adult children of refugees from Vietnam, Sri Lanka (Tamils) and Turkey (Kurdish). Second generation from refugee backgrounds are characterised by diversity and as a group are increasing numerically. However, little is known about the specificity of their experiences as they have been either subsumed within or have fallen between the research agendas on new migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and the body of research on larger established minorities. This paper sets out to fill a gap in the literature by exploring the perspectives of second generation from refugee backgrounds. We examine the impact of policy-particularly dispersal and mobility-on education, the ways in which inter-generational relations and the aspirations of both parents and their children can be shaped by refugee histories, how schools fail to alleviate barriers to parental participation and racism within school settings, especially-though not exclusively-within schools that are less ethnically diverse. We conclude that the policy context and refugee backgrounds shape educational experiences and aspirations but also significant are the structural divisions that reproduce class and race-based inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cohesion and integration agendas in Britain can be characterised by localisation of 'race relations' responsibilities and the importance of local institutions in shaping neighbourhoods has been acknowledged. However, little is understood about the roles of housing providers in integration initiatives. Indeed, research on housing and race has experienced a lull in the 2000s. Thus, this paper aims to examine how social housing providers negotiate their positions and are complicit in constructing a certain vision of community. It draws on interviews from the ESRC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE)'s work in the ethnically diverse neighbourhoods of Cheetham Hill (Manchester), Newham (London), Butetown (Cardiff) and Pollokshields and Govanhill (Glasgow). The paper makes three arguments: first, that race and ethnicity as facets of 'integration' have been subsumed into broader agendas, yet remain implicit in community building; second, that housing organisation practices are often detached from local meanings of community and prioritise exclusionary activities focusing on behaviour change and, third, that the roles of housing organisations in constructing 'integrated' communities are highly variable and localised, influenced by the history and contemporary dynamics of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the 2001 Census Special Migration Statistics, this paper explores ethnic variations in the propensity to migrate, the effectiveness of net migration in redistributing ethnic populations, and the connectivity between places that results from ethnic migration. London has by far the largest concentration of ethnic minority populations in Great Britain and plays a key role in the national internal migration system. By decomposing the net migration balances of boroughs into those within and across London's outer metropolitan boundary, the paper reveals different spatial processes of decentralisation and dispersal as well as centralisation when comparing ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To better understand the public portrayal of minorities, we propose a new and systematic procedure for measuring the standing of different groups that relies on the tone of daily newspaper headlines containing the names of minority groups. This paper assesses the portrayal of Muslims in the British print media between 2001 and 2012, focusing especially on testing scholarly propositions that Muslims are depicted in a systematically negative way. We compare the tone of newspaper headlines across time and across newspaper type and compare the portrayal of Muslims to that of Jews and Christians. We do not find support for arguments that Muslims are consistently portrayed in a negative manner in the British media as a whole. However, our data demonstrate that headlines in right-leaning newspapers are more negative than those in left-leaning newspapers, and that Muslims are consistently portrayed more negatively than Jews and frequently more negatively than Christians. These findings thus offer a more nuanced understanding of British newspaper portrayals of Muslims than exists in the contemporary scholarly literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the lack of collective political action and engagement in protests and anti-deportation campaigns (ADCs) on the part of foreign-national offenders facing deportation from the UK. Taking ADC guidelines from migrant support groups, and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London, I show that the circumstances of foreign-national offenders, and in particular their own understandings of their removal, appear incompatible with open political action and with the broader work of ADC support groups. The findings presented throughout this paper make the case that foreign-national offenders have conflicting notions about their deportation and their ‘right’ to protest and campaign against it, revealing how perceptions of legitimacy impact not only on how policies are lived and experienced but also on the scope for political action on the part of those who are experiencing those policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite an increasingly globalised world, the effects of ever more restrictive barriers to people's movement result in people developing complex and innovative ways to enter and settle in countries beyond their own. