Protecting the honour of the daughters of Eire: welfare policy for Irish female migrants to England, 1940–70

Across the middle decades of the twentieth century, approximately 500,000 people left Ireland for Britain. Around half were young, single females migrating alone. Drawing on archival material in Ireland and England, this paper analyses the ways in which Catholic and secular agencies became aware of female Irish migrants; and how they understood and responded to their needs. Catholic organisations focused on maintaining religious belief and practice as a means of avoiding social problems in migrants. Some female migrants, such as nurses, were considered exemplars of Catholic and Irish femininity. However, female sexuality was problematised when associated with single motherhood, prostitution and cohabitation. The Irish hierarchy expected to lead policy development for migrant welfare. The framing of female migrant social needs within a moral and religious discourse led to solutions prioritising moral welfare delivered by Catholic priests and volunteers. Both the Irish government and British institutions (state and voluntary) accepted the centrality of Catholicism to Irish identity and the right of the Catholic Church to lead welfare policy and provision for Irish female migrants. No alternative understanding of Irish women's needs within a secular framework emerged during this period. This meant that whilst the Irish hierarchy developed policy responses based on their assessment of need, other agencies, notably the British and Irish governments, did not consider any specific policy response for Irish women to be required.     

Uncovering the ‘Virginity Testing’ Controversy in the National Archives: The Intersectionality of Discrimination in British Immigration History

This article explores the practice of ‘virginity testing’ by British immigration officers in the late 1970s through the internal documents of the Home Office held at the National Archives in London. By analysing these documents, we argue that the ‘virginity testing’ controversy demonstrates the intersectionality of discrimination faced by migrant women from the Indian subcontinent attempting to enter Britain in the 1970s. Previous discussions of the practice have focused on either the dimension of ‘race’ or gender as the determining factor behind this invasive procedure, but this article shows that both dimensions are of equal importance in explaining why immigration officers undertook ‘testing’ for virginity during border control investigations. The emphasis within the immigration control system on preventing ‘bogus’ migration informed how immigration officers processed potential migrants and this framework of suspicion allowed the practice of ‘virginity testing’ to occur.     

Re/negotiating “suspicion”: exploring the construction of self in Irish migrants' memories of the 1996 Manchester bomb

On 15 June 1996 the Provisional IRA exploded a 3000 lb bomb in the city of Manchester, home to a large Irish community. This article uses oral history to explore the distinct ways in which two male Irish migrants, both of whom settled in the Manchester area during the post-war period, recall and negotiate their experiences of the bomb and its aftermath. Focusing on how memory production is shaped though interactions between different cultural forms and interior psychic processes, the article uses memories of the bomb to explore how the culture of suspicion generated around Irishness in Britain during “The Troubles” could be productive of distinct forms of Irish migrant subjectivity.     

A comparative study of Caribbean return migration from Britain and France: towards a context-dependent explanation

"The currently dominant element in the labour migration from the Caribbean to Britain and France is a return flow of migrants. This paper focuses on the migrations from the Commonwealth and the French Caribbean to Britain and France respectively. While these migrations are historically similar in origin, subsequent differences in the colonial and immigration policies of Britain and France have resulted in divergent migration trends and experiences. New sources of data are drawn on in this comparative study of return migration to the Caribbean, providing up-to-date information on the size and demographic characteristics of the returnee populations. Equally important to this study is the section of the migrant population who are likely to remain in Europe. The authors argue that a comprehensive model of labour migration would need to incorporate the non-return situation in its dynamic entirety."     

The white essential subject: race,ethnicity, and the Irish in post-war Britain

This article focuses on the history of Irish migrants in Birmingham in an attempt to enhance historical understanding of race, ethnicity and ‘whiteness’ in post-war Britain. To do so, it will look at two Birmingham histories: the Young Christian Workers’ Association’s report on the Welfare of Irish migrants in 1951, and anti-Irish violence in the aftermath of the Birmingham Pub Bombings of 1974. It will consider the extent to which Irish immigrants were victims of racism, what this meant in terms of discrimination and identity, and, in particular, how Irish experiences corresponded to that of black and Asian migrants.     

Blending ‘home’ and ‘away’: young Israeli migrants as VFR travelers

This study explores the nexus between migration and tourism by focusing on the experiences of young Israeli migrants who engage in return-visits to their country of origin. The experiences of the migrants are examined with respect to transnational theory, VFR (visiting friends and relatives) travel and conceptualizations of ‘home’ and ‘away.’ The migrants’ sense of ‘being at home’ is deconstructed in terms of familiarity with place, privacy and situational control, and sociability in associations. The findings of this multidimensional analysis reveal that the young migrants’ experiences of ‘home’ and ‘away’ is transformed across time in accordance with their sense of adaptation in the receiving country. While in terms of familiarity with place and sociability in associations the sense of being at home is weakened considerably, it is actually strengthened in terms of privacy and situational control. These findings stress the complexity of VFR experiences in the context of transnational migration.     

Translocational Irish identities in Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl (2012)

A rural-urban exodus subsequently followed by overseas migration has characterised geographical movement in Ireland. While Irish women have outnumbered men in their diaspora, physical and symbolic identification with Ireland has been decisive to the polemic of Irish female migration. This article explores how real and symbolic contradictions in Irish women experiencing displacement are reflected in Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl (2012). Using translocational positionality as an intersectional research framework, the article reveals the importance of spatiality in the ‘life writings’ of a particular situational subject and its major role in identity construction processes. Furthermore, this article relates the individual biography to the collective and complex construction of identity of Irish women abroad in the second half of the twentieth century. The analysis sheds light on many unvoiced experiences shared by female migrants and discloses key aspects of Irish migration that result in a problematic gendered relation with the land still unresolved.     

Internal migration,group size,and ethnic endogamy in Indonesia

Much of the literature on assortative mating has centred on the social contexts of immigrant‐receiving countries in the West. This article examines ethnic assortative mating (endogamy) against rising volumes and intensity of migration within a multi‐ethnic lower middle‐income country. We used full enumeration data from the 2010 Indonesian Population Census to create a national dataset of husband–wife pairs (n = 47.8 million couples), and five subsets of married couples from provinces with the highest proportion of lifetime migrants: Riau, Riau Islands, Jakarta, East Kalimantan, and West Papua (n = 4.05 million). First, we examined the association between migration, group size, and endogamy at the provincial level. We found a negative association between internal migrant stock and endogamy across 33 provinces in Indonesia. Using endogamy as a proxy of the strength of ethnic boundaries, we have shown that accounting for group size at the provincial level changes the overall ranking of endogamy among ethnic groups. Second, drawing on the subsets of couples in the five provinces with the highest proportion of migrants in their population, we used multivariate analysis to examine how migration status correlates with the likelihood of endogamy at the individual level. Controlling for sex, group size, age, education, and religion, we found that the relationship between an individual's migration status and endogamy varies across the five provinces, reflecting the different nature and history of migration, and the ethno‐religious composition in these regions.     

Workers, migrants, aliens or citizens? State constructions and discourses of identity among post-war European labour migrants in Britain

In this paper, I address a series of questions about migrant identities, assessing the continuities and contradictions between state discourses and those of migrants themselves. I address these questions through the lens of a largely neglected group of migrants, who were recruited by the British State in the immediately post-war period in response to post-war labour shortages. Whereas the recruitment of considerable numbers of labour migrants from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom from the late 1940s onwards is a well-documented part of the response to post-war labour shortages, earlier schemes to recruit people from refugee camps in Germany are less known. In this paper, I focus on women from Latvia, one of the Baltic states, who provide a particularly interesting insight into questions of identity as they both challenge common distinctions and assumptions in theories of migration—they came as independent single women for example. They are also a hybrid category in the sense they were both refugees and economic migrants with no previous attachments to the UK, unlike the other main groups of economic migrants at the time and earlier—Irish and Caribbean people—and the somewhat later migration from the Indian sub-continent. In this paper I show how these women challenged assumptions built into state policies at the time about assimilation and mothering future Britons through a strong and continuing commitment to the recreation of an imagined Latvian community in exile and the refusal of British identity.     

Transnational identities and immigrant spaces of Polish professionals in London,UK

It has been estimated that about 700,000 Poles moved to the UK after Poland joined the European Union in 2004, with London receiving a large portion of Polish immigrants. In agreement with the British perception of migrants from Eastern Europe, the majority of Polish immigrants can be generally classified as labor migrants with close cultural and national ties to Poland. However, Polish migration to the UK also includes a growing group of professionals and social and financial elites who are often overlooked by academic research. This paper analyzes the migrant experiences of Polish professionals and elites in London, and the relationships between their transnational identities and immigrant spaces such as ethnic enclaves, private and social spaces. Furthermore, this paper uses Polish elites in London as a foundation to explore concepts of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, suggesting that global elites can maintain strong national affiliations, and their global ambitions can be fueled by local contexts and standards.     

