The Racialization of the New European Migration to the UK

Abstract

The purpose of our article is to examine how current East European migration to the UK has been racialized in immigration policy and tabloid journalism. The state’s immigration policy, we argue, exhibits features of institutionalized racism that implicitly invokes shared whiteness as a basis of racialized inclusion. The tabloids, in contrast, tend toward cultural racism in their coverage of these migrations by explicitly invoking cultural difference as a basis of racialized exclusion. Our analysis focuses on two cohorts of migrants: Hungarians, representing the larger 2004 entrants, and Romanians, representing the smaller 2007 entrants. The processes of racialization we examine in this article reveal degrees of whiteness that give ‘race’ continued currency as an idiom for making sense of these migrations and the migrants that people them.

Keywords

cultural racism immigration policy institutionalized racism media racialization whiteness

In 2004, the UK opened its doors to migrants from the EU’s eight new member states from East Europe. In 2007, migrants from Romania and Bulgaria, the EU’s next members, were granted restricted entry to the UK. These ‘new Europeans’ (Favell, 2008; McDowell, 2009) are not the UK’s first nominally white migrants. The experience of past generations of Irish, Jewish, and indeed earlier East European migrants would suggest that putatively shared whiteness does not exempt them from the effects of racism. The purpose of this article is to examine how this current round of East European migration to the UK has been racialized.

Racialization occurs when the category of ‘race’ is invoked and evoked in discursive and institutional practices to interpret, order, and indeed structure social relations (Banton, 1977: 18–19; Miles, 1982: 157; Omi and Winant, 1986: 64; see also Barot and Bird, 2001; Murji and Solomos, 2005). ‘Race’ in this sense is not an essential trait of migrants, but rather the socially constructed contingent outcome of processes and practices of exclusion. It is the valorized language through which structured inequalities (measured in labour market position, differential access to scarce resources, legal status, and cultural stereotypes) are expressed, maintained, and reproduced. Racialization does not require putative phenotypical or biological difference; it can also make use of (and/or construct) cultural traits as a basis of differentiation (Modood, 2005; Taguieff, 1990). We opt for a single racialization optique that accommodates both its colourful and cultural dimensions (Kushner, 2005: 208–9). Indeed, our case will demonstrate that the nominal absence of somatic difference does not get in the way of xenophobic racism; it turns out racialized difference can be invented in situ.

Our analysis is constructed around two comparisons. First, we compare different ways in which racialized understandings of these migrations are disseminated through immigration policy and tabloid journalism. The state and the media play pivotal though different roles in affixing meanings to migration. These institutions are often treated separately in the scholarship on racialization (e.g. Van Dijk, 1991, on the media, and Omi and Winant, 1986, on the state). By examining them in tandem, our study uncovers both the distinctive and relational ways in which they act and interact to reproduce racialized subjects. We show that whilst immigration policy exhibits features of an institutionalized racism that implicitly includes on the basis of shared whiteness, the tabloids tend toward a cultural racism that is exclusionary on the basis of putative cultural differences. In different but ultimately complementary ways, these institutions are in the business of constructing, propagating, and legitimating socially relevant difference:

The categories of perception, the systems of classification, that is, essentially, the words, the names which construct social reality as much as they express it, are the crucial stakes of political struggle, which is a struggle to impose the legitimate principle of vision and division. (Bourdieu, 1990: 134)

Our second comparison is between the two main cohorts of East European migrants in the UK: those who arrived after their countries joined the EU in 2004 (the so-called ‘A8’ migrants); and those who came following the accession of their countries in 2007 (the ‘A2’ migrants). We sample Hungarians from the first cohort and Romanians from the second. Besides being roughly the same size, these cohorts (and most nationalities other than Poles) have been under-represented in the scholarship. Indeed, our examination will reveal how immigration policy and the tabloid media also render Hungarians and Romanians invisible at times and visible at other times. Whilst Romanians (and sometimes Hungarians) are often singled out by the tabloid media, they are both subsumed into larger and more generic categories of ‘A8’ and ‘A2’ migrants respectively in immigration policy. Our analysis thus traces the ways these categories expand and contract in immigration policy and the tabloid media.

Our overall aim is to examine the ways in which (but not the extent to which) these institutions of the state and media have contributed to the racialization of Hungarian and Romanian migration. Our analysis demonstrates that nominally shared whiteness between migrant and majority has not exempted these current cohorts of migrants from the sorts of racialization found in other migrations.

