Introduction

This quote is taken from an interview in 2007 with a founding member of the Portuguese Community Association in Great Yarmouth. I use it as a starting point. The rhetoric of the New Labour Government of the time emphasised the importance of community engagement to support the integration of a new wave of migrant workers arriving to the UK. In Great Yarmouth, a medium-size seaside town surrounded by agricultural land where many migrants found employment, a community development response was subsequently interpreted as one in which robust community infrastructures such as the community association referenced above needed to be built. This was to ensure that Portuguese workers were empowered to overcome issues of exploitation, discrimination and disadvantage and were able to integrate more fully into local life.

I don't offer a conclusive account of the migrant worker experience in Great Yarmouth in this chapter but, rather, reflect on how community development responses over 10 years have evolved in a deprived coastal town in eastern England. I started working with newly arrived Portuguese-speaking migrants in the early 2000s as a community development worker for a local charity. I have since worked as a neighbourhood manager and then as a commissioner for community development employed through the local council. I have built a range of professional relationships and friendships with migrants over that time. While I possess strong local knowledge and an experiential insight into the migrant worker context in a particular coastal town, I am also mindful of the limits of my own objectivity. So too am I aware of my (in)ability to reflect these experiences, not as a migrant worker but as a White British male, from my own culturally crafted perspective.

Locating Portuguese migration

Great Yarmouth lies on the easterly tip of Norfolk, England.