‘Immigrant games’: sports as a metaphor for social encounter in contemporary Irish drama

This paper explores the use of sport and sports matches in recent Irish plays that feature migrants. Sport and sports matches are recurring tropes in films, prose and theatre works that feature migration to and from Ireland. A form of popular culture and ‘one of the most pervasive social institutions in our society’, sport acts as a catalyst for social encounter and at the same time it can reflect subtle forms of social discrimination. It allows both for inclusion and exclusion of the other: it can be ‘a site for racial tension’ and it can ‘provide the opportunity to exercise a right that does not have to be officially granted by bureaucracies or public administrations and can be engaged in relatively freely’. Through sports, migrants can acquire ‘an opportunity for self-determination and control that may well be lacking in other areas of their lives’, hence the recurrence of sports on the Irish stage.     

Edna O'Brien and narrative diaspora space

Given the persistent presence of migration in the work of Edna O'Brien, it is surprising how marginal a theme it is in critiques of her work. This article explores how questions of diaspora have reached a renewed level of depth and intensity in her novel The Light of Evening (2006) and the related short story ‘My Two Mothers’ (2011). Looking, in particular, at how letters play a central role in the relationships of three generations of Irish women across three countries, it analyses how issues of mother(land), diaspora and belonging are mediated through migrant fiction. It draws on the work of Avtar Brah and Paul Ricoeur to argue that, along with related forms of textuality within O'Brien's oeuvre, letters represent a ‘narrative diaspora space’ which illuminates the relationship between mothers, daughters and writing in Irish migrant experience.     

Discourses of nation among migrants from Northern Ireland: Irishness,Britishness and the spaces in‐between

Narratives of nation and identity are highly contested in Northern Ireland, with allegiance usually given to an Irish nation or a British nation, or located somewhere along a continuum between the two. The negotiation of one's identity along this continuum can become particularly complex once one migrates outside Northern Ireland. Adopting a sense of belonging to or exclusion from an Irish diasporic community is part of this process of negotiation. This paper explores these negotiations of identity among both Catholic and Protestant migrants from Northern Ireland to England. It utilises an oral history archive of interviews with individuals who migrated in the latter half of the 20th century, and focuses on narratives of nation and identity among these migrants. Drawing on the notion of England as a diaspora space, in order to make sense of these narratives, the intersections between diasporic Irishness and different British identities are untangled in an attempt to draw out the spaces ‘in‐between’ two, often polarised, narratives of nation.     

Negotiations of Irish identity in the wake of terrorism: the case of the Irish in Birmingham 1973–74

This article explores the Irish migrant experience in Birmingham during and in the wake of terrorist campaigns carried out in Britain between 1969 and 1975 and attributed to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Beginning with a discussion of the competencies with which Irishness was associated at the close of the 1960s in England, many of which were hinged on a notion of the Irish predisposition towards violence, the article continues on to take the political, cultural and religious “temperature” of the Irish community in Birmingham between 1969 and 1975, and follows on with a discussion of the specific strategies sought out by Irish immigrants to come to terms with the effect of events such as the “Birmingham Bombings” on their daily lives. Principle findings that emerge from the study indicate that IRA terrorism forced the Irish in Birmingham to engage with and adopt a number of distinct linguistic and cultural strategies in the post-1974 period, the cultivation of which indefinitely altered their relationship with Ireland as “home”, their visibility in the public British sphere and their associational patterns and practices within the migrant enclave.     

A place in the sun? Discursive constructions of positive outcomes in post-migration stories in the Algarve

This study argues for more comparative research between seemingly different migrant groups, bringing a new focus on intra-European migration in Portugal by examining and comparing the reasons why migrants from different geographical origins choose to settle in the tourism-based Algarve region. Drawing on data collected from a questionnaire survey and interviews, the study first compares the profiles of two apparently distinct migrant groups – Northern and Eastern Europeans – and goes on to explore their discursive representations of migration experiences. Findings reveal that despite differences in initial motivations for moving to the Algarve, there are similarities between the two groups in terms of what leads them to settle in the region. Among both groups there is a high level of positive place-identity, suggesting that the specific context of the destination place plays a significant role in positive post-migration outcomes, something which is often overlooked in migration studies. Furthermore, the lived and perceived lifestyle affordances of the destination place, especially when discursively compared with the place and lifestyle left behind, are flagged by both groups and lend support to the idea that the role of lifestyle in migration has a wider significance than is usually credited.     