Background

In the early 2000s, a robust British economy combined with the free market agenda of New Labour made the UK a good candidate for the influx of cheap labour from the East (e.g. Castles, 2006: 751–4; Favell, 2008: 703–5). This influx, however, quickly surpassed the 5000–13,000 workers originally predicted: by 2011, nearly 1.5 million East Europeans had reported for work (though many of these of course have since left; on the problems with keeping tabs on this circular migration in the UK, see Pollard et al., 2008: 19–20; Sumption and Somerville, 2009: 13). About two-thirds of these workers have come from Poland; Hungarians, numbering more than 75,000, account for about 5 per cent of all A8 migrants (Department for Work and Pensions, 2011). A8 workers have been channelled into jobs in the low-end sector of the economy, particularly in hospitality, manufacturing, construction, and agriculture. A8 workers’ movement is unrestricted, but until 2011 they were required to register their employment and work for one year continuously before claiming benefits.

Since 2007, over 80,000 Romanians and about 55,000 Bulgarians (A2 migrants) have registered for work in Britain (Department for Work and Pensions, 2011). Their access to the UK labour market has been much more restricted. The Accession Worker Card Scheme gives A2 workers access to specific professions and quota-based schemes (in agriculture and food processing, among other sectors). A2 migrants can also enter the UK as high skilled migrants or with self-employment or student status (the latter two with employment restrictions). After one year of uninterrupted employment (or five years for those with self-employed status), A2 workers can apply for a ‘Blue Card’ to give them unrestricted labour market access. These different routes of entry and monitoring procedures complicate the compilation of accurate measures on the overall labour market position of A2 migrants (Migration Advisory Committee, 2008: 61). Most observers agree, however, that A2 migrants are generally worse off than their A8 counterparts (e.g. Favell, 2008: 711).

Immigration Policy

The British approach to immigration control has at times relied on identifying both racially desirable and undesirable migrants. Before the Second World War, East European Jews were excluded on racialized grounds (Kushner, 2005; Miles, 1993). Since the war, British immigration policy has favoured a number of groups deemed racially desirable (McDowell, 2009: 22–7; Miles, 1993: 140–3; Paul, 1997: 83–5, 134–5). In the late 1940s, displaced East Europeans were recruited through the European Volunteer Worker scheme because of their racial suitability (Kay and Miles, 1992: 166–76; McDowell, 2008: 57), although even here care was taken not to cast the net so widely as to include Jews (Kushner, 2005: 216–21). The Irish also benefited from racialized preferences. As policy makers tried to shut the door on ‘coloured’ migrants arriving from the Commonwealth (resulting in the Immigration Acts of 1961 and 1962) (Paul, 1997: 123–7; Schuster and Solomos, 2004: 268), they opened a backdoor to the Irish by exempting them from immigration control (despite the fact they were neither citizens of the UK nor subjects of the Commonwealth) (Carter et al., 1996: 149–51; Paul, 1997: 90–1, 105–10). The Immigration Act of 1971 then reopened the door a crack to allow Commonwealth migrants with a parent or grandparent born in the UK (the so-called ‘patrials’) – in other words, former settlers and their descendants (or, in practice, white people) – to return to the UK (Solomos, 2003: 62–3). Sometimes, racialized preferences for white migrants (and antipathy toward ‘coloured’ migrants) were made patently clear (Carter et al., 1996: 151); at other times, such preferences were more subtly ‘coded’ (but often still codified) in immigration policy (Solomos, 2003: 55–7; but see Banton, 2002: 198–200). In practice, however, preferences for white migrants afforded those migrants few protections against pervasive discrimination and racism (Hickman and Walter, 1997; Miles, 1982). Indeed, the Irish case highlights the ways in which racial boundaries and definitions of whiteness are variable. Popularly viewed as racially inferior (and therefore less white), the Irish became racially desirable (and therefore more white) in immigration policy when other (New Commonwealth) migrants featured as even more (racially) undesirable (and therefore less white).

There is no such smoking gun in the current case. In the past, the ‘race’ of potential migrants sometimes figured explicitly in considerations of desirability (Small and Solomos, 2006: 238). Since then, immigration policy has been consistently and carefully layered with anti-discrimination laws explicitly intended to correct for possible racist biases. In the current case, A8 policy was informed by economic considerations (e.g. McDowell, 2009: 22–7; McGhee, 2009: 53–5): to fill gaps in the low-skilled sector of the labour market. This ‘managed migration’ approach was introduced by the Home Office in 2002 to tackle immigration to the UK in a ‘carefully managed’ way ‘to meet particular needs within … particular sector[s]’ of the economy (Home Office, 2002: 12). This philosophy informed the government’s decision later that year to allow unrestricted migration from the eight East European countries preparing to join the EU in 2004. ‘We have made this decision’, then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw explained, ‘because it is in the UK’s interest. It will attract workers we need in key sectors’ (Hansard, 2002, columns 11–12WS). This same agenda was developed and specified in subsequent policy documents, finding its clearest expression in the Points Based System introduced in 2006:

