Rethinking settlement and integration: Migrants' anchoring in an age of insecurity

By Aleksandra Grzymala-Kazlowska

Rethinking settlement and integration argues that concepts well-established in migration studies such as ‘settlement’ and ‘integration’ do not sufficiently capture the features of adaptation and settling of contemporary migrants. Instead, Grzymala-Kazlowska proposes the integrative and transdisciplinary concept of 'anchoring', linking the notions of identity, adaptation and settling while underlining migrants’ efforts at recovering their feeling of security and stability.

Drawing on in-depth interviews and questionnaires with Polish migrants in the United Kingdom and Ukrainian migrants in Poland, ethnographic and autobiographical research as well as the analysis of texts from internet forums and blogs, this monograph demonstrates the applications of the author’s original concept of 'anchoring', and its foregrounding of the combination of sociological and psychological perspectives. Rethinking settlement and integration aims not only to examine the processes of adaptation and settling among today’s migrants, but highlights practical implications to better support individuals facing changes and challenges in new, complex and fluid societies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526136855

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Rethinking settlement and integration

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Rethinking settlement and integration

Migrants’ anchoring in an age of insecurity

Aleksandra Grzymala-Kazlowska

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Aleksandra Grzymala-Kazlowska 2020

The right of Aleksandra Grzymala-Kazlowska to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 3683 1 hardback

First published 2020

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Hanna and Andrzej connecting me to the past, and for Antoni and Stefan linking me to the future.

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Rethinking settlement and integration: a critical and integrative literature review

2 Developing the concept of anchoring: from a metaphor through a sensitising concept to an empirically grounded concept

3 Researching migrants’ anchoring

4 From mobility to anchoring: Ukrainian migrants in Poland

5 Anchored not rooted: Polish migrants in the UK

6 Towards a general model of migrants’ anchoring

7 Insecurities, constraints and inequalities in anchoring

Conclusions: from theory to practical applications?

Appendix: characteristics of interviewees

References

Index

Figures

1 Different types of anchors of Ukrainians in Poland (author's elaboration)

2 Different types of anchors of Poles in the United Kingdom (author's elaboration)

Acknowledgements

The data used in this book was gathered within the project ‘Social Anchoring in Superdiverse Transnational Social Spaces’ (SAST), funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under REA grant agreement No 331421. I am extremely grateful to all my interviewees and those who facilitated my research, such as the Polish Expats Association, the Midlands Polish Business Club, the Polish School in Sutton Coldfield, Polish Millennium House, St Michael’s Church, SIFA Fireside as well as Anna Cielecka-Gibson and Maureen Smojkis. I want to thank the Institute for Research into Superdiversity for hosting the project and all the support of its director at that time, Professor Jenny Phillimore, as well as other friends and colleagues from the University of Birmingham and University of Warsaw, including my collaborators Anita Brzozowska, Natalia Tymoszuk and Iryna Kolodiychyk, who helped me to gather the data in Poland and conduct the analysis of migrants’ blogs and forums. Many thanks to all those who provided me with their comments – the reviewers of this monograph and previous articles, co-participants of the conferences and seminars where my research was presented, particularly: Dr Kamila Fijalkowska, Dr Michal Garapich, Dr Lisa Goodson, Professor Agata Gorny, Dr Marta Kindler, Professor Slawomir Lodzinski, Dr Aleksandra Lompart, Professor Marek Okolski, Dr Konrad Pedziwiatr, Dr Agnieszka Radziwinowiczowna, Professor Louise Ryan, Professor Nando Sigona, Dr Alison Strang, Monika Szulecka and Professor Renata Wloch. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to those involved in the preparation and production of this monograph such as Renata Stefanska, Margaret Okole, Manchester University Press, especially Tom Dark and Jessica Cuthbert-Smith. Some early findings and analysis developed in this book can be found in my published articles, including ‘Social anchoring: immigrant identity, adaptation and integration reconnected?’, Sociology 2016:50(6); ‘From drifting to anchoring: capturing the experience of Ukrainian migrants in Poland’ (co-author A. Brzozowska), Central and Eastern European Migration 2017:6(2); ‘From connecting to social anchoring: adaptation and settlement of the UK's Polish community’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 2018:44(2); and ‘Capturing the flexibility of adaptation and settlement: anchoring in a mobile society’, Mobilities 2018:13(5).