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative research with Latin Americans in London from a range of nationalities and socio-economic backgrounds, this paper examines how migrants across the spectrum of immigration statuses have responded to these restrictions with a particular focus on negotiating irregularity. Through analysing how migrants develop a range of entry, regularisation as well as spatial, economic and social invisibility practices as they arrive and settle, the paper challenges a binary hierarchy of immigration status and subsequent well-being. Instead, it argues that conceptualising these as the creation of webs encapsulates the complexity and dynamism of migrant irregularity as migrants negotiate from above and below. The paper highlights how these webs and practices emerge from below in innovative ways that entail negotiation of fluid migration regimes that structure a wider context of exclusion within which migrants can exercise agency from below. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Developing on Granovetter’s classic work on embeddedness in systems of social relations, this paper proposes the concept of ‘differentiated embedding’ to explore how migrants negotiate attachment and belonging as dynamic temporal, spatial and relational processes. When Poland joined the EU in May 2004, the large flow of migrants to the UK was perceived by many migration researchers as heralding a new form of transient mobility associated with short-term, temporary and circular migration, and high levels of transnationalism. Relatively little attention was paid to how these migrants were integrating in local contexts. Based on 20 in-depth interviews and network mapping with Polish migrants, resident in London for a decade, I examine why participants extended their stay and how their decisions were shaped by interpersonal relationships locally and transnationally. London as a ‘superdiverse’, global city offers place-specific opportunities for building networks and developing processes of embedding. Nonetheless, a focus on networks risks overlooking the wider structural context in which migrants live and work. Thus, I argue, there is a need for a differentiated concept to capture the nuanced interplay of structural, relational, spatial and temporal embedding. This concept not only captures multi-scalarity and multi-sectorality but also levels of belonging and attachment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Western states are concerned about maintaining and securing national borders. Across Europe, one response has been to implement restrictive asylum regimes that prevent ‘bogus’ applicants and grant refuge only to the ‘deserving’. Alongside these concerns, states are eager to encourage socially cohesive communities. One recent tool adopted by the UK government has been citizenship policy, including English language/life in the UK tests and citizenship ceremonies. By drawing upon in-depth interviews with refugees in Scotland (UK), this paper explores the impact of the current asylum regime and citizenship policies from the perspective of individual voices that are often absent from wider debates. It explores how temporary refugee status impacts upon individuals' everyday lives including employment and education, and impacts upon children. The data also question the reasons for refugees deciding to become British citizens (or not) and highlight instrumental reasons alongside less tangible factors such as gaining a sense of security. Taking the discussion forward, the study explores some unintended consequences of immigration and citizenship policies in the UK. The research suggests that not only do restrictive asylum policies negatively impact upon refugees and their integration but also serve to elevate fear and uncertainty, which can unintentionally spur individuals to seek naturalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines narratives of learning and occupational advancement amongst migrants employed in 'low-skilled' jobs, based on in-depth interviews with secondary-educated East and South Europeans living in the London region. Our findings indicate that many achieved varying degrees of professional gratification, progress, and skills development within occupational sectors typically associated with unattractive conditions, limited benefits or opportunities to get ahead. Participants' narratives of achievement expand the relatively limited literature that challenges common perceptions of occupational mobility and professional development as the terrain of the 'highly skilled'. Furthermore, we examine how migrants made sense of their career opportunities and success. We discuss two discourses, centred on 'hard work' and 'creativity' respectively, through which participants challenged and reconfigured traditional 'high'-'low-skilled' divides. Our findings contribute to critiques of traditional understandings of migrant human capital and simplistic 'high'-'low-skilled' distinctions in two ways: by documenting the less visible experiences of learning and career progress amongst secondary-educated European youth who enter 'low-skilled' employment abroad, and by calling attention to subjective understandings of occupational mobility and the new 'symbolic boundaries' around skills, broadly construed, that migrants redrew in their reflections on career progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing rates of interracial unions in multi-ethnic societies such as Britain are notable, and point to significant changes in the blurring and possibly shifting nature of ethnic and racial boundaries. Asian Americans who partner with White Americans are assumed to engage in 'whitening' – both in terms of their aspirations and their social consequences. Yet little is still known about the aftermath of intermarriage, even in the USA. Drawing on this US literature, this paper considers the whitening thesis in relation to multiracial people in