Times of Work and Social Life: Bangladeshi Migrants in Northeast Italy and London

Introduction

Migration has generally been viewed as a spatial process (e.g., Boyle, Halfacree, and Robinson 1998, 5), meaning that the role of time is implicit; yet time is also indelibly inscribed into the socio-political constructions and personal experiences of migration and (im)mobility (Cwerner 2001; Griffiths, Rogers, and Anderson 2013). The temporalities and rhythms of migrants’ everyday lives have rarely been studied in detail, especially in a comparative perspective. This article addresses this gap and contributes to the ongoing theoretical debate on the temporalities of migration (e.g., Mavroudi, Page, and Christou 2017). In particular, we use the notion of “rhythm” as an anchoring concept that brings together mobility and the underlying forces that order and disrupt everyday lives and spaces (Wee, Goh, and Yeoh 2020, 111).

We analyze the rhythms of work, family, and social life among Bangladeshi migrant men in two contrasting settings: northeast Italy and London. The link between these two destinations is “onward migration”—the growing tendency for migrants to engage in multi-stage migration trajectories that question the conventional framing of migration as a bipolar move from origin to destination (King and Karamoschou 2019). In our study, we found that many Bangladeshi men who had been living and working in Italy for a sufficient length of time to acquire Italian citizenship (hence, we call them “Italian-Bangladeshis”) undertook a second migration to London, where they and their families joined the largest community of Bangladeshi-origin people outside their home country (Gardner 2002). To be more precise, we focus on Bangladeshi “first-migrant” men who achieved family reunification with their wives and children in Italy, and mainly fulfilled the role of family breadwinners, whether they stayed in northeast Italy or onward-migrated to London.

Our broader theoretical ambition is to demonstrate how an analysis of the temporalities of migration and of migrants’ life rhythms exposes the stark contrasts between capitalism’s different labor regimes in different geographical settings. We unpack this general aim to highlight three context-specific, yet closely interrelated, issues that our empirical evidence seeks to illuminate. The first asks how daily relationships—at work, within the family, and with colleagues and friends—are transformed by onward migration between two very different labor regimes. Male migrants moved from the regulated working conditions of northeast Italy’s Fordist industrial complex and post-Fordist subcontracting small factory units (Dunford and Greco 2006) to London’s highly deregulated labor market and low-wage tertiary sector linked to strong occupational polarization and the “new migrant division of labor” (Wills et al. 2010). The second issue we address compares and contrasts the spatiality of daily life for migrant Bangladeshi men in the “diffuse urbanization” of small towns and industrial villages in northeast Italy (Della Puppa and Gelati 2015) with London’s sprawling mega-region as a “global city” (Sassen 1991). Third and finally, we address the differentiated impact of migration and its temporalities with respect to inter-generational prospects, reflecting the fact that onward migration may be motivated not so much by immediate gains for first-generation migrants but by the future life-chances of the second generation.

This article can be conceptually located with reference to two important trends in the study of global migration. First, Bangladeshi migration to Italy is a good example of Winders’s (2014) “new immigration destinations in a global context,” whereby international migration’s spatial dynamics have shifted from traditional channels and gateways, defined by geographical proximity, colonial history, and trading ties, to new opportunities related to porous borders and more complex migration and life-course trajectories. At the same time, our research material speaks to certain constants in contemporary capitalism, class dynamics, and flexible labor and to the ways in which migrants are inserted into the diversified socio-economic urban fabrics of European and global labor markets. Italy, with its rather lax regime of border control (especially during the 1980s and 1990s), offered Bangladeshi migrants a foothold in Europe.

The second trend in contemporary global migration dynamics to which we contribute is onward migration, which we use as a temporal frame to structure this article’s comparative aspect. There is a substantial emerging literature on this phenomenon, both within North America (e.g., King and Newbold 2007) and more particularly in Europe, where the variety of onward pathways is much greater (e.g., Ahrens, Kelly, and van Liempt 2016; King and Karamoschou 2019). As we shall see, Bangladeshi onward migration to the United Kingdom, as well as being driven by conventional push-and-pull factors, was above all facilitated by many Bangladeshis’ acquisition of citizenship in Italy.

