This strand of research was carried out between January 2010 and October 2010 and focused on 61 interviews with the providers and users of East-Central European migrant labour. The fieldwork concentrated on the hospitality and food production and processing sectors and on case study areas in urban and rural England and Scotland. The aim of this part of the research was to gain an understating of employers’ and labour providers’ experiences of recruiting and employing East-Central European labour migrants. These sectors were selected as the focus of analysis because the Worker Registration Scheme indicates that A8 migrants predominantly engage in these parts of the economy. The project also investigated spatial, sectoral and temporal data from the Worker Registration Scheme. This showed that A8 migrants serve particular ‘functions’ in the UK, producing distinctive geographies of immigration. Explaining the uneven pattern of demand pointed to the differences, for example, between migrant labour deployed in the intensification of agricultural production and migrants used as flexible labour in construction. Analysis of the research evidence resulted in a new typology of recruitment and employment practices and a dynamic model of their spatial impacts. The research also shed light on how migrant labour is perceived and represented by UK employers. Theorisation of the knowledge practices of recruiters sheds new light on how cultural and social processes ‘produce’ and ‘reproduce’ migration geographies. This project explored labour market aspects of immigration flows , specifically A8 recruitment and employment patterns and how these changed between 2004 and the current recession. The research involved 70 interviews with labour providers (recruitment agencies) and users (employers) of migrant labour in the hospitality, food production and processing sectors across four UK study sites. This was complemented with a suite of interviews with policymakers, recruitment agencies and employers in Latvia. Since the accession of the A8 countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary and Estonia) to the European Union citizens from these countries have had the right to freely participate in the British labour market. As a consequence of significant disparities in earning potential, large numbers of A8 migrants have come to the UK, with nationals from these states constituting some of the largest foreign-born populations in the country.

This cross-sectional (one-time) study consists of 61 transcripts from face-to-face interviews with organisations who supply (recruitment agencies) and employ (employers) in the hospitality and food production and processing sectors which were carried out across four rural and urban case study sites in England and Scotland between January and October 2010. Observation units were therefore 61 individual members of organisations that supply (recruitment companies) or use (employers) East-Central European migrant labour in the UK.