Introduction

Migrant adaptation and settlement constitute a key research topic today, when spatial mobility is a global feature and migrants and their descendants represent a substantial share of European and other industrialised societies (Castles and Miller 2009; Massey et al. 1998). The United Nations (UN) figures – even if treated with the particular caution required in the case of migration data – estimate that in 2017 the global stock of international migrants officially residing outside their countries of birth was over 257.7 million, with 77.9 million living in Western Europe, mainly in Germany (12.2), the United Kingdom (UK) (8.8) and France (7.9) (UN 2017). Although since 2015 public opinion across Europe has mainly focused on the influx of migrants and refugees into Europe, problematised as a ‘refugee crisis’, migration processes within Europe have also attracted attention, giving rise to animated debates and being used to influence voters. An example is the 2016 referendum in the UK on membership of the European Union (also referred to as the EU referendum or the Brexit referendum) and its aftermath, where the topic of migration into the UK from the European Union (EU) was a major feature of the debate in the run-up to the referendum.

In the twenty-first century, migration has become one of the most salient issues on the political agenda of the EU (Castles et al. 2002). The growing diversity of Europe, the issue of migrant inclusion and concerns over the social cohesion of receiving societies, as well as threats of terrorist attacks from extremists associated with populations with a migrant background, have come to be seen as challenges. In response, the EU's Europe 2020 Strategy aimed to address these questions through such objectives as creating sustainable growth, enhancing the rights and security of EU residents, and promoting social cohesion (European Commission 2010) and through commitments outlined in the Global Compact for Migration (UN 2018: 6) including, among others, the goal to ‘empower migrants and societies to realise full inclusion and social cohesion’.

Central in debates over the presence of migrants in Europe is the concept of integration. As Bommes and Morawska (2009: 44) indicate: ‘Looking across Western Europe in the broadest possible way, it is clear that integration has emerged as the most widely used general concept for describing the target of post-immigration policies.’ According to the European Commission's Common Basic Principles for Immigrant Integration Policy, integration has been presented as a two-way process of mutual accommodation by immigrants and host societies that should be facilitated by member states (Council of European Union 2004). The principles stress a need for migrants’ basic knowledge of the receiving society's language and institutions; for host countries’ efforts in education to be aimed at both migrants and receiving societies; for guaranteed access for migrants to state services as well as their interaction with established residents; and for migrants to participate in different areas of life in the host countries – for example, not only through employment, but also through civic and political engagement (e.g. in the democratic process). However, instead of developing and implementing the relevant policies, EU member states rather focus on strengthening migration regulations (particularly pertaining to non-EU migrants) (de Haas et al. 2018), reinforcing different types of borders (Yuval-Davis et al. 2019) and cutting support for integration. This in the context of the decline of the welfare state and the prevalence of the neoliberal paradigm that focuses on deregulating markets and reducing state influence on economies, accompanied by a shift from multiculturalism towards an assimilationist and individualist approach, a growing anti-immigrant backlash and increasing popularity of conservative and nationalist political narratives.

Although migration and integration studies have been developing intensively both in Europe and the United States (US) (Morawska 2008), gaps still remain in knowledge about the pathways of adaptation and processes of accommodation between migrants and receiving societies, including the lack of comprehensive, multidimensional, cross-disciplinary analyses. An in-depth understanding of the mechanisms of adaptation and settling requires more advanced and comprehensive frameworks as well as further empirical investigation, especially in the context of increasingly diverse migrant populations and their migration pathways, and the ongoing wider cultural and societal changes in European societies, with the aim of linking adaptation and settling to the wider processes and to contribute to policy development and a broader social theory.

Along with the migratory processes, all forms of diversity have been intensifying, and growing multiculturalism has begun to take the form of superdiversity in some places (Vertovec 2007), leading to new forms of coexistence but also conflicts, tensions and inequalities. These socio-demographic changes are accompanied by transnational flows, reinforced by the media and cultural transmission (Appadurai 1996). Advances in transport and communication contribute to growing transnational processes, including everyday practices and social ties which span national borders and increase interconnectedness between societies (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004), while at an individual level resulting in migrants’ multiple links with different spaces and more multidimensional identities.

European societies are undergoing processes of individualisation, fragmentation, growing complexity and accelerating socio-cultural and institutional transformation (Fenger and Bekkers 2012; Luhmann 2006), captured by Bauman's metaphor of ‘liquid’ reality (2000) where individuals are prone to experience uncertainty and instability. Previously more coherent cultural systems and traditional social institutions, such as lifelong marriage and the conventional patriarchal family (Popenoe 1993) or institutional religion (Dobbelaere 1999), are becoming less significant, while the shrinking of the welfare state (which earlier provided certainty and security) is coupled with growing economic precariousness and job instability (Kingfisher 2002). In the context of contemporary neoliberal doctrine and flexible capitalism, jobs no longer provide a sense of identity and life stability (Sennett 1998).

