Being (un)settled as citizens and community: post-2004 Polish migrants, Brexit and the legacy of the Parekh report

Abstract

This article applies the concept of Britain as a community of citizens and a community of communities to the analysis of post-2004 Polish migrants. This concept received its clearest articulation in the 2000 report on The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain chaired by Bhikhu Parekh, which constituted a hallmark of the national debate on multiculturalism. The report is used as an intellectual inspiration to see post-2004 Poles not just as white labour migrants to the UK, but as citizens and community within the multi-ethnic Britain envisaged by Parekh and his co-authors. The discussion draws on a set of qualitative data gathered in the Northern English district of Wakefield following the Brexit vote. The analysis reveals a high degree of local embeddedness of Polish migrants both as citizens and community, which involves civil relations across ethnic lines and the sense of shared commitment. This inclusion is however undermined by the pattern of paid employment, language difficulties and arbitrariness of the Brexit state, which interviewees experienced both as a community and as individual citizens. While following the dialectical frames set by the report, this article expands notions of the boundary of multi-ethnic Britain by putting this ethnic and post-EU enlargement group within its map.