Introduction

This chapter examines a particular example of ‘democratic participation’ within the diverse and heterogeneous Roma communities across Europe – the role of community and cultural mediators. To what extent have various mediation training programmes helped or hindered Romani empowerment and emancipation across the member states of the EU? To address this question requires some critical thinking about an array of strategic and policy-orientated work; the on-going policy/educational activities around mentors can help to shed light on structural initiatives arising out of this significant developmental work (for example, within health promotion as well as in improving access to educational opportunities). In the last ten years there has been significant growth in European funding to promote Roma mediation via the training and employment of Romani mediators in more than 20 member states. Much funding has come from the Council of Europe and its ROMED programmes, which started operation in July 2011. The main areas of attention for such efforts have been employment (Messing, 2014, pp 6–10), health (Open Society Foundations, 2011, pp 37–44) and education (Friedman, 2013, pp 11–12). Mediators, largely coming from a Roma background themselves, now numbering well over 1,000 people across the EU, are employed by public authorities to act as a ‘bridge’ between the wider Roma communities and state agencies and institutions, with a view to promoting ‘culturally appropriate’ engagement with public services. ROMED1 has moved into a second phase, ROMED2, and this is working in tandem with another initiative, the Council of Europe and European Commission joint project ROMACT.

Introduction

What happens when two different, but related, moral panics collide? When prejudice and hysteria join forces? What impact does racial profiling have on those communities who find themselves in the crosshairs of the state? In late 2013, various central and Eastern European Roma (‘Gypsy’) communities living in Britain faced an unwelcome and overtly hostile media spotlight. Politicians openly spoke about needing to ‘change’ the ‘behaviour and culture’ of Roma migrants who were allegedly behaving in ‘intimidating’ and ‘offensive’ ways. Such views were espoused not by marginalised and disgruntled Tory backbenchers but a former Labour Home Secretary (David Blunkett, MP) and the current (at the time of writing) Deputy Prime Minister (Nick Clegg, MP). This moral panic largely centred around themes of integration, asociality and behaviour but also overlapped and merged with existing media and political attention on allegations of Roma being involved in child abduction – initially the case of ‘Maria’ in Greece and two later cases in Ireland. Roma ‘behaviour and culture’, viewed in highly static, essentialist, almost colonial terms,could only do right in doing wrong and was presented as being in direct contrast to equally static and unproblematically reified ‘British values’. At the local level, accusations of ‘antisocial’ behaviour were direct and forceful: mainly around ‘loitering’ on street corners, rubbish disposal, noise, criminal activity and sanitation issues. Tabloid and broadsheet media features appeared targeting mainly Slovak and Romanian Roma communities living in Sheffield, Glasgow and Manchester. Roma people, as an undifferentiated whole, were castigated as the nightmarish, ‘backward’, antisocial ‘neighbours from hell’ that no one wanted to live beside. Although this particular moral panic was fortunately brief, it arose out of a well-established anti-Roma history and tradition and has left its mark on present and most likely future community relations.

Introduction

In recent years, the movement of highly skilled migrants has become an important worldwide issue, as it is assumed to reflect the impact of globalisation on the world's economy and the development of communications technology (Salt & Findlay 1989; Salt 2006; Pethe 2007). Based on the supposition that a high level of human capital is positively correlated with having high economic and social status (Becker 1969), qualified immigrants should be able to be incorporated into the host country's labour market relatively successfully. Yet it seems that the process of immigrants’ socio-economic incorporation into their new country of residence involves greater recognition and translation of possessed qualifications, since their skills have been acquired in different national contexts where the languages, the education system and the labour market differ from that of the host country. The employability and socio-economic status of particular qualified immigrants largely depends on the transfer, translation and recognition of their human capital value (Jones 1996).

Recent Home Office research concerning EU post-enlargement migration from Poland to the United Kingdom emphasised that although almost half of the Polish migrant workers are well-educated (e.g., around 40 per cent of Polish migrants hold university diplomas), they mostly work in low paid and low-skilled positions, including as factory process operatives (19 per cent), kitchen and catering assistants (9 per cent), packers (6 per cent), or room attendants (6 per cent) (Home Office 2008). Thus, recent EU post-enlargement migration from Poland to the United Kingdom is marked by a high rate of human capital wastage, as most of highly skilled migrants cannot make use of their qualifications and skills.

The aim of this chapter is to look at new patterns of migration from Poland to Scotland within the broader context of the migration of highly skilled individuals. By analysing the social processes involved in the economic incorporation of skilled Polish migrants, the key question we seek to address is the extent to which contemporary migration from Poland to Scotland can be viewed as brain waste, brain gain, brain overflow or a brain drain. The notion of brain drain refers to the significant outflow of highly skilled individuals while emphasising that the exodus of skilled migrants slows down economic growth of the sending country due to the reduction of the sending country's human capital (Adams 1968; Benchhofer 1969; Das 1971; Grubel & Scott 1997; Beine, Docquier & Rapoport 2001).