Britain, with a particular focus on Asian/White multiracial people. I draw upon the findings of two British studies – one of multiracial young people in higher education (Aspinall, Peter, and Miri Song. 2013. Mixed Race Identities. London: Palgrave Macmillan), and another of multiracial people who are parents (Song, Miri. 2017. Multiracial Parents: Mixed Race Families, Generational Change and the Future of Race. New York: NYU Press) – to explore these questions. I argue that conceptualizations of part Asian people (in the USA) as leaning toward their White heritages are often unsubstantiated, and deduced primarily from one key factor: their high rates of intermarriage with White spouses. Little attention has been given to part Asian people who try to maintain ties with their Asian ancestries. We must consider the ambivalence, tensions, and contextually variable identifications and practices adopted by multiracial Asian people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread practice of transnational marriage among British Pakistanis has often been understood through an ethnic lens, as emphasising the boundaries of ethnicity and reaffirming bonds of kinship to Pakistan. Within British Pakistani families, however, a diversity of marriages may exist, with some siblings married transnationally, whilst others have partners from within the UK. Marriage between cousins or more distant relatives is common, but unions between British Pakistanis are less often consanguineous than those involving a spouse from Pakistan. This paper draws on sibling pair case studies to explore the logics and consequences of contrasting marriage choices: those between kin but crossing international borders, and those within the nation-state but crossing the boundaries of the kin-group. In doing so, we suggest that both 'types' of marriage should be understood as part of wider dynamics of creative contextual brightening and dimming of a variety of boundaries of similarity and difference. Negotiations of marriageability may include ethnic, kin and national boundaries, but very often go beyond them. Destabilising these dominant discourses, moreover, also brings into question assumed correlations between cross-border marriage and broader transnational orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnic minorities in the U.K. are more likely than the white majority to gain university qualifications, but experience worse labour market outcomes on average. This paper compares employment and earnings of British graduates from ethnic minorities to those of white British graduates to analyse whether ethnic labour market differences exist among the highly qualified, and whether they can be explained by differences in parental background, local area characteristics or differences in university careers. These factors account for a substantial part of persistent ethnic differences in earnings, but explain very little of the differences in employment. Compared to the literature estimating ethnic labour market inequalities on people with any level of qualification, we find smaller ethnic differences in employment and almost no differences in earnings among graduates entering the labour market. The results are robust to various changes in model specification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high achievement of British Chinese students in the British education system is established in the official literature and has recently been subject to increased attention and comment; albeit it remains the case that few studies have asked students or their families about the factors contributing to their success. This paper revisits findings from an earlier research project that investigated the extent to which British Chinese students and their parents value education (and their rationales), their experiences of British education, and the construction of British Chinese students by their teachers. The study revealed the ‘hidden racisms’ experienced by British Chinese students, the problematisation of their perceived approaches to learning by British teachers in spite of their high attainment, and the benefits, costs, and consequences of their valuing of education. This article contextualises these prior findings within more recent discourses and debates around ‘Chinese success’, precipitated by increased policy attention to the educational attainment of different groups of students, especially from low socio-economic backgrounds. It argues that these discourses on one hand elevate Chinese successes and teaching methods (in contrast to prior narratives), but on the other they continue to exoticise and ‘Other’ the British Chinese, misrecognising educational practices common among White middle-class parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rejection of free movement embodied in the 2016 Referendum vote created tremendous uncertainty regarding the immediate and future legal rights of EU nationals living in the UK. Drawing on interviews with EU staff and management at three universities, this paper asks how Brexit was experienced by highly skilled migrants in a sector reliant on EU migration, and the ways that employment in higher education buffered staff against its impact. Interviews reveal the ways that the Brexit vote disrupted previous perceptions of life in the UK, creating new feelings of vulnerability in terms of rights as well as public acceptance. Symbolic and practical support provided by management, as well as informal support from colleagues, cushioned EU employees against this shock. At the same time, employee satisfaction with employer response was shaped by perceptions of a neo-liberal turn within the University, with a subset of (primarily) academics expecting more personalised support and political involvement in the