To develop these ideas, the article proceeds as follows. The next section reviews the key intersections of the time–migration nexus, highlighting time geography, rhythmanalysis, and other “timings” of migration. Then we briefly document the evolution of Bangladeshi migration to Italy and the United Kingdom. A methodology section follows and describes the main research technique of in-depth interviews. The article’s empirical heart contains three sections. First, we review participants’ reasons for onward-migrating from northeast Italy to London, which have mainly to do with the “future time” of their children, for whom London is thought to offer better education and career opportunities. The other two sections describe and comparatively analyze the temporalities of work, family, and social life in the two migration settings. In Italy, we find that the legalization of irregular status, family reunion, regular factory work, and an integrated and temporally well-ordered social life within the ethnic community, and to some extent also with local Italians, gave Bangladeshi men in this study a measure of economic security and life satisfaction, but that this stability was tempered by a desire to escape from dead-end factory work and to give their children a better long-term future. By contrast, in London, onward migrants were subjected to a more variable life rhythm, doing precarious jobs at unsocial hours in the city’s ethnicized low-wage economy and making it difficult to sustain a satisfactory family and social life. Hence, their hopes were pinned on the next generation’s future success, rather than on their own less-than-ideal work and social/family life arrangements. The concluding discussion highlights the article’s key findings and elaborates some theoretical implications.

Conceptual Foundations: Time Geography and Rhythmanalysis

As has long been acknowledged (e.g., Malmberg 1997), migratory phenomena unfold in space and in time. Recently, there has been increased scholarly interest in the intersections of time and temporalities with migration and mobility studies (Cojocaru 2016; Griffiths et al. 2013; Mavroudi et al. 2017; Robertson 2015). The theoretical roots of this approach can be found in pioneering writings on time geography by Hägerstrand (1975, 1985), in which he traced time-paths across a range of temporal scales from a single day to a lifetime. According to Thrift and Pred (1981, 277), Hägerstrand’s time geography offered “a discipline-transcending perspective on the everyday workings of society and the biographies of individuals.” Hägerstrand’s engagement with long-distance migration was limited, but his mapping of the “choreography” of daily existence (Pred 1977) foreshadowed our analysis of the temporalities of migrants’ daily lives.

Hägerstrand showed that the individual’s path through time and space is closely related to one or more “projects” in which he/she is engaged, such as the need to secure work or to find a better future for one’s children. Some of these projects are strongly tied to specific places, while others are easily transferable from place to place. Equally important, there are instances when these goals or projects can only be achieved elsewhere, through migration (Malmberg 1997). This latter circumstance applies to our study of Bangladeshis onward-migrating from Italy to the United Kingdom to fulfil the “project” of offering their children better education and career prospects.

Furthermore, Thrift and Pred pointed out how the time-geographic concepts of path and project can provide researchers pursuing a mode-of-production analysis with a concrete means of linking the workings of economic systems with the everyday social activities and relations of people (1981, 279). Pred’s (1981) study of the individual life consequences of the rise of factory and workshop production in nineteenth-century US cities is a good example, as is Glennie and Thrift’s (2009) more detailed historical analysis of the evolution of “clock time” and “social discipline” in “shaping the day” in England and Wales. Building on the pioneering paper by E.P. Thomson (1967) on time, work discipline, and industrial capitalism, their use of time geography provided new insights into the ways in which tightly synchronized production regimes imposed “time discipline” and led to a modification in the nature of family and social life.

