ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out the portability practices and experiences of Polish transnational migrants moving between the United Kingdom and Poland. We offer the first systematic and in-depth study that links transnational regulations, discourses of belonging, and migrant experiences and practices between these two major EU countries at a time of significant political and policy upheaval. We explain and evaluate the ways in which major policy reforms in the UK and in Poland were established through statutory, non-statutory, and informal mechanisms. We examine how mobility is problematized in both cases, but in different ways in Poland and the UK. In particular, we explain the exclusionary, regulatory logics for migrants in our case, which rest on the intersection of migrants’ employment status and income in the UK, and employment and residence in Poland. In exploring the experiences of transnational migrants, our initial findings indicate the adoption of highly gendered and classed strategies to cope with these shifting boundaries of ‘belonging’ and the exclusionary logics embedded in regulations.
