Workers, migrants, aliens or citizens? State constructions and discourses of identity among post-war European labour migrants in Britain

In this paper, I address a series of questions about migrant identities, assessing the continuities and contradictions between state discourses and those of migrants themselves. I address these questions through the lens of a largely neglected group of migrants, who were recruited by the British State in the immediately post-war period in response to post-war labour shortages. Whereas the recruitment of considerable numbers of labour migrants from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom from the late 1940s onwards is a well-documented part of the response to post-war labour shortages, earlier schemes to recruit people from refugee camps in Germany are less known. In this paper, I focus on women from Latvia, one of the Baltic states, who provide a particularly interesting insight into questions of identity as they both challenge common distinctions and assumptions in theories of migration—they came as independent single women for example. They are also a hybrid category in the sense they were both refugees and economic migrants with no previous attachments to the UK, unlike the other main groups of economic migrants at the time and earlier—Irish and Caribbean people—and the somewhat later migration from the Indian sub-continent. In this paper I show how these women challenged assumptions built into state policies at the time about assimilation and mothering future Britons through a strong and continuing commitment to the recreation of an imagined Latvian community in exile and the refusal of British identity.