Ethnicity, a form of cultural belonging, is a relatively recent addition to the conceptual vocabulary of history and the social sciences: its first recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1953. For the most part, it has been deployed negatively, applied only to the ‘other’, to migrant and minority groups: in Britain, for example, Englishness has been assumed as a superior non-ethnic norm over and above the ‘ethnic’ characteristics of others. While such usage may be traced back to the Greek ethnos, a synonym of gentile, its current application in the sociology of migration is more historical and inclusive. Eschewing the ‘new racism’ of ethnic absolutism – the process of constructing essentialised groups, of reifying cultural differences as absolute differences and bases for social mobilisation – sociological studies locate ethnic affiliation within a complex interactive process, a socio-historical dialogue between dominant and subordinate groups. Put bluntly, there can be no ethnic ‘other’ without an ethnic ‘us’. Thus, while giving a voice to the other, to previously excluded marginal and minority groups, a focus on ethnicity (as on gender) should also encourage critical deconstruction of dominant formations.

A cultural construction, ethnic identity is defined and projected in two main ways: through opposition to an ‘alien’ other and by the invocation of deep-rooted, self-referential myth. The project of intellectuals and cultural nationalists, this ‘invention’ of ethnicity is outside the scope of this essay. Migrant workers, however, were often the first to embrace the ‘collective fiction’ ahead of the vernacular mobilisation of the people – the crucial transition from Miroslav Hroch's phase B to phase C – back in the homeland. A relational identity, ethnicity seems to have acquired added salience at a distance, strengthened in dialogue between host-ascription – generally in the form of crude labelling and stereotyping – and migrant response. ‘Irishness’, for example, was in part an imposed and host-invented stigma, but was also a creative response, an act of migrant self-imagination to facilitate adjustment to new surroundings.