The Migrants, the ‘Stayers’, and the New Borderlands in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Brexit

Abstract

Borderlands are not easy to define. They can be a physical territory, a territory where communities and cultures meet, or where their ideologies meet; they can also refer to microterritories of one’s identity, and more besides. In the article, we focus on the borderlands created as a result of two overlapping processes: the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit. These two processes have resulted in changes in the way of thinking about being a migrant as well as in their perception of the cross-border relationships with the people in Poland, who are of great importance to the migrants—the stayers. However, most of all we concentrate on the role and position of the migrants and the stayers in the new local (Brexit) and global (pandemic) social circumstances. Among the most important consequences are the creation of the new social and emotional borderlands in this complex reality and reformulating some of the preexisting social boundaries. The main goal of the text is to analyze the Polish migrants' lives in the UK and the stayers’ in Poland on the eve of these complicated social circumstances. We base the analysis on the qualitative research with 13 Polish migrants in the UK and 12 stayers in Poland. We conclude that COVID-19 and Brexit, unprecedented processes of a different nature, at a certain point coincided in time, building their own boundaries and borderlands which now overlap, producing different ways and strategies of navigating these areas.