Returning to Hägerstrand’s work, his semi-autobiographical 1982 paper, based on recollections of his early life in a Swedish village, recalled the community’s “halting rhythmicity”—the daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms of farmers tending their fields and animals; the village foundry and metal workshop, with its daily ebb and flow of workers; the school with its own daily and holiday rhythms; and the aural rhythms of the timetabled passing of trains and tolling of church bells. This attention to the intimate workings of time across the rhythm of a community clearly resonates with Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, even if the two authors did not cross-reference each other. In the subtitle to his book Rhythmanalysis, “Space, Time and Everyday Life,” Lefebvre (2004), for example, signals his project’s potential, which is “the interrelation of understandings of space and time in the comprehension of everyday life” (Elden 2004, vii). Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis says little about migration per se, but scholars studying migration and its associated mobilities have recently begun to apply his typology of rhythms to real-life situations of migrants and mobile people, including young people and students (Marcu 2017), domestic and care workers (Wee et al. 2020), rural farm laborers (Reid-Musson 2018), and to various spatial settings, including islands (King and Lulle 2015) and borders (Novak 2017).

The examples given earlier demonstrate a fundamental principle of rhythmanalysis: the triadic relationship between space/place, time, and energy that sets people in motion. Their movements are not casual or random; they are driven by the dictates of work, family relations, social life, emotions, the desire to travel, and so on. As Edensor (2010) points out, places and spaces become distinctive through their ensemble of intersecting rhythms—polyrhythms in Lefebvre’s typology (2004, 67–68). A typical polyrhythmic setting would be the home-village observed by Hägerstrand (1982): a somewhat bucolic and timeless beat of several spatio-temporal and aural rhythms apparently in harmony with one another. Where the system is in stable good health, Lefebvre describes it as eurythmic. However, when the various rhythms of work, family, community, and so on are discordant, we arrive at a state of arrhythmia, of malfunction or breakdown.

Acknowledging that, especially in Anglo-American critical social science, an “academic industry” on Lefebvre has developed (Kipfer et al. 2008, 5), we note that Rhythmanalysis, possibly the most eccentric of Lefebvre’s many books, is rooted in the author’s Marxist critique of capitalism, particularly his interlinked and wide-ranging analyses of labor relations, class, urbanization, space, time, and everyday life (see Lefebvre’s main English translations: 1991, 1996, 2014). Across his writings, Lefebvre was concerned with the relationship between the capitalist system and individuals’ daily lives (Elden 2004, xv). As he stated in no uncertain terms (Lefebvre 2004, 51–55),

Capitalism makes masters and slaves, the rich and the poor, the propertied and the proletariat…. Capital has something more than maliciousness…. It kills nature…. It kills the town…it kills artistic creation…. It delocates humans…. Capital kills social richness. It produces private richness…. The rhythm [of] capital is the rhythm of producing (everything: things, people) and destroying (through speculation…brutal intervention etc.).

Bangladeshis in Italy and London: Migrants and Citizens

This article’s comparative analysis of Bangladeshi migrant men’s work experiences and social lives in two distinct spatio-temporal contexts is not a conventional bilateral comparison between parallel migration streams issuing contemporaneously from a common source. Instead, the presence of Bangladeshi-origin migrants in the two destinations arises through more complex historical temporalities produced by onward migration. We, therefore, undertake the diachronic analysis of changes in the rhythms of everyday life—which take shape from the interweaving of family and migratory cycles—observed at different times within participants’ biographies.

London’s Bangladeshi community has a long history. ¹ Initial rapid growth occurred in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when Bengali seamen recruited by the East India Company from Sylhet, then in British India, began settling in East London’s dockyard areas. The community expanded further in the early post-war decades, stimulated by the 1948 Nationality Act, which permitted free entry to the United Kingom for citizens of the (former) colonies. At this stage, most Bangladeshi migrants in London were single men. A new phase started in the 1960s, however, when laws were passed to control new immigration—notably, the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 and the Immigration Act of 1971. As a result of this legislative shift, most Bangladeshis in the United Kingdom opted to stay and, as British citizens, pursued a strategy of marriage migration or, if already married, of family reunification (Gardner 2006). By the 2011 British census, the Bangladeshi-origin community in the United Kingdom numbered 447,200, with half this number resident in London (Zeitlyn 2016).

