“They were chasing me down the streets”: Austerity, resourcefulness, and the tenacity of migrant women’s care-full labour

In this paper, we examine the role of migrant women in civil society in Wales in a triply-hostile environment created by UK government policy since 2010. Drawing on interviews carried out with EU migrants between 2016 and 2017, we outline the active support and care work provided by these women to migrants and others and the way in which they navigated austere and hostile conditions (contrasting the popular construction of migrants passively requiring support and care). Contributing to the literature on resourcefulness, we introduce the notion of tenacity to highlight the exhausting care-full labour of these migrants, who continue despite challenging circumstances and impact on their own wellbeing. We conclude that the care work provided by these women plays an important civil society role in tackling ongoing austerity and hostility but that precarious conditions bring a lack of sustainability which can heighten the socio-spatial inequalities seen across the UK.