Brexit debate. Ironically, at the institutional level, the university with the most neo-liberal employment model was the most concerned and proactive in response to the Brexit vote, due to reliance on ready access to the EU to fulfil contingent labour contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1990s, populist discourse based on anti-immigration sentiments has been on the rise in Britain. This phenomenon reached a peak during the EU Referendum (ER) campaign and shortly thereafter. The ER has been linked to the upsurge in racially and religiously aggravated offences recorded post-July 2016. Polish nationals, who constitute the largest group of EU nationals in the UK, were targeted by many of these incidents. It could therefore be argued that, in the last years, and particularly, since the ER, EU nationals living in the UK have become more 'vulnerable'. To test this hypothesis, this contribution is based on an interdisciplinary project that collected socio-legal evidence to compare the vulnerability of the Polish community in Southampton before and after the ER. The paper draws on vulnerability and psychology literature to differentiate between 'objective' and 'subjective' vulnerability. Our study deploys mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) to test changes in objective and subjective vulnerability among Southampton-based Poles before and after the ER. Our findings suggest that, following the ER, Poles felt significantly more vulnerable, especially in terms of subjective vulnerability, even if they had never experienced overt hate incidents or discrimination (objective vulnerability) before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on an emerging literature that focuses on processes of population change as a means of understanding geographies of ethnicity. It argues that persistent assumptions of segregation being the result of divisive separation of ethnic groups are mistaken. The paper takes a demographic approach, presenting analyses of original estimates of natural change and net migration for eight ethnic groups in Britain over the period 1991-2001, at national and district levels. Major results are the greater significance of natural change than migration for minority ethnic population change, and the accordance of population dynamics with theories of counter-urbanisation and dispersal from areas of minority ethnic concentration. The importance of natural change is illustrated through the presentation of its effects on the index of isolation. The paper concludes that ethnic group population change in Britain can to a large extent be explained by benign and unexceptional demographic processes and ethnically undifferentiated migration patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jewish population living in Britain has commonly been depicted as a 'model of integration'. This paper explores the social and spatial transitions made by the Jewish community over the course of more than a century of settlement and adaptation, with particular reference to Leeds. Using an historical perspective, the paper traces the changing 'place' of Jews in wider society in terms of their socio-economic status and how they construct themselves as a religious and ethnic minority in Britain. Drawing on a mixed methods approach, the paper reveals how Leeds Jews' understandings of community, identity, integration and citizenship have evolved over time. The research uncovers diverse and complex interpretations of Jewishness and integration, which unsettle the idealised notions of community, the straightforward trajectory of adaptation, and unproblematic conceptions of identity embedded in the Jewish model of integration. The paper reflects on the implications of the Jewish experience for current debates and discourses on 'race', difference and social integration in twenty-first-century Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controversy exploded in 2005 over a paper at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers which claimed that ethnic segregation in Britain was increasing, ghettos had formed and some British cities were more segregated than Chicago. The paper asserted that indexes failed to measure segregation and should be abandoned in favour of a threshold schema of concentrations using raw data. These assertions were repeated by Trevor Phillips, Director the Commission for Racial Equality, in an inflammatory speech claiming that Britain was sleepwalking into American-style segregation. The argument of this paper is that the index approach is indeed necessary, that ethnic segregation in Britain is decreasing, that the threshold criteria for the claim that British ghettos exist has manufactured ghettos rather than discovered them. A Pakistani ghetto under the schema could be 40 per cent Pakistani, 30 per cent White, 20 per cent Indian and 10 per cent Caribbean. In 2000, 60 per cent of Chicago's Blacks lived in a true ghetto of tracts that were 90-100 per cent Black. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that the role of voluntary sector bodies in black and minority-ethnic (BME) communities is a missing factor in much of mainstream industrial relations and race and ethnicity debates. There are gaps between trade unions and organised community groups within BME communities. These are significant issues, which question some of the more optimistic analyses of the subject of union renewal in terms of community unionism. The space of BME representation is much more complex and diverse than that discussed in terms of individual worker needs. Questions of representation need to be addressed not solely in terms of formal representation but also of broader understandings of relations and perceptions between actors. This dovetails with the debate on the role of other actors in relation to representation within industrial relations. The paper ends with a discussion of how linkages between traditional and new industrial relations actors such as BME community groups and trade unions are constructed in a variety of unanticipated ways which require an understanding of the politics of BME groups, their regional dynamics and the way industrial relations is viewed. The paper is focused on the experiences of the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the link between self-efficacy and positive affect among resettled refugees (N = 180). We hypothesised that self-efficacy would play a key role in improving refugee wellbeing. Research used mixed methods. Alongitudinal survey with three time points confirmed that higher levels of general self-efficacy were consistently associated with better positive affect at later time points. The reverse effects, from positive affect to later self-efficacy, were not significant. In addition, qualitative interviews with a subsample provide suggestions as to how self-efficacy of refugees might be improved: that is, by improving access to employment and language classes, by clarifying how British social and cultural systems work, including the practical information necessary to navigate daily life, and by providing more opportunities to increase social networks, all suggesting the necessity of a proactive role of the receiving society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While post-2004 Polish labour migration to the UK was underpinned by diasporic spaces instrumental in facilitating social and labour market adjustments, the institutions of the host society such as trade unions also sought to establish links with migrants. The analysis of interactions between UK unions and EU migrants focused on organising strategies and specific provisions such as English language learning. However, the discussion tended to ignore the impacts of diasporic influences, from ethnicity and native languages of migrants to the outcomes of migrant worker organising. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative data, this paper discusses how Polishness, in its ethnic, historic and linguistic manifestations, has affected the internal dynamics of a migrant worker organisation created by a major UK trade union. The explicit acknowledgement of diasporic particularities of post-2004 Polish migrants not only enabled labour organising activities but also shaped the migrant worker organisation from within. The strength of diasporic influences on one hand and the chosen form of union organising on the other created conditions for the development of diasporic spaces within the institution of the host society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores how youth engagement (i.e. organised social participation in a group, club, or activity) can impact young people's interethnic attitudes, via pathways of positive and negative interethnic contact. To do so, it examines processes of interethnic cohesion occurring on a large-scale, nationally-implemented UK youth engagement scheme. Employing a quasi-experimental approach, using pre-test/post-test data on a sample of participants and a (propensity-score matched) control-group, analyses demonstrate that participation leads to positive changes in young people's interethnic attitudes, evident at least 4–6 months after participation ended. This improvement in attitudes is driven primarily by increases in young people's positive interethnic contact, while participation has no impact on young people's levels of negative interethnic contact. However, the impact of participation on interethnic attitudes depends on how much positive contact young people had prior to taking part: young people who joined the scheme with less frequent positive contact see substantially larger improvements in their levels of positive contact which, in turn, drives even greater improvements in their interethnic attitudes. These findings provide encouraging evidence that sites of youth engagement, especially national engagement schemes, can foster intergroup cohesion among adolescents; especially among those with less frequent positive contact in their daily lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from Understanding Society, a large representative survey of UK with an ethnic minority boost sample, to test the association between ethnic maintenance, discrimination and health behaviours, among both foreign born and UK born ethnic minorities. We model the probability of smoking and alcohol consumption on (a) ethnic maintenance measured as a function of friendship composition, religiosity, and ethnic identity; and (b) exposure to discrimination as evidenced by self-reports of ethnic and racial harassment in public places. We find that even after controlling for other structural inequalities in income, education, and geography, there is a positive association between ethnic and racial harassment and smoking for ethnic minority women. We also find that ethnic minority men and women who report stronger ethnic maintenance are less likely to binge drink. While we find similar results for ethnic minority women and smoking, we find no such relationship for ethnic minority men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise across Europe of political parties espousing an ethnic conception of the nation, explicitly opposed to immigrants and minorities, has brought into stark relief the politics of identity. Exploiting multiple identity questions in a large, nationally representative UK survey, this paper investigates the drivers of ethnic and political identity and the extent to which they are similar. It does so for both the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities. Locating our analysis within