Bangladeshi migration to Italy is much more recent (Priori 2012) and illustrates how, after the 1980s, new “gateways” into Europe opened up for migrants coming from “non-traditional” origins—sending countries with no prior links through colonial history or language affinity to the destination country. In the connection between Bangladesh and Italy, the supply chain lay not in Sylhet and seamen, but in central Bangladesh, including the capital Dhaka, and urban middle-class migrants (Knights and King 1998). The first Bangladeshi immigrants to Italy arrived in the 1980s, due to the closure of borders of other European countries (Priori 2012), making this migration “opportunistic” (King and Knights 1994). Hence, not only did “new” migrants arrive from Bangladesh, but also Bangladeshis already living in other European countries, notably France and Germany, came to Italy, pulled by the attraction of periodic amnesties for irregular migrants to legalize their status. It is important to highlight that the first wave of Bangladeshis arriving in Italy was almost entirely composed of men. Therefore, subsequent family reunions were configured exclusively as “male-led” reunifications (Priori 2012).

During the 1980s and 1990s, Bangladeshi migrants to Italy were heavily concentrated in Rome, where they worked in the city’s extensive informal economy as street-hawkers or in catering and other tourism-related services (Knights and King 1998). Subsequently, having obtained legal residence through one of Italy’s amnesties, migrants dispersed to other parts of the country, especially the prosperous northeast, where they found factory work and affordable housing and created their own “bangla-towns” (Della Puppa and Gelati 2015). By 2016, the Bangladeshi community in Italy had grown to 122,400, with major concentrations in Rome and the Veneto region (Centro Studi e Ricerche IDOS 2017).

Thanks to their employment as factory workers in northeast Italy’s then-thriving industrial districts and to relatively spacious housing available for rent or mortgage (granted by banks on the basis of stable employment), Bangladeshi men met the criteria for family reunification or marriage migration. However, family reunification had sharply gendered emotional meanings. While already-settled Bangladeshi men were able to (re)construct their emotional universe of family togetherness by bringing their wives and children to Italy, for the reuniting women, it was an “imposed” migration that forced them to abandon their kinship and relational networks in Bangladesh and to suffer the social and emotional downgrading of South-to-North “trailing spouse” or arranged marriage migration (Della Puppa 2018).

Given the gendered nature of Bangladeshi migration to Italy, Bangladeshi men were the first to become eligible, after 10 years of continuous residence, for Italian citizenship, which could then also be claimed by their wives and children (Della Puppa and Sredanovic 2017). For some Bangladeshis, possession of an Italian passport represented the last stage in their attempt to stabilize themselves in Italy. For others, it was a strategic step to further mobility, since, as European Union (EU) citizens, they could relocate anywhere within EU territory. Our interviews with community leaders indicate that the vast majority who onward-migrate from Italy go toward the United Kingdom, for reasons that will be clarified presently. According to estimates of the Bangladeshi Embassy in Italy, about 6,000 Italian-Bangladeshi families have moved to the United Kingdom since the early 2010s. Counting each family as four members, this number (24,000) represents a not-insignificant share of all Bangladeshis enumerated in Italy (122,400).

Onward migration to the United Kingdom started around 2010, spurred by the temporal coincidence of several factors (Della Puppa and Sredanovic 2017). First, many first-generation Bangladeshis and their families acquired Italian citizenship around this time, giving them a “European” passport. Second, in this period, the economic crisis took hold in Italy; job opportunities were squeezed by factory closures and their negative impact on northeast Italy’s regional economy (Sacchetto and Vianello 2016; Veneto Lavoro 2012; 2014). Third, Bangladeshi families saw a grim future for their children in an Italy afflicted not only by ongoing recession but also by prejudice against young people of color. Fourth, many Bangladeshis share a kind of imperial nostalgia that sees London as both the capital of Empire and the capital of the Bangladeshi diaspora. As our field interviews reveal, many research participants were initially oblivious to the harsh realities of immigrant life in London.