Thus, individuals have become more prone to experiencing ontological insecurity (Giddens 1991) and face challenges to the preservation of their integrity (Lifton 1993). In a similar vein, Gergen (2001) notes that the entanglement of individuals in extended networks of multiple but predominantly superficial and temporary social relations is overwhelming and does not help to sustain a coherent identity. This may contribute to a crisis of the individual substantial self that could have provided relatively stable reference points in the complex and changing world. Cohen and Kennedy (2013) also point out that instabilities arising from the nexus of inequalities and globalisation lead to a wider prolonged condition of chronic uncertainty and insecurity permeating all geographical regions and dimensions of human life.

Individuals have become increasingly aware of unavoidable uncertainty and various types of risks, including new risks produced by late modernity (Beck 2006). The decline of the cosmopolitan, pacifist and modernist narratives and welfarist ideologies, accompanied by growing social divisions and conflicts, lead to contemporary anxieties and discourses of insecurity that link the lack of safety to ‘otherness’. This is reinforced by politicians and perpetuated by the media (Lianos 2013) with the ‘new politics of fear’, concentrated on the others, particularly immigrants (Massey 2015). Lianos (2013) argues that competition between atomised individuals, together with the erosion of social bonds in neoliberal capitalism and the vulnerability that ensues, produce a politics of fear where insecurity becomes a kind of mobilising and cementing notion, providing a substitute for social bonds and exploited by leaders and politicians. Vail, Wheelock, and Hill (1999) indicate that this rise in insecurity, contrasted with well-being and safety, is damaging for individuals and communities because it impacts their lives and self-esteem, and generates high levels of anxiety, hopelessness and passivism.

Von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann (1994) stress that in contemporary societies the main counterpoint to order and stability may be not conflict or disruption but indeterminacy, uncertainty and insecurity, only partially lessened by formal organisations, informal institutions and norms. Insecurities concern not only basic needs such as: food, shelter, health and care but also moral questions, social relations, formal institutions and feelings. In response to this uncertainty, different mechanisms are mobilised through individual activity, informal networks, formal organisations or cultural and religious beliefs. Insecurity thus has become a central focus for various scholars who analyse individuals’ quest for ontological security (Giddens 1991), the dilemma between security and freedom (Bauman 2001a), (in)security as a mode of political governance (Lianos 2013), or a sense of security and belonging as a foundation for a society (Donzelot 2013).

However, surprisingly, a need for security seems to be overlooked in migration research despite the fact that migrants face changes, new conditions and challenges to which they need to adapt to recover the feeling of safety and stability in their lives. Adaptation challenges and coping mechanisms are particularly visible in the case of recent international migrants who have to adjust and establish themselves in host countries. Not only do they encounter a new social, cultural, political and material environment, but they must also deal with changes in their lives and navigate in an unpredictable and complex world where ongoing transformations and ‘diversifications of diversity’ are taking place (Vertovec 2007). Thus the psychological perspective should be brought into migration studies more, while the issues of identity and integration – which to date have been predominantly researched in parallel – should be integrated.

This monograph, therefore, examines the efforts of contemporary migrants to establish safety and stability by presenting a new conceptual framework grounded in empirical research for analysing the processes of migrant adaptation and settling. The main goal of the book is to theorise complex, multidimensional and flexible adaptation processes and settling practices among migrants through the lens of the original concept of anchoring (Grzymala-Kazlowska 2013a, 2016). My working definition of anchoring refers to the process of establishing significant footholds which allow migrants to satisfy their need for safety and restore their socio-psychological stability in new life settings.

I claim that the established categories employed in migration studies such as ‘integration’ and ‘settlement’ are not sufficient to understand and examine the ways of accommodation, functioning and experience of contemporary migrants. I argue that my concept of anchoring, developed through research with Polish migrants in the UK and Ukrainian migrants in Poland, might provide a more integrative and comprehensive transdisciplinary approach to analysing the processes of migrants’ adaptation and settling. It does this by linking the existing notions while overcoming their limitations, as well as by underlining the psychological needs for safety and stability and with the additional value of capturing the processuality and multilayeredness of the analysed processes. It allows us to explore people's attempts to recover their sense of relative stability and safety in different settings: while involved in ‘incomplete migration’, engaged in ‘fluid’ mobility, operating in transnational spaces or settling in new societies. My argument will be substantiated against a critical review of existing migration studies literature, combined with relevant sociological and psychological inputs as well as the diverse data from my fieldwork research.

The empirical analyses presented in the book are based on the material gathered in my research conducted in 2014–2015 within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship ‘Social Anchoring in Superdiverse Transnational Social Spaces’ (SAST) at the University of Birmingham. The processes of anchoring were examined and theorised through my research with post-2004 Polish migrants in the UK and Ukrainian citizens residing in Poland. The two case studies represented the major recent migrant groups respectively in the UK and Poland.

