Crossing borders: migration and survival in the capital's informal marketplace

Major discourses on UK migration tend to be framed by simplistic dichotomies which currently inform policy, media, and public debates: migrants as parasites or providers, exploiters or exploited, victims or criminals. However, our ongoing ethnographic research amongst post-communist populations (PCPs), in particular those from the accession and new accession states such as Lithuania, Poland, Romania, etc., and London's informal and criminal economies reveals a more complex and worrying set of realities. Static boundaries are more or less non-existent as many migrants find themselves, for myriad reasons, constantly traversing the borders between the capital's formal, informal, and criminal markets. This, in turn, requires a constant shifting of identity and status as a means of successfully negotiating passage back and forth across these economic margins. These fluctuations present a challenge to the various agencies within criminal justice and the third sector whose competing agendas are largely based on stable categorisations of migrants.