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Building on insights from Migration Studies and International Relations, we investigate constructions of Ukrainians who arrived in Germany due to conflict-induced displacement during the first year of the Russian-Ukraine war. To do so, we analysed reporting on Ukrainian women in two German major weekly news outlets (Der Spiegel and Die Zeit). Here we take a unique approach – drawing on key points of, and illustrative quotes from, that analysis, and reading them alongside the fictional film Mary Poppins. Doing so helps us understand German discourse around displaced Ukrainians. Specifically, our unique reading of refugeehood and deservingness helps us demonstrate how familiar, yet fictional, stories can be deployed to critically interrogate and better understand real-world extraordinary political responses towards refugees. Overall, we suggest that by analysing representations of Ukrainians through this fictional lens, we contribute to denaturalising 'common knowledge' about displaced people often taken for granted in public discourse and public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state-induced anti-immigration environment and the normalisation of xenophobia in political and media discourses have led to the increased othering of European migrants in the UK through new forms of social stratification, especially since the Brexit Referendum of 2016. For young people who migrated to the UK as children from Central and Eastern Europe, Brexit has represented a major rupture in the process of their identity formation, adding new insecurities in the context of increasingly uncertain rights. Based on a survey with 1,120 young people aged 12–18 who identified as Central or Eastern European migrants, followed by focus groups and case studies, we report on young migrants' everyday experiences of xenophobia and racialisation. We explore the coping and resistance strategies young people used to integrate themselves in these racialized hierarchies. Drawing on insights from emergent theories of racialisation and whiteness, we add new evidence on the direct consequences of these experiences of marginalisation on young people's sense of belonging and their own attitudes towards other ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore queer migrants' social networks and the role language plays in how they negotiate companionship, romance and sex within queer community and diasporic environments. We draw on interviews with 56 self-identified LGBT migrants from Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union living in Scotland, UK. In doing so, we bring into conversation and critically engage with perspectives from queer migration literature and from work on migrants' social networks and language use. In the article, we show how language underpins access to English-speaking and ethnic social circles, and how it is powerfully bound up with emotions, affect and perceptions of social proximity or distance. We argue for the need to move beyond abstract notions of queer or diasporic communities, and for an exploration of queer migrants' sociality grounded in their personal communities, social networks and the language(s) used within them. We argue that this approach can better capture queer migrants' complex identity negotiations and diverse sources of support and belonging, without assuming the primacy of either sexuality or ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on attitudes towards immigrants devotes much attention to the relative effects of economic and social-psychological factors for understanding sentiment towards immigrants, conceived in general terms. In this article, we advance this work by arguing that the context framing immigration concerns leads publics to associate different types of immigrants with different threats. An issue context that diminishes support for one ‘type’ can boost it for another. Evidence from an original survey experiment in Britain supports this claim. Security fears affect attitudes towards Muslim immigrants but economic concerns bear on views towards Eastern Europeans. While concern about crime adversely affects sentiment for East Europeans but casts Muslims more positively, cultural threats have the opposite effect. By shifting the focus onto the qualities of different types of immigrants, we highlight the importance of the target immigrant group for understanding public attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies demonstrating the vulnerability of labour migrants following the recession have focused on unemployment. This article examines how the labour market performance of East-European workers in the U.K. has been affected by the recession by focussing on four possible employment outcomes: unemployment, self-employment, over-qualification and part-time jobs. By showing the relatively low rates of unemployment amongst East-European migrants, which have become even lower following the recession, it argues that the vulnerability of immigrants in periods of economic downturn cannot always be solely measured in higher rates of immigrant unemployment. Labour migrants may be prompted to take jobs (any jobs) below their skills and qualifications, thus suggesting a ‘trade-off’ between unemployment and over-qualification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is mounting evidence to suggest that East European migrants in the UK have been victims of discrimination. Reports of pay gaps point to the possibility of structural discrimination, restrictions on employment operate as a kind of legal discrimination, and politicians and the media have constructed East European migrants as different and at times threatening. The Hungarians and Romanians we spoke with in Bristol also reported some discrimination, albeit in ways that deflected its racialised connotations. But they also denied that they were victims of discrimination. Why would the supposed victims of discrimination deny discrimination? We argue they did this to attenuate, and potentially reverse, the status degradations they suffered as disadvantaged and at times racialised labour migrants in Britain. We examine two discursive strategies they employed to negotiate this higher status. First, they claimed a higher social class status by embracing the meritocratic values of the dominant class. Second, they claimed a higher racial status by emphasising their whiteness and Europeanness. These were discursive attempts to reposition themselves more favourably in Britain's racialised status hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The share of Old and New Commonwealth migrants in Britain greatly diminished between 1971 and 2002. The decline of former colonial Commonwealth migrants occurred alongside the rise of Central, Eastern European and Middle Eastern migrants. This paper focuses on the chances of social mobility of the previously little-studied new migrant groups and outlines the differences in employment patterns between them and UK-born Whites and old migrants. It establishes that huge differentials exist between new immigrant groups in their labour-market participation, employment rates and occupational attainment. The disadvantage of EU10, Eastern European, Turkish and Middle Eastern migrants in terms of their probabilities of being active, employed and accessing intermediate positions cannot be explained by a lack of human capital, and their situation is not likely to improve with time. For migrant women, inactivity rather than unemployment seems the greatest concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science is conducted in an increasingly international domain but it is highly questionable whether scientists have equal chances, both professionally and personally, as opportunities and working conditions vary enormously. Drawing on new empirical research with Eastern European scientists, this article explores the professional motivations of Polish and Bulgarian doctoral scientists who have 'gone West'. We consider the relationship between doctoral training, mobility and labour markets within the broader context of science careers. Conditions that create a 'migration potential' are coupled with doctoral candidates' own professional motivations for moving. Moves are found to be economically driven—not just in the 'traditional' sense that moves are made to earn more—as expenditure on research and development influences the number of positions available and their attractiveness to doctoral candidates. Eastern European doctoral scientists share the same rationales for moving as mobile scientists in other studies: for example, moving to prestigious centres or to access international environments. Although socio-economic factors shape attitudes towards mobility, the actual moves themselves were often down to 'chance' encounters or opportunities, although contacts also played an important role. Our findings indicate that, despite a net loss of researchers, scientists do regularly return to their country of origin for professional reasons and often maintain links there, even at early stages in their careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to contextualise the papers in this special issue, this paper presents an overview and framework for understanding the importance of East-West migration in Europe associated with the EU enlargement process. The new patterns and forms of migration seen among East European migrants in the West—in terms of circular and temporary free movement, informal labour market incorporation, cultures of migration, transnational networks, and other phenomena documented in the following papers—illustrate the emergence of a new migration system in Europe. Textbook narratives, in terms of standard accounts of immigration, integration and citizenship based on models of post-colonial, guestworker and asylum migration, will need to be rethought. One particularly fertile source for this is the large body of theory and research developed in the study of Mexican-US migration, itself a part of a regional integration process of comparative relevance to the new European context. While the benefits of open migration from the East will likely triumph over populist political hostility, it is a system that may encourage an exploitative dual labour market for Eastern movers working in the West, as well as encouraging a more effective racial or ethnically-based closure to immigrants from South of the Mediterranean and further afield. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]