Methods and Research Design

Empirical data for this article derive from 40 in-depth interviews with Italian-Bangladeshi men in northeast Italy (20) and London (20). The former group were long-term residents in Italy and had acquired Italian citizenship; many were talking about or actively preparing to move to London. The latter group had already made the move, following a period of residence in Italy that varied between 15 years and 25 years. The interviews were conducted during two phases of fieldwork: in Italy during 2010–11 and in London in 2015–16. Some of those interviewed in London had also been interviewed in Italy five years earlier, allowing us to reconstruct their biographies and better highlight changes in their rhythms of work and social life experienced in the different times and places.

All interviewees were male family breadwinners engaged in paid employment and aged in their 30s, 40s, or 50s. We consciously focused on male respondents and their narrated experiences because we wanted to analyze the changes in daily work rhythms and other temporalities of those who had the role of family breadwinner. This perspective has its limitations, as has been widely discussed by other researchers who privilege male testimonies yet also observe gendered experiences of migration (Donaldson et al. 2009; Gallo and Scrinzi 2016; Wojnicka and Pustulk 2019). We made a reflexive effort to take into account our own gender positioning in the field, remaining sensitive to gender dynamics in the ensuing analysis, albeit based on male participants’ direct voices.

Interviewees were accessed via a variety of initial approaches—through key-informant representatives of ethnic associations, friendship networks, and more casual contacts—and then supplemented by snowballing. As is typical with this kind of qualitative research, our research participants cannot be considered a true random sample. In interviews, we stressed a dialogic approach, using a flexible interview schema through “generative” questions (Becker 1998) that allowed process to emerge, rather than mere information, and often started from the narration of concrete episodes. According to this approach, we avoided evaluative questions (such as “why?”—a word Becker advocates banning), as they can be deemed threatening and result in defensive answers.

Although interviews were deliberately carried out in a relaxed conversational style to build trust and enhance information flow, they aimed at gathering data on a series of pre-determined themes: social background in Bangladesh and social positioning in Italy (and in London for onward migrants); motivations and strategies underpinning the move (actual or potential) to London; everyday life and the nature of personal, family, working, and leisure life in Italy (and London); and future plans. Interviews were conducted in Italian or English, according to interviewees’ preferences, as all participants were fluent in one or both languages.

Interviews were recorded, subject to participants’ consent, fully transcribed, and, if in Italian, translated into English. Repeated reading and annotation of interview transcripts were followed by coding of the various thematic segments pertinent to this article’s subject and then by an integrated comparative analysis of the “times of work and social life.” All participants have pseudonyms.

Motives for Onward Migration

Having migrated once as younger men, onward-migrants now moving with their families often have more complex and multiple reasons to migrate, as the literature reviews of Ahrens et al. (2016) and King and Karamoschou (2019) reveal. Unsurprisingly, such interwoven motives for onward migration were evident in participants’ narratives and reflected a number of economic, social, and cultural-religious factors that are mutually reinforcing and the product of personal circumstances, collective histories, and idealized representations of the British post-imperial context (Hansen 2014). Above all, the move to London was strongly influenced by the “future times” of the next generation—participants’ Italian-born children. In Hägerstrandian terms, the “path” led to London in order to realize the “project” of a better life for the children.

In interviewees’ perceptions, life in Italy would entail the likelihood that their children retraced the same occupational and existential trajectory that they themselves had followed: that of a generic “migrant worker” locked into subordinate sectors of the labor market. This eventuality was perceived as even more likely because of the economic retrenchment that has afflicted Italy for the past decade. This extract from an interview with Apnan in London, where he had recently moved following nearly 20 years in Italy, is typically revealing about how he viewed his son’s future, had they remained in Italy.

If he did university there [in Italy], and graduated, where does he work? In a bank? In insurance? At the university, as a researcher, like you? Imagine he tries to get a job in a bank: let’s say that among ten white applicants, he is the son of a Bangladeshi immigrant—what chance would he have to be hired, and then to make a career? Maybe you think I’m biased, but I speak of my own experience. In Italy it is like this. Then I asked myself: “But why did I do all this work, as a street vendor, in the restaurants, in the factory, only to see my son do the same work as his father?”…. One day, Italy might change…but not yet.

