1st Edition

Socio-Legal Integration Polish Post-2004 EU Enlargement Migrants in the United Kingdom

By Agnieszka Kubal Copyright 2012
    258 Pages
    by Routledge

    258 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book examines how contemporary migrants form and transform their involvement with the law in their host countries and which factors influence this relationship. It suggests a more comprehensive insight into the socio-legal integration of migrants by analysing the interplay between the new legal environment and migrants' existing culturally-derived values, attitudes, behaviour and social expectations towards law and law enforcement. Acknowledging the superdiversity of migration as a global issue, the book uses the case study of Polish post-2004 EU Enlargement migrants to examine values and attitudes to the rules that govern their work and residence in the UK and to the legal system in general. With wider international relevance than just Poland and the UK, this book makes a case for the meaningful employment of legal culture in socio-legal integration research and suggests far-reaching consequences for host countries and their immigrant communities.

    Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Theoretical Approaches to Understanding Migrants in a New Socio-Legal Environment; Chapter 3 Polish Post-2004 EU Enlargement Migrants in the UK: Case Study; Chapter 4 The British Legal Environment in the Context of the 2004 EU Enlargement Free Movement Regime; Chapter 5 Polish Migrants in the British Legal Environment: The Question of Semi-Legality; Chapter 6 The Polish Socio-Legal Tradition; Chapter 7 Polish Contemporary Legal Culture in Comparative Perspective; Chapter 8 Gradual Legality: Changing Behaviour, Changing Attitudes;

    Biography

    Dr. Agnieszka Kubal works at the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford. She is also Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College. She currently pursues research projects in the areas of European migration systems, migrants' legal incorporation and comparative legal culture. She teaches political sociology and socio-legal approaches to migration. She is a member of Migration Law network.

    ’There is much to admire in Agnieszka Kubal’s meticulously researched and theoretically innovative account...The book will be of interest to socio-legal scholars of migration as well as to anthropologists and sociologists tracking mobilities within and into Europe. Moreover, Kubal’s rich and varied bibliography will be an excellent resource for students of the sociolegal aspects of migration everywhere.’ Slavic Journal 'There is a good deal of popular, but usually poorly-informed, commentary on the question of whether and to what extent post-2004 Polish migrants are adjusting to a British way of life. Agnieszka Kubal has lifted this debate to a new level. She does this by skilfully deploying a combination of social theory, the idea of legal culture and a deep appreciation of the dilemmas and responses of the migrants themselves. In depicting how an initial indifference to the law slowly gives way to a complex interplay between migrants' agency and the new socio-legal environment in which they find themselves, Dr. Kubal has made a vital contribution to the general question of how to understand integration in a transnational world.' Robin Cohen, University of Oxford, UK 'By introducing legal culture as a crucial intermediate factor of migrant integration, Agnieszka Kubal has succeeded in offering a new and innovative perspective to the study of contemporary intra-EU labour mobility.' Marek Okólski, University of Warsaw, Poland