social identity theory, we consider the role of observed characteristics, including party affiliation, the experience of harassment, and political context in shaping ethnic and political identities. We also show that there are unobserved factors jointly implicated in individuals' political and ethnic identities, which we interpret as providing suggestive evidence of more general political mobilisation of ethnicity. Although individual characteristics have largely expected associations with identity, we find that the local share of UKIP/BNP voters heightens ethnic but not political identity among both majority and minority populations. By contrast, harassment and discrimination shapes minorities' political but not ethnic identity. Contrary to expectations, both political and ethnic identities are stronger among second-generation compared to immigrant minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have found that ethnic minorities in Britain have similar levels of partisan attachment as white UK respondents. However, we find that this hides substantial ethnic differences in levels of partisanship within age groups (minorities are younger on average) and that there is a substantial minority party attachment premium that is greatest for the youngest respondents. Our paper examines the factors that account for the substantial partisanship gap between minority and white UK respondents by the time they enter the electorate. Using waves 3, 5 and 7 (2011–2016) of the Understanding Society youth panel, which follows 10–15 year olds in the UK, we model both the early attainment of party attachment among respondents (the first time we observe them as part of the youth panel) and the subsequent retention of this party attachment up to age 15, or acquisition of party attachment among young people who had no partisanship at the time of first observation. We find that differences in levels of parental partisanship and political engagement are the key factors in explaining the difference in minority and white UK acquisition and retention of party attachment during this critical period of political development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the ethnic dynamics of unemployment and earnings in the UK. Drawing on data from the first six waves of Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009–2014), the analysis shows that ethnic minority members, particularly black African, black Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi minorities, face much higher risks of unemployment and have much lower levels of earnings than do their white British counterparts over the life course. Ethnic minorities are not only more likely to face unemployment, previous experiences of unemployment also carry more enduring scars for them than for the majority group in terms of reemployment and pay. Even with similar levels of prior unemployment, ethnic minorities are more susceptible to delayed re-entry and wage penalties than are their white British peers. The life-course trajectories in unemployment and lower pay, coupled with unemployment scarring, suggest cumulative ethnic disadvantages in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores asylum-seekers' and refugees' experiences of place, social exclusion and social networks, based on a qualitative sociological study. It examines interviewees' constructions of neighbourhoods as excluding or including places and compares and contrasts parents' and children's accounts. Interviewees perceived social inclusion as a number of place-specific factors, including security, access to inclusive local resources and services, and migrants' ability to form supportive social networks. Particular emphasis was placed on social networks with people of the same ethnic or religious identity and other black and minority groups living locally, rather than social bridges with white and majority-ethnic communities. I suggest that parents' constructions of childhood reflect neighbourhood places; children are seen as vulnerable and in need of protection in 'excluding' neighbourhoods, and less vulnerable and relatively independent in 'including' ones. Children valued their independence and mobility within including neighbourhoods, and appeared to develop a sense of attachment to them, suggesting that they may integrate more quickly and fully within British society than their parents. The paper concludes that it is important to understand asylum-seekers' and refugees' experiences of social exclusion and inclusion in relation to their experiences of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the economic, political, social and cultural transnational exchanges of 500 Zimbabweans living in the UK. The paper examines the ways in which motivations for migration and immigration status impact on the type of transnational exchanges that take place between the UK and Zimbabwe, and also among diasporic networks elsewhere. After social contact with close family members, economic remittances form the most regular exchanges. The paper shows the ways in which remittance activities are affected by the structural exclusions, due to government policy, experienced by asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants who are prohibited from working in the regular labour market. However, it also clearly demonstrates that, with the exception of more political activity among those who left Zimbabwe for political reasons, motivations for migration have little impact on the nature of transnational exchanges among Zimbabweans in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the Home Office has adopted a reinvigorated policy of citizenship education and integration towards both new immigrants and settled minority ethnic communities. One of the cornerstones of this new policy is