Being foreign-born is represented as being cosmopolitan. It is, however, only a certain construction of cosmopolitan internationality.
Only a fraction of foreign-born workers are acceptable front desk staff. These are primarily ethnically white and do not include African-Caribbean workers.
Our interviews identified examples of customer racism, providing further evidence for the argument that BME workers are less likely to be found in such customerfacing jobs (Adib and Guerrier, 2003).
Sophia, for example, describes how some customers behave towards self-evidently non-white workers: