“We are here because …”

This chapter draws on “we are here because you were there” as the “overlapping, plural combinations of place, experience and encounter” (Patel, 2022, p. 11) to connect individual Central and East European migration biographies to broader geopolitical arrangements. By tracing the continuity of the “postsocialist” as both a historical condition and affect, it situates these stories alongside the postcolonial trajectories that have shaped the racialised category of the “im/migrant” in the aftermath of the British Empire. The chapter proposes three analogies, “we (postsocialist children) are here because you were there”, “they (other migrants) are here because you were (also) there”, and “we (Central and Eastern Europeans) are here because you were not there”, each of which illuminates different aspects of what Doreen Massey (2004) terms “geographies of responsibility”. At the same time, it identifies identarian investments in victimhood that mobilise the (post)socialist in the service of grievance and racial b/ordering.