Even ‘Wilder Workhouse Girls’: The Problem of Institutionalisation among Irish Immigrants to New Zealand 1874

Studies of the Irish in New Zealand tend to focus predominantly on sectarian issues and respective ‘identities’. While class is explored to a lesser extent, it is mainly through the lens of occupational status. Overall, migrant poverty and criminality in that colonial setting has received the least attention from historians, because the socio-economic profile of the majority of Irish immigrants was generally of a higher status. This article traces a group of poor assisted immigrants that departed Cork at very short notice in 1874 and examines how some of them achieved notoriety in New Zealand. Using a combination of poor law records, shipping records, newspapers, government reports and criminal statistics, this article traces the fortunes of the single Irish workhouse girls. Irish Poor Law registers can be notoriously tricky to negotiate and present many problems for historians. Periodically Poor Law Guardians invested in assisted immigration schemes and to that end they surrendered groups of migrants. In so doing, the guardians bound individuals by a range of similarities—marital status, social class, fiscal means, age, abilities and gender to mention but a few—and such groups lend themselves to case-study analysis. As prophesised by those who argued against its foundation, the poor law network in Ireland both created and exacerbated many social problems. In many respects, when over-crowding occurred, it offered little by way of training and thus created a stasis for poverty. Building on recent case studies of ‘wild workhouse girls’ undertaken by Anna Clark on the South Dublin Union and Virginia Crossman on a Wexford Union, this research explores the concept of ‘modulation’ used by Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin in the context of migration, whereby migrants were at the mercy of the host community to decide whether they can be accepted or rejected.1 Clark, ‘Wild Workhouse Girls’; Crossman, ‘The New Ross Workhouse Riot 1887’; Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 62–68. This article traces and links the ‘institutionalised’ behavioural patterns of these poor, unskilled, single, young women with indefinite periods of ‘modulation’ in a negotiated space between rejection, vice, incarceration and an existence on the ‘outside’.     

Unpacking the discursive Irish woman immigrant in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newfoundland

From the late 1600s to the early 1800s, Irish migrants journeyed to Newfoundland to take advantage of opportunities in the lucrative Newfoundland cod fishery. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this essay explores constructions of Irish-Newfoundland womanhood as articulated by local British officials, the Catholic Church, and male-centred family history narratives. These discourses located women at the margins of early settlement experiences or rendered them invisible altogether. Yet Irish-Newfoundland women were able to negotiate their own subjectivities within this discursive terrain, finding spaces for identity construction in the disjuncture between rhetoric and lived experiences. Some resided more immediately under the hegemonic gaze and struggled to break free from dominant narratives. But most became essential workers in household fishing production outside the capital of St John's, and their vital contribution as shore crews gave them considerable power and authority both in their households and in the broader community. Performing demanding physical work on stages and flakes (elevated wooden structures) or in gardens and fields, carrying out various economic activities in their own right, they were hardly the unproductive, unruly bodies of British official discourse or the passive flowers of civilisation narrated from Catholic pulpits. And far from being absent from the migration story, they were central players in community formation and the economic life of the island. In this historical context, proximity to/distance from hegemonic knowledge production created variations in identity construction within a group often represented in the literature as homogeneous and powerless.     

Transient dwelling: trains as places of identification for the floating population of China

China has experienced massive rural–urban migration, producing the huge so-called ‘floating population’ (liudong renkou). This article attends to what it means to be thus between places by focusing on the embodied and emotional experience of migrant travel. Each year sees the Spring Festival rush (Chun Yun) with the largest annual movement of people as millions of these rural migrant laborers (nongmingong) return to their homes for the holidays. The Spring Festival rush is marked by huge crowds queuing overnight for train tickets, with throngs of migrants carrying woven bags of belongings and gifts on their shoulders, who end up standing in the overcrowded ‘hard-seat’ carriages of trains. By closely reading some of the poems from the emerging genre of ‘Hired laborers literature,’ this article explores migrants' affective and emotional journeys. It argues that this transit experience is one of the key shared sites of common identification for a migrant population whose mode of inhabitation is through circulation and mobility. It also argues that mobility creates shared experiences characterized by specific corporealities, material cultures, and senses of social stratification.     

Gendered,spatial and temporal approaches to Polish intra-European migration

This themed section brings together five articles focusing on distinct urban sites: Berlin/Munich, Oslo/Bergen, Belfast, Bologna and Barcelona. While there has been extensive research on Polish migrants in cities such as London, this themed issue presents a unique opportunity to explore the experiences of Polish women and men across a range of different cities. In so doing, these articles address key questions concerning implications of the specific structures and opportunities of localities where Polish migrants settle for their gendered everyday life experiences. In providing a short introduction to the themed sections, we begin by introducing some of these questions and consider the ways in which the section can contribute to on-going debates about how migrants experience and navigate place in gendered ways. We argue that gender relations and dynamics are significant to processes of migrant adaptation within particular cities. The ways in which migrants navigate their new locations are shaped not only by institutional structures but also by gendered, classed and racialised power dynamics enacted in and through those spaces. By examining the experiences of Polish migrants across various city spaces in different national contexts, we consider how migrants may adopt particular strategies to negotiate these specific ‘spaces of encounter’.