A conversation on migration policy and community

I have spent the last two years talking to people about migration. Not in the way that journalists usually mean when they say this — not attending press conferences, reading reports, interviewing officials — but actually talking: long conversations, over several meetings, with people who have moved and people who live in the places they have moved to.

What I have found does not fit neatly into the frameworks that dominate political debate. It is neither the story of seamless integration and mutual enrichment that the liberal centre prefers, nor the story of fundamental incompatibility and cultural replacement that the identitarian right prefers. It is messier, more particular, more human than either.

Let me give you one example, because abstractions do not convey it.

I spoke at length with a man — I will call him Andrzej — who moved from a small town in eastern Poland to Vienna in 2004, when Polish accession to the EU made this possible. He came for work; he stayed because the work was there and because, over time, Vienna became home. He has been in Vienna for twenty years. He speaks German fluently. His children attend Austrian schools. He votes in local elections.

Andrzej does not think of himself as an immigrant, exactly, though he is one by any legal definition. He thinks of himself as a Pole who lives in Vienna — a distinction that matters to him and that he maintains with some effort, returning to Poland regularly, maintaining Polish friendships, following Polish politics closely.

He is also, he told me with considerable directness, not particularly welcoming of more recent immigration from outside the EU. His reasons are not the ones I expected. They are not primarily cultural or economic. They are spatial: he has watched the neighbourhood where he settled change in ways that he did not choose and did not anticipate, and the change has made him feel, he said, like a guest in a place he thought he had made his own.