With an expanded European Union there is an accessible and mobile workforce already contributing to our growing economy, closing many gaps experienced by employers. In a changing environment where our European commitments provide many opportunities for the UK to benefit from this new source of labour ( … ) [o]ur starting point is that employers should look first to recruit from the UK and the expanded EU before recruiting migrants from outside the EU. (Home Office, 2006: 6)

These pronouncements contain no reference to East Europeans (let alone Hungarians specifically) being desirable because they are white. The rationale is strictly economic. The question then becomes how (if at all) these economic motivations become racially informed or inflected. What we find in the current case is what a number of observers have referred to as institutionalized racism (Miles, 1989: 84–7), whereby racism is not explicit but rather implicitly embedded and reproduced in exclusionary institutional practices, routines, and cultures that both draw on and reproduce a logic of racialized difference. The evidence of institutionalized racism in the current A8 case can be found in the continuity in British immigration policy since the post-war period (see Miles, 1993: 157–64; Paul, 1997: 134–5; Shuster and Solomos, 2004: 267, 279). When there has been a need for foreign labour, it has often been white migrants from the continent (or Ireland) who have been deemed the most desirable (Kay and Miles, 1992: 166–76; Kushner, 2005: 220–1; McDowell, 2008: 60). Although not all immigration policy has been racialized, a pattern has emerged over the decades that reveals how racialized preferences have at times become embedded in institutional routines.

Current policy exempts A8 and other EU migrant workers from immigration control while subjecting other (non-European) migrants to tighter restrictions. The migration that thus requires management is that from outside of the EU (Home Office, 2002). This approach does not explicitly invoke racial categories because it does not have to: by favouring migrants from the EU, the UK is implicitly favouring white migrants (Favell, 2008: 704); those who by extension are unfavourable are non-white (Garner, 2007: 68–9; McGhee, 2009: 43–4; see Bonnett, 2000, on the links between Europeanness and whiteness). Whereas migration now, as before, is managed to maximize economic benefits, it is done in a way that seeks to minimize social disturbances (McGhee, 2009: 52–5). As spelled out by the Home Office in its Controlling our Borders paper (2005: 21), ‘migrants must be as economically active as possible; put as little burden on the state as possible; and be as socially integrated as possible.’ The correlation of the A8 migrants’ economic desirability with their European and racial affinities suggests that the logic of racism that was explicit in immigration policy in the past continues to underlie current policy as well, albeit in subtler forms (McDowell, 2008: 60–1; McGhee, 2009: 54; Schuster and Solomos, 2004: 267–8).

This is not to suggest that the architects of these policies were racist. East European migrant workers were not explicitly identified in racial terms as desirable, as were others before them. But institutional routines in the governing and administrative bodies that set and enforce immigration policy are making choices that (implicitly) reproduce these same colour-based logics. To be sure, Hungarians are practically invisible in these policies; they appear by name only in the lists of nationalities that comprise the A8 entrants. But they don’t need to be singled out to reap the benefits of an immigration policy that favours EU workers. Indeed, by virtue of not being named, they can claim (and reap the benefits of) membership in a larger category of (white) Europeans.

Putatively shared whiteness did not, however, earn Romanians or Bulgarians any special invitations to the UK. The A2 migrants paid for British anxiety over larger than expected numbers of A8 migrants in the form of new and strict immigration controls (Somerville, 2007: 137–8). As then Home Secretary John Reid explained, ‘Workers from the new [A8] member states have filled [the] gaps … [T]he UK will [thus] maintain controls on Romania’s and Bulgaria’s access to jobs’ (Hansard, 2006, columns 82–84WS). Romanians were not singled out for special treatment; they belonged to a larger category of A2 migrants. But membership in this category only earned them restrictions. These A2 workers were not restricted because they were not white (they were); shared whiteness simply did not inform these economically motivated decisions. Even European migrants could only enjoy access to the British labour market when the economic case was justified. But whilst immigration controls against Romanians were not racially motivated, they did produce racialized effects. Romanians were symbolically denuded of their whiteness by an immigration policy that refused to recognize them as full Europeans with the associated rights (and colour) such a status would have otherwise availed them.

