A good pączek should be light and fluffy on the inside, flat across the top, and sport a clean, pale stripe around the middle – proof, supposedly, that the rich, sugary dough it is made from was fried in really fresh oil.

On Tłusty Czwartek, Poland’s Fat Thursday – the last Thursday before Lent – there were a lot of pączki in Bognor Regis: sugar-dusted, iced, sprinkled with dried orange zest, with fillings of thick vanilla creme, strawberry jam, apple compote.

“I buy some every year,” said Chris Medcalfe, 34, an IT engineer, carrying a full paper bag down High Street. “They’re good and they’re not expensive. Hah! Bit like Poles themselves, I suppose. If that’s not racist. Is it? Shouldn’t be, it’s a compliment. I’m fine with the east Europeans; we need them.”

If there was little resentment to be heard on the streets of Bognor this week towards the seaside town’s sizeable eastern European community, there was not much confidence, either, that David Cameron’s much-trumpeted plan to curb immigration by making EU newcomers wait before they can claim any benefits would achieve anything.

Bognor, a somewhat faded south coast resort with a newly rediscovered sense of ambition, is these days best known for its Butlins, its esplanade and its pier, and the fact that when George V, sent here to convalesce, was petitioned to bestow the royal suffix on the town, his initial response was: “Oh, bugger Bognor.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Queensway Polish shop in Bognor Regis. Photograph: Andrew Hasson/The Guardian

According to the 2011 census, just over 10% of the town’s 24,000 residents come from the so-called accession countries of the European Union, with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia accounting for by far the largest number. The town hall says that in several areas of Bognor more than 25% of the residents now speak an eastern European language as their first.

A safe Conservative seat with a strong Ukip representation on the county council, the town has seven – soon to be eight – specialist food stores catering to maybe 7,000 eastern European nationals living in the surrounding area. The Catholic church, Our Lady of Sorrows, has a full-time Polish priest who says a weekly Sunday afternoon mass in Polish; the displays of the electronic parking meters offer a Polish translation.

“But I have never felt any bad feeling here,” said Kamila Elezi, 25, in the Queensway Polish supermarket and delicatessen, tray upon tray of pączki stacked high behind her. “Apart from when people are very drunk, maybe. That’s not nice. But normal English people, never a problem.”

Elezi has been working in the supermarket for three years. Before that, when she arrived in 2008, she did – like almost all newcomers – agency work, in food processing, warehouses, factories, contract cleaning. Elezi was in the glasshouses, cutting and packing flowers. She is married to an Albanian factory worker; they have a six-year-old son.

“I came here to work,” she said. “Before I came, I didn’t even know you could get benefits here. Yes, now we have tax credits and child benefit, maybe £100 a week, but we spend the money on our son, and we save some, for his education.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elezi has been working at supermarket for three years. Photograph: Andrew Hasson/The Guardian

Like Elezi and many others, Natalia Totoriene, 37, the deputy manager of a betting shop, said she thought it was “quite right, in fact only fair” to expect new arrivals to pay something into the British social security system before they could take anything out.

She was doubtful Cameron’s measures would have any real impact. “I think he just has to say something, you know?” said Totoriene, who arrived from Latvia 10 years ago, has a degree in English and business studies from nearby Chichester University, and is married to a Lithuanian factory worker.

“He has to make a noise,” she said of the prime minister. “And actually it doesn’t bother me, all this immigration debate. I’m too busy. I work full time; I have three kids. But nobody I know came here for benefits and I don’t think not getting them will stop anyone coming. Maybe one or two. There’s always someone. But I know many, many more British people who live on benefits than east Europeans.”

The couple, who have a home and mortgage, receive child benefit and a disability allowance for their eldest son, who is partially deaf, as well as subsidised childcare that allows Natalia to work full time.

“The real benefit for us here is the better care our son gets,” Totoriene said. “He has been in a special school, he gets individual classroom support, free hearing aids. But we both work and we pay our taxes. We’re not getting anything we shouldn’t.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Owner Barzan Aubid in his shop, The Baltic, in Bognor Regis. Photograph: Andrew Hasson/The Guardian

Toms Vimers, 25, a Latvian logistics team operator, said he “never thought once” about benefits when he was planning his move five years ago, and that even now, apart from the £80 child benefit that “everyone gets”, he did not fully understand the system. “Maybe there are things I should be getting,” he said. “I don’t know. No idea.”

Leaving the Kujawiak Polski Sklep by the station clutching a box of a dozen pączki, Krzysztof Kaplanski, 26, an HGV driver, said he needed all the money he could get to help him pay off the 20 years remaining on his mortgage, but he was not claiming any kind of benefit or tax credit.

“I don’t know who they are, all these east European people the government says are doing this,” he said. “My sister is a nurse here, she gets child benefit but that’s all. We come to make a better life for ourselves; how is living on benefits a better life? And I think we are quite good workers.”

“I’m really not fussed by them,” said Arron Jackson, 26, emerging from the Baltic Shop with a six-pack of lager. “Sometimes when you walk into a shop, and they speak Polish to you and give you a look when you don’t speak it back … But they work really hard.”

Heather Booth, 68, a retired receptionist shopping on London Road, was more outspoken. “They’re good workers, nice people,” she said. “But there are just far too many. We’ve let too many in. Sometimes you don’t feel like you’re in your own country. But I don’t know what we can do about it now. I wouldn’t want to be prime minister.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Heather Booth on London Road. Photograph: Andrew Hasson/The Guardian

Short of leaving the EU, which a fair few particularly elderly Bognor residents thought was now the right thing to do, no one saw any immediate solution in the government’s renegotiation package. “I don’t believe they come for the benefits, not for a minute,” said Robert, 50, a nurse married to a Pole – also a nurse – who wanted to remain anonymous.

“We need them; I have a lot of Polish and Lithuanian colleagues and I don’t know how we’d do without them. Plus, it’s a crap benefit system anyway, even for us. I was ill for three months and got no help at all with the mortgage; my wife worked overtime to get us through. She’s never claimed, and never would. It’s really not benefits that brings people here.”

Not everyone was quite so sanguine. “I think word spreads; they’re not silly, they know what they’re entitled to,” said a Bognor recruitment agent, who asked not to be named. She said she finds jobs for “hundreds” of eastern European workers every month, both newcomers and existing residents. But she, too, thought squeezing benefits would have little impact on numbers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Toyubur Rahman, Bognor’s town centre manager. Photograph: Andrew Hasson/The Guardian

The town, which is investing considerable sums of council and grant cash in rejuvenating itself, certainly wants to see its new residents as assets. “We want to embrace them,” said Toyubur Rahman, recently hired by the town and district councils, local businesses, university and Butlins, as Bognor’s energetic town centre manager.

“Bognor aims to be a premier seaside town – drawing on its history, but embracing its modern identity. The people who come here, live here, work here, settle here, whose children go to school here, are part of our modern identity,” said Rahman.

Sometimes, he said, “they do get a bad press – beer cans on the seafront, that sort of thing – but I can tell you, our problem street drinkers are not east Europeans. They’re here because there are jobs for them; because they do them well, and at a good rate.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ben Yilmaz, left, and his brother Eric at their barber shop in Bognor Regis. Photograph: Andrew Hasson/The Guardian

Eric Yilmaz, recently arrived from London with his brother Ben to set up a very un-Bognor – and highly successful – Turkish barbers, the Tonsorial Parlor, agreed. “East Europeans are good customers,” he said. “We came to Bognor because it’s cheap and it’s on the move, renovating. These guys are part of that.”