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‘High-Skilled Good, Low-Skilled Bad?’ British, Polish and Romanian Attitudes Towards Low-Skilled EU Migration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Alexandra Bulat
Alexandra Bulat*
Affiliation:
School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), UCL
*
E-mail: alexandra.bulat.16@ucl.ac.uk
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Abstract

A new skills-based immigration system, with a preference for the highly-skilled, is central to UK policy debates in the Brexit context, arguably responding to majority public opinion on migration. Through qualitative fieldwork with British, Polish and Romanian citizens living in two local authorities in England, this paper shows what participants understand by ‘low-skilled’ and how there is broad support of those who ‘contribute’, but are ‘controlled’ at the same time. Migrants’ narratives of downskilling also illustrate why the category of ‘low-skilled’ migration needs to be seen through a more critical lens in research and policymaking.

Keywords

migration policymakingintra-EU migrationlow-skilleddownskillingBrexitF22J08
Type
Research Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 248 , May 2019 , pp. R49 - R57
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

This article draws on fieldwork conducted as part of the author's doctoral research project, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/J500185/1). The author thanks all interview participants, whose names have been changed for anonymity purposes. The author also thanks the two peer reviewers for their constructive comments.

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