Moving to Britain, the land of meritocracy, also means becoming Italian. Participants become recognizable as foreigners, get asked where they come from, and mobilize ethnicity and nationality as categories of practice through which they (and others) navigate everyday conversations and interactions (Ryan, 2010). Mara, introduced in Chapter 2, summarizes the positive associations between Italianness and “beauty”, “cultural heritage” and “life's pleasures”, which emerge from her interactions with Britons and which are experienced more widely, albeit unequally, by participants, as I discuss in this chapter.

She also introduces a contrast: being recognized as Polish would not command the same enthusiasm. Mara concedes that ethno-national distinctions are “clichés”, but also suggests that clichés have real effects in everyday life. Indeed, the racialization of Eastern European migrants is an increasingly well-documented phenomena, in Britain and beyond (Drnovšek Zorko and Debnár, 2021). Eastern Europeans are not only racialized as a homogeneous, ‘problematic’ group, but are also overrepresented in lower-status, lower-paid jobs in Britain and Northern Europe (Felbo-Kolding et al, 2019). By contrast, Italians are overrepresented among managers and professionals in Britain, compared to British nationals as well as other Southern European nationalities (D’Angelo and Kofman, 2017). This does not exclude the possibility of structural discrimination, for example in terms of lower pay (Felbo-Kolding et al, 2019).