Citizens of Ukraine were the most numerous migrants that came to Poland between the end of communist rule in 1989 and 2015, despite generally low levels of immigration to Poland in this period being coupled with substantial emigration (Gorny et al. 2010; Kaczmarczyk 2015a). On 1 January 2015, according to the Office for Foreigners data of the number of officially registered migrants in Poland, 40,979 Ukrainian citizens had the right to reside in Poland out of a total of 175,065 foreigners officially living there. The next most numerous foreigners were migrants from: Germany (20,200), the Russian Federation (10,739), Belarus (9,924) and Vietnam (9,042). In 2015 the vast majority of Ukrainian citizens officially residing in Poland were granted either a temporary residence permit (19,323) or a permanent residence permit (18,637). In addition, 2,761 held a long-term EU residence permit, 97 had a right of residence or right of permanent residence as family members of EU citizens and 161 remained under protection (Office for Foreigners 2015a).

However, the number of Ukrainians registered in Poland in more recent years has increased significantly, reaching 179,154 (out of 372,239 all foreigners) on 1 January 2019 (Office for Foreigners 2019). According to this data, the stock of Ukrainian residents in Poland included: 138,657 holders of a temporary residence permit; 35,169 migrants with a permanent residence permit; 7,172 with an EU long-term residence permit; 239 with a right of residence or right of permanent residence as family members of EU citizens, and 917 foreigners under protection (99 conventional refugees, 387 granted supplementary protection, 6 with tolerated stay and 425 with stay due to humanitarian reasons). This data reflects the fact that in recent years, circular economic migrants have been joined not only by long-term and settlement migrants, professionals operating in transnational spaces and numerous students (sometimes partly of Polish origin) but lately also by Ukrainian asylum-seekers fleeing military conflicts in Ukraine.

According to the Office for Foreigners, while in 2013 Ukrainian residents filed only 46 applications for refugee status, these numbers increased to 2,318 in 2014 and 2,305 in 2015 (Office for Foreigners 2015b, 2016). The turbulence in Ukraine, which started with the Euromaidan demonstrations in 2013, followed by the 2014 revolution, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass, has contributed to the changes in motivations and characteristics of Ukrainian migrants in Poland as well as shifts in their migration strategies. This has also led to the growth of patriotism and nationalism among Ukrainians in Poland and the development of institutions such as ethnic associations.

Despite introducing visas for Ukrainians as citizens of a third country to comply with the Schengen Agreement, over the years preferential arrangements for migrants from Ukraine have been adopted in Poland, including special opportunities to enter Poland for work and study such as offering a simplified employment procedure and special visas for employment in Poland. According to Ministry of Family, Work and Social Policy statistics (2013a, 2015a, 2015b), Ukrainian migrants received 50,465 work permits out of 65,786 issued in 2015 (20,416 in 2013), while in the same year there were registered 762,700 employers’ declarations of intent to hire a Ukrainian (out of 782,222). Overall, the number of these registered documents regarding Ukrainians rose from 217,571 in 2013 to 1,262,845 in 2016 (Ministry of Family, Work and Social Policy 2013b, 2016).

Another special provision allowing Ukrainian citizens to come and reside in Poland is the Karta Polaka (officially translated as the Card of the Pole), which has been granted since 2007 to people of Polish origin who are familiar with Polish culture or/and are involved in promoting it. According to data from the Statistics Poland (2018), up to the end of 2017 234,350 people received the Karta Polaka, mainly inhabitants of Ukraine (44 per cent) and Belarus (48 per cent). In the particular years Ukrainian citizens were the largest or the second largest group (interchangeably with Belarusians) to receive the Karta Polaka (compared to the total numbers of the cards issued), for example: 2010 – 8,720 (out of 19,365), 2015 – 9,533 (24,105) and 2016 – 13,007 (27,464). Ukrainians constituted the largest group of migrants who acquired Polish citizenship (for instance 1,667 in 2013, 1,918 in 2014, 2,012 in 2015 and 1,432 in 2016) as well as the most numerous foreign female spouses of Polish citizens; for example in 2015 there were 573 (with respective Ukrainian husbands of Polish citizens – 142) (Central Statistical Office 2016).

The second case study considered the numerous and diverse population of post-accession Polish migrants in the UK. The accession of Poland to the EU in 2004 and the subsequent unrestricted access for migrants from the newly joined countries to the UK labour market led to the movement of Poles to the UK that was unprecedented in scale and speed, which ‘may well have been the largest voluntary migration between two countries’ over a short time span (Okolski and Salt 2014: 11). As a result, according to the data from the British national census of 2011, migrants born in Poland counted for 579,121 out of all 7,505,010 residents born outside England and Wales (Office for National Statistics 2014). Notwithstanding the difficulty of measuring migration, Poland's Central Statistical Office estimates suggest that the number of Polish citizens staying in the UK for longer