Of all Western European countries, Scotland is second only after Ireland in its high historical rates of out-migration, with high net rates of outflow, both overseas and to other parts of the United Kingdom, in every decade from the 1850s to the 1990s. By contrast, the first two decades of the twenty-first century saw a marked reversal—with significant net inflows, almost always both from overseas and from the rest of the United Kingdom—in every single year.

But large-scale population in-migration is not new. For at least the past 170 years, a larger proportion of the population of Scotland than that of England has been born outside the country—but, in Scotland's case, a majority of these migrants were from other parts of the United Kingdom, while in England and Wales by far the largest share since the 1930s has come from other parts of the world, above all from the countries of the former British Empire and, more recently from other countries in the European Union. Even in 2011, while 6.5 percent of those coming to Scotland were born overseas (up from just 2 percent in 1971), more than 10 percent were born in England, Wales, or Ireland (up from about 7 percent in 1971: Michael Anderson and Corinne Roughley, Scotland's Populations from the 1850s to Today [2018], 143).

So, as the contributors to New Scots: Scotland's Immigrant Communities since 1945, edited by T. M. Devine and Angela McCarthy, remind readers, while there has been a very significant rise in their numbers since the 1990s, not all “New Scots” are new. What they have in common, however, is that they live in a country where the Scottish National Party policy is clear: residents are in principle recognized as citizens. Residence in Scotland, rather than birth or family connection, determined eligibility to vote in the 2014 independence referendum. Also, and, unlike that of the UK government, Scottish government policy has been strongly supportive of higher levels of immigration. But, as the contributions to this book confirm, none of this has guaranteed that immigrants to Scotland have felt welcomed or have seen themselves as “Scottish.”

Given the scale of this in-migrant population and how much it differs from migrant groups in other parts of Britain, it has been surprisingly under-researched. Indeed, New Scots is certainly the first to contain in a single volume chapters on migrants from England, China, Poland, South Asia, and Africa, with essays also on the experiences of Jews, the Roma community in Glasgow, and Commonwealth-born nurses, together with a rather inconclusive analysis of migrant self-perception and voting patterns in the 2014 Independence Referendum.

The big limitation of the book, in spite of Enda Delaney's brave attempt to pull out some challenging general points in a concluding chapter, is that there is almost no integration or comparison between the different case studies. A stronger structure and focus would have greatly strengthened the book. Nevertheless, most of the chapters raise fascinating insights that one hopes will stimulate others to explore across other migrant groups. The book also stands out for its extremely good range of bibliographic references in each chapter.

One broad theme that comes across very clearly is that, in most cases, migrants have been able to settle in Scotland with markedly less overt confrontation with the host community than have migrants to England. As the authors of several chapters point out, Scotland has not in recent decades had sudden, new, and massive waves of immigrants standing out because they are concentrated in particular communities or parts of communities and seen as seriously competing with local labor (though there has, for example, been some local hostility to the large Polish inflow in the years after 2004, and also, as Ashli Mullen describes, but with regrettably little critical evaluation, against the Roma community in Govanhill in Glasgow).

In general, however, where there has been some concentration of immigrants in particular occupations, these have mostly been in newly developing sectors (for example, Chinese and Asian restaurants, South Asian-run small corner shops) and widely scattered between and across communities. The authors of several chapters also note that the deeply endemic Protestant-Catholic sectarian tensions in many parts of Scotland have provided some degree of distraction from prejudice against incomers.

The chapters that impressed me most were those based on sustained ethnographic methods, exploring the experience of migrants who had entered Scotland from different homelands or at different times. Among these is Teresa Piacentini's essay on the experiences of African migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. Her particular focus is on the way that the experience of settlement has been affected by place, migration routes, and status. Much of this is connected with community building often involving the development of “an ethnicised economy,” with shops selling familiar foods, and “safe spaces” emerging where people could meet together and both learn from each other how to cope in the new society while also finding “a cultural home” (193). Some of this seems to have been modeled in part on associational arrangements of Pakistani and Chinese groups in Scotland, though the authors of several chapters also note how scatter has tended to make the maintenance of ethnic cultural lifestyles very difficult, especially outside the cities.

Ima Jackson's sensitive account describes the disappointments felt by many nurses coming from Commonwealth countries when they were unable to obtain posts of equivalent standing, often despite holding qualifications identical with those of UK-trained professionals. Instead, many clearly suffered overt exploitation and discrimination and had to take less well-paying positions for which they were overqualified. As she writes, for those in the first postwar generations in particular, the prospect of a new kind of belonging in Scotland at least in part offsetting the loss of belonging in their homelands did not materialize. Instead, “the idea of a shared ‘Commonwealth family’ did not bear much relationship to the reality they experienced” (119).

In sum, Devine and McCarthy have certainly provided an interesting book, but one hopes that it will point the way to even more thorough, grounded, and comparative analysis in the future.