Far-right discourses have increasingly mobilised migration-related issues to circumscribe their exclusionary world-views, legitimising discrimination against migrant and ethnic minorities on the basis of nativist rationales. In the last decade, first and second generation migrants in the UK have experienced a notable increase in perceived discrimination on grounds of race, religion, language or ethnicity (see Fernandez-Reino and Cuibus 2024). Studies on the consequences of discrimination mostly focus on life chances and economic and well-being aspects. Much less attention has been attributed to the impact on values and identities. Building upon 50 multi-method qualitative interviews conducted in the years following the Brexit referendum, this paper examines everyday situations of discrimination as experienced and rationalised by migrants of European and non-European origin in the UK. I show that exposure to discriminatory episodes is crucial to understanding disaffection with the context of reception, ethnic closure and enhancement of the national identity of the country of origin. Yet experiencing discrimination can also have a cosmopolitanising effect by generating empathic feelings towards other migrants, reversing negative attitudes to migration and challenging pre-existing nationalistic ideas and sentiments. Moreover, discrimination shows to play a key role in processes of de-identification with the receiving society by affecting pre-existing images. When egalitarian values and respect to diversity are not perceived as traits of the host environment anymore, migrants adjust their feelings of identification by weakening or even discarding their identity bond with the local, national or the European level. It is argued that discrimination experiences trigger processes of learning through which migrants adjust their identities and world-views in different degrees and directions along cosmopolitan-uncosmopolitan lines. The research emphasises the role of interethnic conflict in everyday life processes of political socialisation and highlights the advantages of a micro-sociological lens focused on the nexus between individual and contextual factors, day-to-day experiences and subjective rationalisations of such experiences to explain the relationship between human mobility and processes of value polarisation in junctures of far-right populism.