London’s perceived attractiveness for investing in children’s future had several dimensions. One was an education and socialization in English. Many fathers spoke about the way in which socioeconomic opportunities for their children could only be maximized through fluency in English and with academic credentials from the British higher education system. Sherif, interviewed in London after more than 20 years in Italy, put the comparison in the following terms:

Our children were studying in Italy only in the Italian language. The Italian education system…is a problem for our community…. It is better for our children to study in the UK and then to work there, or in America, or anywhere…. To have better opportunities, English is important for us.

A second argument framing participants’ decision to transfer their families from Italy to London was the British capital’s specific appeal in Bangladeshis’ post-colonial imaginary (Hansen 2014). Two aspects of London’s historical and contemporary social geography are relevant here. The first was its historical role as capital of the British Empire and, therefore, repository of values and institutions nostalgically considered still to exist. The second was its contemporary character as a global and cosmopolitan city that, precisely because of its colonial past and long tradition of immigration, now presented itself as a city of multicultural tolerance and diversity where national origin, “race,” and religious belief did not constitute sources of discrimination or stigma. Among the values frequently referenced by participants were meritocracy and lack of prejudice, especially in the job market. In the words of Kobir, a participant interviewed in both Italy and London,

In the UK there are no differences, I mean inequalities, because of your color. In Italy when I go for a job, the first thing that people see is the color of my skin, so we are always the second choice. While here [in London], they don’t look at these things: they look at your experience. “Are you qualified? OK, you can have this job.” ²

Third, London hosts the largest community of Bangladeshi-origin migrants and their descendants outside Bangladesh and has done for many decades (Gardner 2002; Zeitlyn 2016). Thus, London, especially working-class East London, was perceived as a small version of Bangladesh, where it was possible to “feel at home” and to live in accordance with what participants defined as a “Bengali culture and lifestyle,” which included greater freedom to practice Islam. In the quote here, Adnan (London) drew a distinction between the very different histories of Bangladeshi migration and settlement in Italy and England:

We [Bangladeshis] came only recently to Italy…so we are not a strong community there, whereas here in England, we are a big community, we are already at the third and fourth generations. This means that there are more advantages for us—our compatriots, our community, our food, our language, our culture, everything…. Here, I feel more comfortable, more at home.

Fourth, a driving force in London-bound onward migration was the first generation’s desire to escape dead-end factory work and achieve greater upward mobility for themselves. Although this upward trajectory often became a dashed hope, there was also a realization that in Italy “being Italian” on paper did not protect them from the discrimination, inequalities, and rigidities that they experienced on a daily basis in the Italian labor market, where they were confined to the most dangerous and boring jobs on the production line or in other manual employment. Furthermore, the United Kingdom was perceived as a more attractive country because of its more inclusive and transparent welfare system. In the words of Mukul, who had recently relocated to London after twenty years in Italy,

In Italy, if you have a wife and children, and you lose your job, what can you do? Here, if you lose your job, you go to the council, and they help you with bills, the rent…. In Italy, I asked repeatedly to get public housing; the answer was “No…no…no.” Whilst here, as soon as I arrived, I asked…and they gave accommodation to me and my family after fifteen days.

A final reason for London-bound onward migration reflects the agency of Bangladeshi reunited wives in Italy and their dissatisfaction with their lives there. Unable to find jobs in the male-dominated industrial economy, they aspired to escape the loneliness and frustration configured by an imposed migration and imagined London as a place where they would have better employment opportunities and a more congenial social life among the city’s large Bangladeshi community. We acknowledge that, in our research, women’s perspectives are filtered through their husbands’ narratives, as in the case of Zaeed, interviewed in northeast Italy, where he had been living for 25 years, but the pattern of Bangladeshi women encouraging onward migration to London was noticeable:

I would like to stay here, but she [referring to his wife] says I have to go there [to London] with the whole family…. I have a permanent job here, everything…everybody knows me, I am well-known in my community…. There, I don’t know what I will find…it’s a new place for me, I don’t know anyone, and I’ll have to start all over again. She always tells me we have to make sacrifices, always sacrifices, for the children and the family.

