This chapter concludes the discussion of imagination laid out in Part 1, examining further the interface between imagination and experience and presenting an explanation for the way in which the migrants understand their post-migration lives. This lays the foundations for the migrants' identity-making practices. Through an examination of the varying ways in which the respondents relate to the landscape, the chapter reflects on the process of getting to know the landscape through experience, stressing that while imagination plays a central role in their expectations for post-migration lives and shapes their experiences, it can also be challenged and subtly transformed through experience. Against this background, the chapter argues that Bourdieu's concept of practice is useful for understanding the migrants' everyday lives in the Lot, allowing a role for their embodied experiences and individual biographies as well as the cultural logic that lay at the root of migration.

Ireland's first major immigration policy statement, Integration: A Two Way Process (2000) advocated the integration of refugees and immigrants into Irish society through employment promotion measures and through addressing specific barriers of discrimination, non-recognition of qualifications and lack of fluency in English. The repertoire of barriers to labour market participation was well known by 2000. Since 2000, various welfare reforms had undermined the welfare rights of many vulnerable migrants. No reference was made to the 2004 legislation that introduced a two-year habitual residence condition for eligibility to many core benefits, including children's allowances. This chapter examines the ‘family resemblance’ between integration goals and social inclusion goals within mainstream Irish social policy. It looks at the legal and cognitive barriers that foster the exclusion of migrants from mainstream thinking about social inclusion. Drawing on the examples of the former asylum seekers who make up much of Ireland's disproportionately marginal black population and of vulnerable migrants excluded from welfare safety nets, the chapter argues that such state-sanctioned contradictory thinking works to sabotage integration and future social cohesion.

The decisive factor which drew provincial communities into the more systematic rescue of refugees was the escalating number of those seeking entry to Britain following the Anschluss (March 1938), the German occupation of the Sudetenland (October 1938), the Kristallnacht pogrom (9 November 1938), the British government's decision to facilitate the entry of unaccompanied children on the Kindertransport (21 November 1938) and the German annexation of Bohemia and Moravia (March 1939). As the sources of emigration multiplied and the Jews of Germany became finally convinced of the permanence of the Nazi regime and the centrality of its anti-Semitic intentions, Britain received around 70,000 refugees, of whom a little over one-tenth reached Manchester. As the number of refugees swelled, the London agencies of support, Quaker and Jewish, in danger of being overwhelmed by the case work and financial commitment involved, applied increasing pressure on provincial centres to share the load.

Manchester facilitated the escape of some 8,000 refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, most of them of Jewish origin, but including also Communists, Social Democrats, Liberals, pacifists and Confessional Christians, targeted by the Nazi regime. This chapter suggests that more would have been rescued by Manchester efforts, if the government had yielded earlier to demands for concessions on the right of entry to the victims of Fascism. But the history of refugees is a compound of ‘ifs’. What this book suggests is what was possible within the circumstances and constraints of the time and within the framework of real events and personalities, before the realities of genocide had made themselves known. In retrospect, of course, nothing was ‘enough’.

Refugee academics and industrialists, trainees supported by Isidore Apfelbaum's ‘private’ operation, German domestic servants placed by the Ladies Lodge of B'nai Brith, the two or three foreign students accepted by the Yeshiva, the two German ‘refugee’ rabbis and the handful of pacifists and Jewish ‘Friends of Friend’ supported by the Quakers represented the only known refugees from Nazism to have arrived in Manchester before November 1938. In spite of an escalating ‘war against the Jews’, many had delayed their departure in the belief that the Hitler regime would be as short-lived as its predecessors or, at any rate, that his anti-Semitism had been no more than a device for the achievement of power.

Stockport was in many ways typical of the many Lancashire and Cheshire towns which during the 1930s were emerging from the years of depression, as dynamic centres of industry with competitive aspirations for modern structures of health-care, education, housing and leisure. Slum clearance, municipal housing estates, a purer water supply and improved leisure facilities were all part of an agenda which Stockport's councillors shared with their urban peers throughout the northwest. It must have been around this time that the idea of providing homes for children gave way to that of providing a refugee hostel. A combination of municipal policy and private enterprise sought also to strengthen Stockport's role as a major market place for the population of rural Cheshire and Derbyshire. Of all these changes, the leading families of Stockport's tiny Jewish community, said to comprise only 350 individuals in 1939, were amongst both the promoters and the beneficiaries.

In the face of an increasing number of refugees reaching Manchester, the Quaker ISC could not justify any more than the Jewish community, what was at best a haphazard response to their needs. On 20 October 1938, the ISC declared itself ‘seriously concerned with the need to help the increasing number of refugees in this country’. The sense of a ‘refugee crisis’ had been developing since the Anschluss in March 1938. The most likely explanation, as it had been earlier in the case of the Jewish response, was pressure exerted from London. In the European capitals from which Kindertransports set out, Quakers helped families find places for their children, took part in organisational work, saw off children whose parents were barred from platforms, accompanied transports to Harwich, and arranged for the children to be met and befriended in London and Manchester.

This chapter draws together the various themes discussed in the book, exploring the intersections between distinction, ambivalence and authenticity. On the one hand, the analysis argues that particular ideologies for living in the Lot underwrite migration and the search for a better way of life. On the other hand, it becomes clear that lifestyle migration has at its core a focus on processes of self-realization. In this respect, it becomes clear that a persistent tension in the migrants' lives originates in the opposing roles played by individual agency and the structural determinants in shaping their migration and experiences of life in the Lot. The conclusion analyses the persistence of the quest for a better way of life. The migrants' ideologies for living are regularly put to the test and authenticated as they engaged in processes of social distinction.

This chapter examines the political participation of immigrants and the role of citizenship in the political integration of immigrants in Ireland. Drawing on interviews with almost half of all immigrant candidates who contested the 2009 local government elections, it considers bottom-up efforts of immigrants to participate in electoral politics since 2004, when two former asylum seekers were elected as councillors in the local government elections. It also examines the institutional responsiveness of Irish political parties to immigrants as voters, candidates, and party members, based on interviews and written responses from each of the political parties in 2003, 2004, 2007, and 2009. Most immigrants are entitled to vote in Irish local government elections, where the franchise depends on residency rather than citizenship.