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This paper explores the experiences of recent Irish highly qualified migrants who, having left post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, arrive in post-‘Peace Agreement’ Britain. Our paper contributes to understanding the enduring salience of place and how expressions of identities are framed by specific place-based factors as well as by temporality. We explore how these migrants’ narratives, as ‘successful’ professionals, are framed by complex intersections of historical legacies and changing socio-economic and intra-EU migration patterns. We consider the extent to which residual anti-Irish stereotypes remain, or indeed have re-emerged since the economic recession, and how these negative perceptions may impact on expressions of Irishness. Focusing on accents and other markers of identity, we discuss how Irishness may be constructed through a spectrum of visibilities at different times and in different places. This spatial-temporal perspective may help to go beyond a simplistic, one dimensional ethnic lens by highlighting the contextualities of identities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a long history of migration from Britain to Ireland, but it is rarely theorised as migration. Drawing on historical and contemporary sources as well as ongoing qualitative research, this paper makes visible the extended presence of British nationals, as migrants, in Ireland. In discussing the conflicted geographies of belonging of recent British migrants to Ireland, the paper highlights the ways in which postcolonial and nationalist discourses may suggest boundaries to belonging. However, these boundaries are undermined by the positioning of British migrants as not-quite-migrants in the changing landscape of migration in contemporary Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses transnationalism and integration as processes entangled in the everyday lives of Polish migrants. It acknowledges that the co-existence of transnationalism and integration can present an array of choices and enable migrants to lead a fulfilling life in the receiving country while they continue to maintain a foothold in their original homeland. Yet, it might also create a feeling of disjuncture, discontinuity of relations, and ceaseless negotiation between inclusion and exclusion. It is, thus, important to bear in mind that migration is a process involving individuals with all their unique life experiences, complexities and consequences of their choices, sacrifices, ambiguities and hopes associated with the move. All of these have a profound impact on changes in migrants’ perception of, and attitude to, their place of origin, the specificities of destination setting and interpersonal relations between the two milieux. The empirical grounds for this discussion originate in biographical narrative interviews with Polish migrants in Belfast, Northern Ireland. These narratives portray transnationalism and integration as multiple trajectories, emphasising the co-existence of non-linear relations between the time and the intensity/frequency of migrants’ connections to the two settings. These will be examined using the theoretical framework of interpretative sociology, viewing individuals as constantly engaged in the task of interpretation, which is intrinsically rooted in the processes of interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]