The combination of factors outlined in this article acted to produce onward migration but also resulted in unexpected repercussions both on participants’ socioeconomic status and day-to-day work and on their family and social lives. We now proceed to a comparative analysis of these temporal rhythms of everyday life, taking in turn the Italian and London contexts.

Times of Work and Social Life in Italy

The temporal rhythms of work, personal, and family life in Italy evolved over two main stages corresponding to a change in Bangladeshis’ geographic settlement pattern and civil status—an initial concentration in Rome, where they worked as single men mainly engaged in street-selling, and then a transfer to northeast Italy’s expanding industrial economy, where they found factory jobs and settled with their growing families.

Times of Work and Social Life in London

Italian-Bangladeshi men’s onward migration from northeast Italy to London resulted from a combination of push-and-pull factors, as noted earlier: first-generation migrants’ desire to escape the occupational immobility of factory work; their realization that their Italian-born children’s social mobility would be severely constrained in Italy by a combination of economic stagnation and racist attitudes toward people of color; the belief that in London they, and especially their children, would fare better in a more open and buoyant economy and a more multicultural and meritocratic society; the dissatisfaction of some reunited wives concerning their unrewarding lives in small industrial towns; and the postcolonial imaginaries of a cosmopolitan and tolerant capital city. The key facilitating factor was the acquisition of Italian citizenship, which turned the aspiration to onward-migrate into the ability to do so (Carling and Schewel 2017). However, in many cases, the London imagined by these new “European citizens” failed to meet their expectations, and their aspirational moves came with a price, which impacted, above all, the rhythms and freedoms of daily working life and social relations. In a nutshell, participants in London experienced “temporal rupture” and lost what they saw as their “control” over time.

Conclusion

As evidenced in our literature review, time is an under-researched and under-theorized dimension of migration and especially of the lived experiences that are temporally enfolded within migration trajectories. Cwerner’s (2001) landmark paper on the “times” of migration set the initial theoretical agenda, but detailed empirical studies on the daily life and other periodic temporalities of migrants and their significant others have been slow to emerge and are few in number (e.g., Marcu 2017; Mavroudi et al. 2017; Reid-Musson 2015; Wee et al. 2020). Deploying the theoretical frameworks of Hägerstrand’s time geography and Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, in this article we have comparatively analyzed the contrasting temporalities of work and everyday life of Bangladeshi migrant men in Italy and onward-migrated Italian-Bangladeshis in London. The focus on onward migrants enabled a diachronic comparison of the same migrant group in two contrasting destinations. By focusing on the micro-temporalities of their everyday working, family, and social lives, we have contributed new insights into onward migration as a recently expanding area in global migration dynamics (cf. Ahrens et al. 2016; King and Karamoschou 2019).

Wee et al. (2020, 112) make the important point that “rhythms, intimately experienced through the mobile body, are conditioned by the labour market.” Our findings go one step further and show that the rhythmic (and arrhythmic) temporalities of migrants’ everyday lives are powerfully underscored by the mode of regulation of the labor market and the spatial setting within which migrants’ working lives unfold. As we show, in both locations, migrants were restricted to “lower-class” jobs that non-migrants would generally reject, reflecting migrant labor’s continuing “reserve army” function within contrasting varieties of contemporary capitalism, but experienced those jobs—and their impacts on family and social life—in fundamentally different ways.

