Kazakh Poles arriving in Poland through the repatriation program still feel a close bond with the country where they were born, and for many of them it is an integral part of their daily existence. Maintaining regular contacts with Kazakhstan (direct or mediated by modern means of communication) and the family left there exerts a constant impact on the repatriates, and shapes their way of life. In this article, I attempt to highlight the actions or lifestyles that depend on this relationship, captured in the course of field research, using the categories of the theory of transnationality in the context of research on migration movements. By placing these activities and analysing them within the trans-local social network operating at various levels, I present a number of factors stimulating and hindering transnational activities. One of the outcomes of these deliberations is diagnosis of how the repatriates’ two-culture potential is put to use.

Ireland has become one of the main destination countries for Polish migrants after Poland’s EU accession in 2004. While much of the literature on Polish migration to Ireland post-2004 focuses on its labour-market element, in this paper we analyse the political participation of Polish migrants. We utilise data from a survey conducted by the Centre of Migration Research (University of Warsaw) with Polish migrants in Ireland which documents low levels of political engagement as measured by voting turnout in Polish presidential and parliamentary elections as well as the Irish local elections and elections to the European Parliament. A lack of knowledge about political participation rights or how to engage in voting is one explanation for the low levels of voting, especially in Irish local and European parliamentiary elections. Another explanation may be the attitude that migrants have towards the political system and how they can influence it. Polish migrants predominantly report that they have no or little influence on politics in Poland and have relatively less trust in the authorities and politicians there (compared to Ireland). The key individual-level characteristic affecting Polish migrant respondents’ electoral participation in Ireland is their (lack of) voting habit formed before migration.

The main aim of this paper is to assess the extent to which the 2016 Brexit referendum impacted on the decisions of young Polish and Lithuanian migrants to stay in the UK or return to the country of origin. We analyse information from 76 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Lithuanians and Poles living in the UK, as well as those who have returned to Lithuania and Poland since June 2016. We find that, for our interviewees, the referendum had little impact on the decision to stay in the UK or return to the country of origin, giving way, instead, to work, family and lifestyle considerations. Only for a select few did it act as a trigger, either adding to other reasons which eventually prompted the return to Lithuania or Poland, or motivating people to secure their rights in the UK and delay plans to leave the country. We conclude by discussing our results together with existing research on transnationalism and life-course migration theory: regardless of interviewees’ decisions to stay or return, these were never final, stressing the fluid nature of migration and the desire of our interviewees to maintain ties across multiple places.

Qualitative migration researchers today often use one or more of three concepts – mobility, transnationalism and integration – to make sense of the complexities of contemporary migrants’ lives. Collectively, researchers identify these as the three fundamental characteristics of migranthood. Being a migrant is about, for example, planning return visits, maintaining (or not maintaining) relations with people in the sending country or being preoccupied with learning to speak the receiving-society majority language. Qualitative interviewing suggests that each migrant is uniquely situated along various mobility, transnational and integration continuums. Migrants have many social identities as well as migranthood and the existence of these other, intersecting, social identities (such as social class, lifestage and gender) helps to determine their location on the continuums: for example, how often they are mobile and how much they can be mobile. The article draws on interviews in Poland with Ukrainians and Polish return migrants to show how (former) migrants conceptualise shared Ukrainian-Polish migranthood along these three continuums.

This paper explores the ways in which young people aged 12 to 18 who were born in Central and Eastern European EU countries but now live in the United Kingdom construct their future imaginaries in the context of Brexit. It reports on findings from a large-scale survey, focus groups and family case studies to bring an original perspective on young migrants’ plans for the future, including mobility and citizenship plans, and concerns over how Britain’s decision to leave the European Union might impact them. While most of the young people planned to stay in Britain for the immediate future, it was clear that Brexit had triggered changes to their long-term plans. These concerns were linked to uncertainties over access to education and the labour market for EU nationals post-Brexit, the precarity of their legal status and their overall concerns over an increase in racism and xenophobia. While our young research participants expressed a strong sense of European identity, their imaginaries rarely featured ‘going back’ to their country of birth and instead included narratives of moving on to more attractive, often unfamiliar, destinations. The reasons and dynamics behind these plans are discussed by drawing on theories of transnational belonging.

Whilst the extant scholarship offers a detailed exploration of why return migrants enter self-employment or engage in business initiatives in general, we know relatively little about their involvement in transnational economic activities which connect the previous destination coun-try with the origin one and how they compare to other kinds of entrepreneurial venture in this vein. This article aims to understand these motivations by using insights from 50 semi-structured interviews conducted with traders of used cars imported in Romania, a mass phe-nomenon in the Central and Eastern European area and beyond. An important result of this research is that entrepreneurs have to consider a multitude of factors in multiple locations when entering the used-car business. The article also suggests that entrepreneurial motivations among used-car traders are not fixed but, rather, can and do change over time.