English language, which is seen as a key tool for the successful integration of Britain's diverse communities. This paper is divided into two parts. Firstly, it explores the changing role of English language in the current debates around citizenship, nationhood and belonging. It argues that English language is used symbolically as a cultural boundary marker, which both defines minority ethnic 'communities' and excludes them from the re-imagined national 'community'. Secondly, using empirical research from a recent study on 'Access to Services with Interpreters', the paper seeks to challenge the reification of national and minority versions of 'community' that lies at the heart of current discourses around nation and citizenship. Taking language as a key symbol of 'community', the paper explores the complex contours through which individual, familial, local and collective identities are lived. It concludes that minority ethnic 'communities' are best understood as arising out of systems of localised 'personal' networks which challenge reified and abstract ideas of 'imagined communities' and provide insights into the performance of citizenship and belonging 'from below'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critical examination of various community cohesion and asylum and immigration reports and strategies produced in the United Kingdom in recent years, and culminating in the Home Office's Strength in Diversity consultation strategy launched in May 2004. I argue that, in these various reports and documents, reducing race inequality and integrating ‘new’ migrants into British society take precedence over other considerations, and especially over problems facing the often already disadvantaged White ‘host’ communities that receive ‘new’ migrants through the National Asylum Dispersal Scheme. In this paper this emphasis on asylum-seekers’ ‘integration’ will be contrasted with recommendations found in the Community Cohesion Panel's report The End of Parallel Lives? (2004), which advocates a balanced approach combining the managed settlement of asylum-seekers into ‘host’ communities and the Home Office's emphasis on managing ‘new migrant’ integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been very little research into the effects of urban planning policy and practice upon religious groups amongst the South Asian diaspora in Britain. This paper attempts to make up some of this shortfall by examining the role of urban planning procedure in regulating the location, architectural form and use by Muslims of mosques and religious education establishments in Britain. Birmingham, in the West Midlands, provides the empirical focus. The paper has two parts. The first part is historical and traces the modes of interaction between mosque committees in the city and the local planning authority, focusing principally upon the Birmingham Central Mosque. The second part examines the contemporary situation, using quantitative data on planning decisions and the results of semi-structured interviews with members of various mosque committees in Birmingham. Interviewees were asked to evaluate the responses of the City Council to planning applications relating to their places of worship and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data gathered from the Family Resources Survey to examine ethnic differences in economic wellbeing in Britain. It argues that, although a focus on ethnic variation in income levels is useful, a more comprehensive picture of ethnic economic diversity can be obtained by also taking into account general levels of wealth and assets. This is particularly important in order to obtain a better understanding of how ethnic economic advantages and disadvantages build up over the life-course. It also encourages more attention to be paid to how wealth is accumulated and transferred within families and between generations. The research findings show a complex picture of ethnic economic diversity with some ethnic groups (White, Chinese and Indian) over-represented in the doubly advantaged, asset-rich and income-rich category and a larger number of groups (Black-African, Black-Other, Pakistani and Bangladeshi) who were doubly disadvantaged (being both asset- and income-poor). The paper concludes that the short-term economic position of families in both groups has longer-term consequences in terms of the potential for ethnic economic divisions to intensify. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the seminal research of O'Reilly, Karen [2000.TheBritish on the Costa del Sol. London: Routledge] and King, Russell, Anthony Warnes, Allan Williams [2000.Sunset Lives: British Retirement Migration to the Mediterranean. New York: Berg Publishers] about British citizens on the Costa del Sol there has been a surge in the publication of lifestyle migration papers, books and research. Nonetheless, there is a part of the lifestyle migration process that has been rarely explored: a return move to the country of origin following retirement migration. Research has indicated a broad increase in the number of older British returnees, yet there has been no substantive research on the topic. This paper therefore attempts to fill this gap by using Spanish registry data to examine the number of British retirees since 2009 who have returned to the UK. In addition, the results of an electronic survey to older British people in Spain are presented which suggest that considerable numbers of British citizens aged over 55 living in the Northern Costa Blanca are likely to return in the next few years. These data therefore indicate the relevance of return migration from Spain to the UK as a significant issue to the academic community as well as to British and Spanish policy-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]