In northeast Italy, migrants’ lives were disciplined by the rhythms of factory shifts and, by extension, the economic regime of small- and medium-scale industrial capitalism. Despite this “dictatorial” role of time, participants appreciated their ability to enjoy economically secure lives structured around predictable work patterns, family time, and multiple opportunities for socializing. The small Italian towns where they settled offered convivial spaces in parks and squares for socialization both within and beyond the ethnic community. These concatenated polyrhythms were fused together in a generally harmonious pattern that can be regarded as broadly eurhythmic. Although the main comparison that we make is with Italian-Bangladeshi men in London, several participants also drew on memories of their first years in Italy when, as single men, they worked long hours as street-hawkers feeding off Rome’s tourist economy, creating for themselves a mode of survival in the informal sector’s marginal niches.

When Italian-Bangladeshi men moved to London, they experienced a very different set of temporal rhythms, dictated this time by the limits of the jobs they could access in the flexible, casual, low-wage service economy. In this segment of the neoliberalized metropolitan economy, each day’s temporality could be different from the next. In contrast to the regular, repetitive, “safe” temporality experienced in Italy, working in London implied an arrhythmic loss of control over time, which became an alienating, disruptive factor in everyday life, compounded by London’s enormous size and polycentric dispersion of workplaces. In London, Italian-Bangladeshis endured “hard times” in their working and social lives, mortgaging the present against the anticipated more successful “future time” of their yet-to-be-adult children.

Furthermore, we found marked contrasts in patterns of “integration.” In Italy, the highly managed polyrhythmic “time culture” of small industrial towns created multiple time-space settings for socialization with other Italian-Bangladeshis and with local Italians. At the same time, avenues for upward social and occupational mobility were closed off, for both the first and second generations, by the wider racial prejudices and assumptions imbued in Italian society. In London, everyday temporalities were often in an arrhythmic state, creating obstacles at various levels. Family time was constrained and fragmented; socialization with other Bangladeshis was hindered by a combination of irregular working patterns, spatial distancing, and dialect differences; and social interactions with “white” British people were almost non-existent. Despite these disillusionments and challenges, there was no question of returning to Italy or to Bangladesh, for to do so would be to admit the failure of their transgenerational migration project and aspirations for their children’s future.

Although privileging the narrative testimonies of Bangladeshi migrant men, all of them workers, fathers, and “breadwinners” in their nuclear families, enabled us to see and examine how the entanglements of work and life rhythms shaped these migrants’ lived realities in different locales, future research could complement this work. In particular, we encourage future research that interrogates the spatio-temporal lived experiences of other population cohorts in the Bangladeshi migrant population, especially women and children. The female perspective is important because it is so often hidden and silenced in studies of male-led migration chains, while uncovering children’s voices would reveal the attitudes and achievements, and possible identity struggles, of the cohort of migrants for whom the entire intergenerational migration project, from its origins in Bangladesh via an intermediate yet prolonged stopover in Italy, was designed to produce “success.” Onward migration is embedded in a long-term family project of social mobility and economic survival that is also examined in other studies of the “new” middle-class Bangladeshi migration to Europe (Mapril 2011, 2014) and of comparable groups who initially used Southern European countries as an entry-point and staging-post but were then pushed northwards by the economic crisis to Britain or Germany (Mas Giralt 2017; McGarrigle and Ascensão 2018; Ramos 2018).

While our article speaks to this wider regional literature on intra-European, crisis-related onward migration, its other contributions have been twofold. First, we have deployed time geography and rhythmanalysis to explore, in an innovative diachronic comparison, the temporalities of daily work and social life in two geographic settings marked by contrasting urban forms and regulatory regimes of the labor market. Second, we have unfolded the class and generational dynamics of the relatively recent Bangladeshi migration to Italy and onwards to London. As Mapril (2014) has also stressed, it is through geographic mobility, especially to Europe, that young, well-educated Bangladeshi men can earn both economic and symbolic capital to confirm their “modern,” even “cosmopolitan” status and, later in their life projects, advance the life-chances of their children. Although migration is itself constitutive of this “middle-classness,” as both a resource and a discursive formation (Mapril 2014, 718), the path is far from smooth, and, with no option to go back (for such would be to connote failure), sacrifices must be endured to safeguard the future for their children.