The class border: capital, crises and migration

Between 2007 and 2016, there were 1,980,761 (DWP 2018) applications for UK National Insurance numbers from Eastern European ‘Accession Eight’ (A8) country nationals. The experiences of these diverse workers has been the subject of a range of ongoing academic research. This thesis contributes to that body of work by examining the case of Latvian workers in the UK and makes a distinctive contribution using a Bourdieusian approach to the study of the ‘why and how’ people move between different social fields, to leave familiar places and ways of life to re-establish themselves elsewhere. This builds on the work of others (Savage 2015, Friedman and Laurison 2020) who consider habitus and capital in terms of social mobility and class.
Through analysis of in-depth interviews with 22 Latvians living and working in West Yorkshire, I analyse the interrelationship between habitus, cultural, social, and economic capital and field. In doing so, I build on, but also critique, existing studies of migration that utilise a Bourdieusian conceptual framework and advance an account that pays critical attention to the interrelationships between different forms of capital. Further, I argue that digital savoir faire provides significant cultural capital that must be considered along with other capital, as this creates a ‘digitally enhanced migration’ journey. In this thesis, I also address the enduring significance of ‘historical legacy’ as demonstrably important given Latvian migrants’ lived experience of Soviet colonialism and totalitarianism, which Bourdieu (1998) himself documented when discussing Soviet fields and lack of cultural, social and economic capital accumulation.
The thesis concludes that application of a flexible Bourdieusian theory of practice to migratory movements between spatial fields, and a consideration of temporal movements of people from one political economic field to another provides a lens on how habitus is pivotal to mobility ability