Moving Lives

Narratives of Nation and Migration among Europeans in Post-War Britain

Kathy Burrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351916547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Emigrazione e immigrazione

Immigrants in Britain are often viewed as just that - 'immigrants'. Their experiences as migrants are sidelined in favour of discussions about assimilation and integration - how 'they' adapt to 'us'. This book refocuses debates about migration by following the experiences, memories and perceptions of three migrant groups in Britain: the Polish, Italian and Greek-Cypriot populations. In tracing some of the key themes of migration narratives, Kathy Burrell illustrates that the act of migration creates enduring legacies which continue to influence the everyday lives of migrants long after they have moved. The book is structured around four key themes. The first is the migration process itself. Burrell highlights the important contrast between voluntary and involuntary migration, examining the different memories and legacies of migration. The second theme is the national, (as opposed to ethnic) identities of the groups studied. The author demonstrates how national consciousness survives the upheaval of migration and is perpetuated through the recognition of national histories, myths and traditional rituals. The third theme is a memory of the homeland. The author traces her respondents' memories and experiences of their national territory, focusing particularly on the transnational connections that are established with the homeland after migration. Finally Burrell considers community, analyzing her respondents' experiences of community life and the shared social and cultural norms and values that underpin it.

Chapter 1

Narrating Migration

Introduction: Researching Migration

The sensible place to start with any research into migrant groups has to be with the migration experience itself. Too often migrants are seen only in terms of their immigrant status, with their histories as emigrants sidelined in favour of the consideration of settlement and integration into the host society. For the Italians, Greek-Cypriots and Poles studied here the migrant journey long predates arrival in Britain, and the nature of the migration experience carries a legacy that reaches forward to influence subsequent generations. This chapter focuses on the significance of migration as a process in itself, emphasising the contrasting ramifications of ‘economic’ and forced migration, and providing a context where these two very different types of experience can be compared.

Most debates about migration concentrate on the issue of structure and agency and the relationship between the two. Is international migration a result of macro, structural forces, such as industrialisation, globalisation, even war, or can it be best explained by decisions made at a micro level, with migrants acting as autonomous agents, rationally choosing to move for themselves?¹ Theories of migration have ranged considerably between these two vantage points, moving on significantly from the push and pull model advocated by Ravenstein in the nineteenth century.² Broad discussions of international migration since 1945 have tended to play down the role of individual agency, preferring to place migration in the context of changing market forces and emphasising a new era of mass migration where supplies of migrant labour gravitate towards the industrialised ‘west’ in response to increased economic demands. Stephen Castles, for example, asserts that ‘all of these types of population movement are symptomatic of modernisation and globalisation’.³ Forced migration is used as an example of the sometimes overwhelming role of structure in population movements, highlighting the limitations of individual agency in migration.⁴ Others have gone even further, suggesting that structural forces orchestrate all migrant choices, with forced migration being only an extreme example of the constraints already placed on individual autonomy.⁵ It is clear, however, that approaches to migration need to reconcile these tensions between structure and agency, macro and micro, and concentrate more on their mutual interdependence. To focus too much on one is to neglect part of the story.⁶ Even with forced migration, where outside pressures seem to be entirely responsible for ensuing population displacement, there has to be room to consider individual agency, room to explore the limited decisions that migrants can and do still make. Polish migration to Britain, for example, was inflicted by the outside forces of war and invasion, but the interviews undertaken with Polish survivors of forced migration illustrate that even within forced migration there are signs that some decisions can still made at an individual level, and that some autonomy can be retained.

As this last point suggests, the different methodologies which are used to research migration are themselves relevant to this debate. In this case, where in-depth oral history interviews constitute the major resource, individual and family agency is naturally highlighted. Here the perceptions of the migrants themselves are the focal point, and the main aim of the research is to understand, from the point of view of the migrant, why they moved, what the different influences affecting their actions were, and how they feel about that decision. As Allan Findlay and F.L.N. Li maintain, the best starting point for this type of research has to be with the recognition of ‘human beings as pro-active, socially embedded, intentional agents who influence and are influenced by the social worlds in which they are located’.⁷ With her study of Bengali elders in East London, for example, Katy Gardner has managed to present her interviewees as active agents making decisions within the parameters of the global labour market, but as active agents nevertheless.⁸ In fact, Gardner’s research exemplifies the move away from debates over structure and agency, towards a greater concentration on the lived experiences of migration and how it is subsequently remembered and narrated.

In particular, accepting migrants as agents opens up research into the complexity of decision making that surrounds migration. By asking people about their lives and their reasons for migrating it is easier to recognise that there are often multiple factors behind the decision to move, and that the standard perception of ‘economic’ migrants searching for a better life can often hide other influences and reasons. As Paul Thompson argues, ‘though economic pressures often influence migration decisions, personal testimony reveals the complex weave of factors and influences which contribute to migration and the processes of information exchange and negotiation within families and social networks’.⁹ Keith Halfacree and Paul Boyle suggest that ‘rather than look for one or two relatively self-contained reasons for migration we must expect to find several, some relatively fully-formed, others much more indefinite’.¹⁰ Although Italian and Greek-Cypriot movements to Britain have predominantly been understood in the context of economic migration, the collected interviews illustrated that the decisions taken to migrate involved a range of influences and emotions. As Mary Chamberlain asserts regarding Caribbean migration,

The motive for migration may have had as much to do with maintenance of the family and its livelihoods, with the enhancement of status and experience, within a culture which prized migration per se and historically perceived it as a statement of independence, as to do with individual economic self-advancement. Migrants, in other words, had their own agenda which ran parallel with, but did not necessarily conform to, the demands of international capital and the pressures of domestic policy.¹¹