When an economic rationale was later provided for limited access for A2 workers, however, shared whiteness (expressed as a preference for EU workers) again came into play. From 2007, A2 workers were granted exclusive access to certain low-skilled schemes that had previously been the reserve of non-EU workers. As Reid put it, the UK was ‘phasing out all low-skilled migration schemes for workers from outside the EU’ (Hansard, 2006, columns 82–84WS). Border and Immigration Minister Phil Woolas defended the renewal of these schemes a year later as ‘a prudent decision that will ensure the UK continues to benefit from the positive economic contribution Bulgarian and Romanian workers make, while protecting British workers and making sure the numbers coming here are managed in the national interest’ (UK Border Agency, 2008).

Whiteness thus comes in shades, as it is reflected by the changing imperatives of British immigration policy. Racialization does not only degrade; it can also upgrade. Policy that advantaged A8 (and, to a lesser extent, A2) migrants for economic reasons had the effect of making them white; policy that disadvantaged A2 migrants (in the form of tighter restrictions), even though uninformed by racialized preferences, still had the effect of making them less white. These implicit colour-based preferences are evidence of a continuing culture of institutionalized racism in British immigration policy. To be sure, policy throughout the post-war period has been motivated in the first instance by economic imperatives: the need for (cheap) foreign labour. Racial considerations, to the extent they have been present at all, enter the migration picture not as motivating but as mediating factors. Whiteness is thus not (only) a subtle determinant of immigration policy (McDowell, 2009: 28–9); it is also the contingent outcome of immigration policy, practices, and processes that operate according to other logics (e.g. Ignatiev, 1995; Kushner, 2005; Roediger, 1999).

Tabloid Media

If the institutionalized racism of immigration policy implicitly invokes colour as a basis of inclusion, the racism of the tabloid media explicitly features a culturalist discourse as a basis of exclusion. The media play an important yet distinctive role in defining and disseminating public understandings of migration: they define the normative limits of what is acceptable in society. They are not simply an uncritical mouthpiece for public policy, but have their own distinctive discursive strategies that reflect varied agendas and material interests (Van Dijk, 1991: 41–2). The media neatly package social reality into interpretative frames that distil that reality into more digestible bits that dovetail with and reinforce prevailing cultural assumptions about the world (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989: 2–5; Gamson et al., 1992: 384–6). The views of the social world preferred and proffered by the media are selective, creative, and prejudiced.

We adopt a frame-analytic approach (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989) to consider the ways the tabloid media’s coverage of Hungarian and Romanian migration has been racialized. Although East European migration to the UK is a relatively recent phenomenon, the tabloids’ reporting on it makes use of extant cultural tropes and racialized plotlines from previous migrations to frame the current one in ways that remind the British public that the more things change, the more they stay the same (Goldberg, 1993: 55–6). The racialized framings found in these current migrations have thus been de rigueur in framing past migration to the UK (Cole, 2009; Small and Solomos, 2006). Migrants are presented as aliens in ways that call for explanation; racialized framings provide part of that explanation. Our analysis considers how Hungarian and Romanian migrations have been subject to varying degrees of racialization.

Our search for migration-related coverage of Hungarians in the national press generated 94 articles; the same search for Romanians netted 691 articles (we used Lexis-Nexis to search for ‘migration’ and/or ‘migrant’ for both Hungarians and Romanians between 2004 and 2009). We then examined the content of that coverage for racialized framings. We focused on the tabloid media because the overwhelming majority of those framings were found in tabloids. Our analysis was not intended to demonstrate the extent to which tabloid coverage is racialized, but rather the ways in which it is racialized. Our sample is thus not intended to be representative of all tabloid coverage (on variation in the tabloids, see Statham, 2002).

The first racialized frame we consider is the ‘numbers game’ (Van Dijk, 2000: 45–7). This frame draws attention to and indeed amplifies the scope and scale of migration. Pre-2004 estimates of modest numbers of workers arriving in Britain were spectacularly eclipsed by the arrival of 1.5 million migrants in subsequent years. The tabloids took this as license for employing their favourite liquid metaphors of floods, deluges, inundations, swamps, and streams, not to mention hordes and invasions, to describe the new arrivals from East Europe (Charteris-Black, 2006: 570–3; Light and Young, 2009: 286–8). Headlines like ‘One million flood in’ (The Sun, 9 February 2005) and ‘Immigrant invasion’ (Daily Mail, 22 November 2006) captured (and legitimated) public concern with larger than expected numbers of A8 migrants.