Interviewing migrants also allows the migration process to be viewed as a journey through time as well as through space, highlighting that although migration is often seen as a definitive break from the past in the life story of the migrant, it is not necessarily accurate to assume that moving is a ‘one off’ event which separates migrant lives into ‘before’ and ‘after’. Halfacree and Boyle in particular argue that a better understanding of migration can be reached if a broader temporal perspective is taken, allowing the whole biography of the migrant to be considered.¹² Consequently, remembering the migration process also becomes important in itself, with subsequent narratives of migration potentially forming collective memories able to either strengthen or fragment group cohesion long into later generations.¹³

More recent research emphasises the importance of this temporal dimension of migration, stressing that alongside the physical action of moving countries there is also a metaphorical and emotional journey to be travelled. Migration, as argued by Nikos Papastergiadis, ‘is an ongoing process and needs to be seen as an open voyage’, not a movement with clearly defined starting and finishing points: the psychological repercussions of migration, for example, always outlast the physical disruption.¹⁴ The ramifications of the voyage of migration for migrant identity have become the focal point for much qualitative research into migration. Migrant emotions and the impact of migration on perceptions of home and belonging are entrenched in migration discussions, from Salman Rushdie’s personal experience of alienation from India and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s autobiographical account of being in ‘the in-between place’, to Geraldine Pratt’s and Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson’s assertions that home, like migrants themselves, is mobile and transportable.¹⁵ In fact, so much attention has been given to the emotional consequences of migration that the ancient and ordinary process of moving away from the country of birth is in danger of being unnecessarily dramatised and romanticised. Migration is not new, nor is it a deviant activity: enough people have moved throughout time to ensure that mobility is a well established facet of human life. Inevitably migration can be an unsettling process, but there will always be migrants who find the whole experience resolutely unremarkable and undramatic.

The Decision to Migrate: The Italian Experience

It is widely accepted that emigration from Italy has been traditionally driven by the search for a better life. Anne-Marie Fortier, for example, depicts the Italians now in Britain as having fled from severe post-war economic conditions, while in their consideration of the Italian population in Bedford, King and King stress the hopelessness of the situation in the south in the aftermath of the war, focusing particularly on the regions of Campania and Sicily that witnessed huge scales of post-war emigration.¹⁶ Poor living standards and economic opportunities in the south were certainly discussed in the interviews as a compelling reason to move away for those who made their living from the land. Marietta, for example, spent a large amount of time in her interview describing the living conditions that her family had left behind in a southern Italian village. In her account, the decision to migrate is made by hard working, capable people, forced to move by economic circumstances:

We didn’t have a lot, that’s for sure. We had two rooms, one you slept in, one you did all your cooking and everything else there. That was it, that was your house really. It was probably only a couple of years before we came to England before we had electricity, otherwise we didn’t even have that … When you work on the land, lets say you get rain when you are not supposed to have rain, the crops are wasted, you can’t sell nothing, so your money is limited … People from the south, they know what it’s like to do hard work, it’s not like now when you’ve got tractors, there people used to have to do things by hand, dig the land, chop the grain, all by hand. And then perhaps the land they had was miles away so they had to cart all their fruits and things back home, with donkeys or whatever. They know what it was like to have the hard work and get no money from the end of it. At the end of it they probably had flour, potatoes, all that to see you through the winter but you didn’t see the cash … When someone has got a family you have got to see how you are going to feed them, that’s why people move. In our villages, if we were all left in our villages we would never be able to live.¹⁷

Although poor economic conditions in the post-war period are closely associated with the south, those in the north were also affected. Gina, who emigrated from Rimini in 1954, was very clear about her reasons for leaving: ‘You’ve got to consider Italy after the war was a great devastation. If only we had been patient, you see 1954 was really, the wages wasn’t enough really, you live week by week, waiting for the next wages’.¹⁸ The sense of regret is clear in her account, as if she is sorry that economic conditions forced her to leave.

The interviewees, therefore, seemed to be comfortable with the narrative that post-war problems in Italy had made large scale emigration inevitable. For those living in small villages migration of any type was considered necessary for economic survival, whether it was to the larger cities or away from Italy completely. When asked if she ever thought about what her life would have been like if she had not have migrated, Marietta replied that ‘I don’t suppose I would have stayed in my village anyway because I don’t suppose we had much to do there anyway. I don’t know, I would probably have ended up in another big city anyway, in Italy’.¹⁹ Emigration was perceived almost as an extension of internal migration, and no greater risk than moving to an unknown region within Italy itself. For Dino, in fact, previous internal migration had not been successful: ‘I thought I had no future at all in Italy. I’m Sicilian. My life went through misfortune, that is my family ended up with nothing and emigrated up to the north of Italy, but I felt it wasn’t for me’.²⁰ Movement outside Italy, therefore, seemed preferable in many cases. According to Guido, living in the large cities of Italy brought its own expense and inconvenience: ‘In a big city like Milan, if you live on the outskirts you have to travel, and for an ordinary worker it is not possible to live in the city because the flats, the apartments are too expensive. So most of the people live outside but then spend a lot of time going backward and forward’.²¹

While Britain was not necessarily an obvious choice of destination, as Terri Colpi points out, the bulk recruitment schemes adopted by the British government after the war were successful in attracting Italian workers.²² Several of the people interviewed came to Britain as part of these programmes, seeing them as an opportunity to escape poverty. Gabriela e...