Such tropes also figured prominently in reporting on the A2 migrations despite their much lower (and regulated) numbers. ‘Queue here for Britain: Bulgaria and Romania aren’t even in the EU yet. But already, as this disturbing dispatch reveals, they’re ready to come here in the hundreds of thousands’ (Daily Mail, 1 September 2006). The Daily Express (23 August 2006) predicted ‘450,000 Romanians’ would ‘invade’ the UK in an article entitled ‘Get ready for the Romanian invasion’ (quoted in Light and Young, 2009: 287). The numbers game was also connected to issues of competition with British workers: the Mail on Sunday (20 August 2006) carried the headline ‘20,000 Romanians sign up to build London’s Olympics; Rush for jobs sparks wage cut fears for UK workers’ and the News of the World (6 January 2008) followed with a report on a more unlikely area of competition: ‘An influx of penniless folk from former Communist states, particularly Romania, is forcing our own tramps, buskers and beggars out of their favourite patches … as the foreign invasion continues at a terrifying rate.’ As in other instances of migration, this reporting helped ‘make maximal noise over minimal numbers’ (Joppke, 1997: 288).

When the numbers become the story, they invite concern and even incite fear (Kastoryano, 2002: 20, 22). These concerns are exacerbated by describing the migrations as ‘hordes’, ‘floods’, and ‘invasions’. Terms such as these are not value neutral but value laden; they depict the migrants as a nuisance at best, a menace at worst. The ‘numbers game’ veers into its racialized variants when migration is interpreted and represented in alarmist terms that both valorize and essentialize the migrants as the cause for that alarm. Such framings are not openly or crudely racist; rather they hint at and simultaneously validate taken-for-granted assumptions about the relationship between immigration and ‘race’ accrued from the past (Goldberg, 1993: 47–8, 55–6). Recycled references to ‘floods’ and ‘invasions’ are the linchpins to these past migrations: they evoke racialized understandings of migration by juxtaposing past migrations against their current versions.

Our next frame is ‘crime’. Reporting on migrants and minorities from other contexts has been shown to be disproportionately concerned with crime (Hutchings and Valentino, 2004: 398; McLaren and Johnson, 2007: 716–17, 724–5). A ‘crime’ frame posits a tight, even inherent link between migrant and criminal. Here again Romanians more than Hungarians have been subjected to this ‘crime’ framing. The Romanians’ reputation preceded them: even before Romania joined the EU, press reports warned of ‘illegal’ migrants arriving in the undercarriages of the Eurostar with forged documents and unsavoury intentions. Since 2007, Romanians have been associated with cashpoint and credit card theft, child trafficking, begging, and prostitution. In a story titled ‘Our crime wave is good news … for Romania’, The Sun reported that ‘In the first six months of this year, … Romanian migrants were responsible for 1080 offences, compared with 135 offences last year’ (20 September 2007). The Daily Mail (17 April 2008) followed with a report on a leaked Whitehall memo claiming that:

… Romanian gangs were behind an astonishing 80 to 85 per cent of cash machine crimes in Britain and responsible for a sharp rise in street violence, people-trafficking, prostitution, theft and fraud. Indeed, so many have now moved to London that Romania is enjoying a drop in crime. … One police operation alone identified 200 children from Romania who are thieving on the streets of London.

Even Hungarians, typically invisible in the press, still made cameos when the subject was crime. The Daily Mail (27 June 2009) ran a story on an alleged Hungarian paedophile with the headline ‘This girl was murdered by a serial sex offender, one of countless foreign criminals stalking our streets. What legal lunacy allows this?’

This reporting is not only anti-immigration, it is anti-immigrant: it doesn’t stop at criticizing immigration policy, it impugns the integrity of the migrants themselves. Repeated association of East European migrants with crime, particularly the sensational variety, presents these migrants not as upstanding workers trying to eek out a living but as dangerous criminals and social parasites preying on their well-meaning hosts (Light and Young, 2009: 289, 292). Crime in this sense does not simply describe what these migrants do; it describes what they are. And herein lurks racialization: the moral deficiencies of the criminal are indiscriminately ascribed to migrants as part of their innate character.

We find even more pronounced racialization with our ‘Roma’ frame. Much of the reporting on East European migrants depicts the region whence they came as poor, corrupt, conflict-prone, and culturally stunted; in a word, ‘Balkan’ (Light and Young, 2009; see more generally Todorova, 1997). These assumptions are concretized and accentuated when the ‘Roma’ frame is utilized. This frame draws on and reproduces stereotypes of the Roma as epitomizing and embodying cultural backwardness. It often appears coupled with the ‘numbers game’ and ‘crime’ (see Clark and Campbell, 2000: 35–8), thus Romacizing migrant ‘hordes’ and their criminal tendencies, and in so doing insinuating and accentuating their supposed racial inferiority. The Roma frame is particularly effective because it taps into and fleshes out a long history of both local and imported anti-Roma prejudices. East European Roma gained notoriety in the UK in the late 1990s when they began arriving as supposedly bogus asylum seekers. These Roma were depicted as arriving in large families, living in overcrowded homes in squalid conditions, and having a propensity for crime, begging, and spreading disease. In other words, they stepped right into home-grown narratives about Gypsies and Travellers (Clark and Campbell, 2000: 31–2; Guy, 2003: 70). The Roma frame draws on these extant prejudices toward Gypsies and Travellers, acting as a local reference point to which understandings of newly arrived East European Roma can be meaningfully anchored. Conflating East European Roma with British Travellers transfers and translates familiar fears and anxieties to otherwise unfamiliar new arrivals.

The Roma frame was liberally applied to other East Europeans who would not necessarily identify themselves as Roma. In particular, Romanians (especially those supposedly involved in shadowy or criminal activities such as begging, trafficking, thievery, or prostitution) have been frequently described in tabloid accounts as simply ‘Roma’ (Cahn, 2004: 483, 490; Woodcock, 2007: 497–8). Romanians have stridently attempted to reject this link, frequently by turning to their own racist strategies to distinguish themselves from the Roma (Stevens, 2004; Woodcock, 2007). In bandying about the ‘Roma’ label (along with a host of less politically correct variants), the tabloids repeatedly conflate Roma with Romanian, thus racializing the latter as an example of the former. Perhaps for reasons of demography (Romania has a large Roma minority), perhaps for the simple and unfortunate accident of nomenclature (Woodcock, 2007: 505–6), Romanians have suffered more than other East Europeans from this category conflation. The inherent ambiguity of Roma identity (neither inscribed in passports nor found in official immigration statistics) has had the effect of delivering considerable power to the media in attaching and fixing Roma identities.

Attaching the ‘Roma’ label to Roma conveys the stigma that has accrued to the label; attaching it to Romanians transfers that stigma to them. An article in the Mail on Sunday (13 May 2007) described Slough as being ‘invaded by Romanian gipsy orphans’. The following year The Sun (28 February 2008) ran a story with the headline ‘Who ate all the swans?’ Apparently, it concluded, ‘East European immigrants’: ‘Piles of swan carcasses stripped for food have been found at a squalid camp used by East European immigrants’. A ‘Romanian Bible’ found at the scene hinted at the perpetrators’ identities. The Daily Mail reported a similar story the previous year: ‘Sorry, poached swan’s off: Calls for clampdown on river bandits from Eastern Europe’ (7 August 2007). This article reported that ‘hungry, knife-wielding Eastern Europeans’ were poaching ‘hundreds’ of swans from British canals. But the Daily Mail didn’t get the scoop, either. Brubaker et al. (2006: 323–4) described an anecdote from the early 1990s:

… so widely circulated as to have become part of popular folklore in postcommunist Romania. ( … ) [I]t was said several Romanian Gypsies had been arrested in Vienna for eating a swan they had captured and roasted over an open fire in a city park. ( … ) ‘Swan-eating’ indexed a wide range of ‘uncivilized’ behavior allegedly practiced by Romanian Gypsies, behavior that came to be associated with Romanians in general.

These stories are interesting not so much for their avian angle but for repackaging an urban legend about swan-skewering Roma. Different perpetrators are shuffled with shifting backdrops, but the basic swan-poaching plotline is recycled more or less intact.

These accounts thus provide local content and context for Roma/Gypsy/Traveller stereotypes, connecting Romanians and other categories of migrants to unsavoury and uncivilized activities like crime, benefit shopping, and other morally repugnant endeavours (Clark and Campbell, 2000: 35–8). Affixing a Roma frame to these activities stigmatizes and racializes the people associated with them. The Roma frame is effective as a fulcrum for depriving migrants of their Europeanness, and, by extension, their whiteness (see Bonnett, 2000). Linking migrants to the unsavoury activities and cultural backwardness associated with the Roma (sometimes replete with allusions to the Roma’s purported Indian, or non-European, origins) calls into question the migrants’ civilizational credentials. The liberal application of the Roma frame to these other categories of migrants impugns not only their Europeanness but their whiteness as well, thus exacerbating their marginalization (see Bonnett, 2000: 22–3).

All of these frames present immigration as a problem; the people responsible for these problems are the migrants. Racialization occurs when migrants are collectively disparaged with reference to a combination of cultural, social, and/or quasi-biological traits. This is not the crude racism of epithets and insults; rather, it is the racialization of innuendo and inference. Racialized interpretations of migration reside not only in these discrete extracts considered here; rather, innuendo and inference extend them to a larger and growing narrative that attributes the problems of migration to the essential characteristics of the migrants.

Our goal in discussing the tabloids has not been to establish the veracity of these accounts, but to demonstrate the ways in which their framing has at times been racially inflected. Until recently, Romanians have not figured prominently in the British popular imagination; it has been the Poles who have stolen the show with their parading plumbers. Despite their lower numbers, however, Romanians have received the bulk of (negative) attention in our analysis. We did not intentionally ignore the Hungarians; the tabloids did this for us. Hungarians thus feature as our negative case: the low incidence of reporting on them is evidence of a lower incidence of racialization.

We posit two reasons for this variation. First, the economic and social marginalization of Romanians makes it easier to discursively marginalize them as well. It is not that racism informed a policy of exclusion, but rather a policy of exclusion (and the economic marginalization it subsequently engendered) contributed to the tabloids’ racialization of these migrants. By granting Romanians only limited access to the UK labour market, British immigration policy bestowed on them only limited access to the category of Europeans. The point of departure for the tabloids thus saw the Romanians’ European (and, by extension, white) credentials already on unsure footing. Second, the current depiction of Romanians draws from, dovetails into, and fleshes out an ongoing narrative of Romanians and Roma in the UK and Europe more widely (Light and Young, 2009: 290–2). Romania gained notoriety in the 1990s in the UK with its post-Ceauşescu images of AIDS babies and orphanages (Light and Young, 2009: 292; Negoita, 2010: 95–6). The next instalment was a sudden (though ultimately modest) increase in Roma asylum applicants in the late 1990s from East Europe (Cahn, 2004; Stevens, 2004). Alarmist press reports at the time helped cement the ‘iconic figure of the Romani beggar from Romania’ in the British consciousness (Guy, 2003: 73). Associations of Roma with Romanians were compounded by linking both to more stable narratives about Gypsies and Travellers in the UK. Around this same time, more than two million Romanians were being received with scorn, often in racialized forms, across other parts of Europe (Culic, 2008; Favell and Nebe, 2009). By 2007, public anxiety and frustration surrounding the large numbers of A8 migrants in the UK fuelled and legitimated concerns with and fears of Romanians. Those arriving subsequently thus stepped into an emerging narrative that readily lent itself to different forms of racialization.

Hungarians, in contrast, did not benefit from this sort of emplotment in a grander narrative. Random associations with goulash and 1950s football have not added up to a coherent narrative; Hungarians are thus subsumed into a more generic category of East Europeans. Hungarian migration lacks the critical mass (vis-a-vis Poles), the legal restrictions that might otherwise contribute to their marginalization, and the skeleton of an existing narrative in which their current presence might be coherently and consistently situated and articulated. Indeed, it is likely that a different sort of ethno-national elision is taking place, whereby Hungarians are simply seen as Poles or East Europeans. Local Brits, unable (or uninspired) to sort out the cz’s, cs’s, and sz’s on Starbucks nametags typically lump all East European migrants together. Stigmatization of Hungarians, to the extent it occurs at all, is typically mislabelled and therefore arbitrary (see Light and Young, 2009: 290–1).

At the same time Hungarians have benefited from a sort of racial elision, whereby they disappear into an even broader category of whites. Immigration policy that granted Hungarians privileged access to a generic category of Europeans implicitly made them white as well; the tabloid media’s disregard for Hungarians silently endorsed this whitewashing. Hungarians as such are the beneficiaries of powerful cultural assumptions that link whiteness to Europeanness (Bonnett, 2000).

The racialization found in the tabloids does not rely on somatic differences but instead invokes and valorizes various cultural and social attributes of the migrants. This is a kind of cultural racism: essentialized cultural and social characteristics (criminal tendencies, uncivilized behaviour, and moral deficiencies) are indiscriminately imputed to people identified with ethno-national labels (see Gilroy, 1987: 42–6; Modood, 2005: 11–18, 37–41; Taguieff, 1990: 116–17; on ‘xeno-racism’ see Cole, 2009: 1677–9; Fekete, 2009: 19–42). But whilst this cultural racism does not make explicit reference to somatic difference, it nevertheless contributes to its reproduction. Cultural tropes like the west, Europe, and modernity that are conveyed through these framings all carry unambiguous colour connotations (Bonnett, 2008): those to whom membership is bestowed in these categories are lightened and those to whom membership is denied are darkened. The tabloids’ invocation of these cultural tropes thus contributes to colour-based forms of exclusion.

Conclusion

Racialization, we have argued, occurs when this category of ‘race’ is invoked in various institutional and discursive practices to make sense of migration and valorize migrants. We have opted for a racialization perspective not only because it conveys the stigmatization and essentialism exhibited in the current case but also because it links this present migration with past migrations. In past and present, practices of racialization have not only rendered migration meaningful, they have simultaneously reproduced and legitimated ‘race’ in ways that contribute to the structuring of uneven social relations (Miles, 1982: 157, 1989: 74–5; Omi and Winant, 1986: 64).

Our comparative focus on immigration policy and the tabloid media has uncovered distinctive though ultimately complementary forms of racialization. Current immigration policy resonates with and partially reproduces a legacy of institutionalized racism from the post-war period. Assumptions about shared whiteness operate as implicit criteria for racialized inclusion: East Europeans are desirable because they conform to racialized understandings of Europeanness. The tabloids, in contrast, have consistently if unevenly applied racialized frames to their reporting on these current migrations in ways that draw on and reproduce a logic of cultural racism. Here it is not shared whiteness operating as a basis of inclusion, but cultural difference operating as a criterion for exclusion. Our analysis has shown how these distinctive logics of colour and culture are combined to produce complementary effects: the dissemination and legitimation of public discourses on racialized difference.

These processes of racialization have occurred in different ways and to different degrees for Hungarians and Romanians. Hungarians have benefited from an immigration policy that, whilst motivated by economic considerations, was underlined by racialized preferences embedded in the sediment of decades of immigration practices. The consignment of Hungarians to a European (and white) majority rendered them more or less invisible; the tabloid media did not disturb this invisibility. Romanians, in contrast, were subjected to strict immigration controls, not because they didn’t match the preferred racial profile of migrants (they did, at least nominally), but because concern over the numbers of A8 migrants trumped both economic and racialized rationales for letting in more migrants. The tabloid media in turn reinforced and complicated the implicit racial profile of Romanians through their culturally inflected discourse of exclusion.

Research on whiteness has often focused on the perspective of the white majority, for whom whiteness is often (though not always) unquestioned as the norm against which other non-white identities are problematized and therefore racialized (see recent review articles by Bonnett, 2008, and Garner, 2009). Our study in contrast has focused on the (nominally white) immigrant minority perspective, for whom whiteness is not and cannot be not taken for granted but instead is subjected to diverse forms of contestation and negotiation (Ignatiev, 1995; Roediger, 1999). Whiteness from this minority perspective is thus not a default demographic starting point for racializing others but the contingent and tenuous end point of being racialized by others (Garner, 2009: 794–5). Our analysis has shown how two institutions, immigration policy and the tabloid media, each differentially invested in various aspects of migration, have contributed to the whitening and darkening of Hungarian and Romanian migrants. Whiteness in this view is a claim, a stance (Brubaker, 2002), the object or stakes of struggle: it can be bolstered (or undercut) by immigration policies that bestow upon some (but deny to others) membership in a privileged category of (white) Europeans, and challenged (or buttressed) by a tabloid media that has appointed itself as a watchdog against dangerous incursions of alien culture.

Whiteness is thus not a fixed variable that unequivocally determines the migrants’ life chances but rather a continuous variable whose particular hues at any given time or place are the ongoing product of these sorts of processes of racialization (Garner, 2006: 264–5; Nayak, 2005: 147–8). Immigration policy whitened Hungarian migrants; the tabloid media darkened Romanian migrants. ‘Race’ is not an essential trait of the migrants but the ongoing contingent outcome of these dynamic processes of racialization. Our comparative study demonstrates how similar dynamics of racialization produce substantially different racialized outcomes. Two cohorts of migrants, neighbours in East Europe and phenotypically indistinguishable from one another (and indeed from a white British majority), are dramatically lightened and darkened by immigration policy and the tabloid media.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number RES-000-22-33-58) for the financial support that made this research possible. The authors also thank Michael Banton, Gregor McLennan, Tariq Modood, Therese O’Toole, and Paul Statham for critical feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Jon E Fox is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies at the University of Bristol. He is also the Assistant Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol. His research interests include nationalism, ethnicity, and migration.

Laura Moroşanu is a PhD student in the School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her PhD explores the transnational ties of Romanian migrants in London. She was a Research Assistant on the project on which the present article was based.

Eszter Szilassy is a Social Scientist in the School of Social and Community Medicine at the University of Bristol. Her research interests include ethnicity, immigration, and multiculturalism. She was a Research Assistant on the project on which the present article was based.

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