Laura Moroşanu

The racialization of the new European migration to the UK

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.

Denying Discrimination: Status, ‘Race’, and the Whitening of Britain's New Europeans

There is mounting evidence to suggest that East European migrants in the UK have been victims of discrimination. Reports of pay gaps point to the possibility of structural discrimination, restrictions on employment operate as a kind of legal discrimination, and politicians and the media have constructed East European migrants as different and at times threatening. The Hungarians and Romanians we spoke with in Bristol also reported some discrimination, albeit in ways that deflected its racialised connotations. But they also denied that they were victims of discrimination. Why would the supposed victims of discrimination deny discrimination? We argue they did this to attenuate, and potentially reverse, the status degradations they suffered as disadvantaged and at times racialised labour migrants in Britain. We examine two discursive strategies they employed to negotiate this higher status. First, they claimed a higher social class status by embracing the meritocratic values of the dominant class. Second, they claimed a higher racial status by emphasising their whiteness and Europeanness. These were discursive attempts to reposition themselves more favourably in Britains racialised status hierarchies.

‘No smoke without fire’: strategies of coping with stigmatised migrant identities

This paper examines how ethnicity informs the ways in which Romanian migrants in the UK cope with stigmatisation. Instead of assuming ethnicity’s relevance, our purpose is to examine how responses to stigmatisation may or may not become ethnicised. We consider two strategies. The first strategy invokes and reinforces the salience of ethnicity, albeit in a negative and thus still stigmatised way. Instead of countering stigma with a positive reappraisal of ‘Romanianness’, some Romanians seek to transfer the stigma onto the ethnic Roma with whom they are frequently associated. This strategy thus acknowledges stigma, but attempts to detach it from the self and reattach it to the ethnicised other. The second strategy emphasises individual skills and accomplishments to overshadow the effects of a stigmatised ethnicity. Ethnicity is made less salient by this switch to a register of personal skill and worth. Exploring the interplay of these coping strategies, we highlight the fluctuating relevance, rather than declining relevance, of an ‘ethnic lens’ (Glick Schiller et al., 2006) in individual migrants’ de-stigmatising discourses and practices that produce, transform or at times elide different ethnic boundaries.

Professional bridges: migrants’ ties with natives and occupational advancement

This article examines how Romanians in London use native contacts for occupational advancement. Contrary to common associations of ‘bridging’ ties with ‘weak’ ties useful for upward mobility, it illustrates the differentiated nature, role, and resources of native contacts. Drawing on Bourdieu’s capital theory, it shows how weak bridging ties with natives facilitate migrants’ access to better jobs within lower-skilled sectors, whereas strong ties with natives generate distinct cultural resources often required for high-skilled occupations. I consider two strategies of converting strong bridging ties into cultural capital, signalling some limitations of weak ties in facilitating career advancement: mobilizing British friends to act as ‘cultural brokers’, and immersion in British professional networks to acquire and demonstrate local cultural capital. The findings enhance our understanding of bridging social capital and its variable role in enabling upward mobility.

Researching migrants’ diverse social relationships: from ethnic to cosmopolitan sociability?

This article critically examines ‘everyday’ cosmopolitanist approaches to migrants’ social relationships to call for a more nuanced understanding of how ethnicity may inform cosmopolitan ties and aspirations. Research on migrants’ everyday cosmopolitanism tends to either focus on individuals’ engagement with ethnic difference, or highlight commonalities that unite people across ethnic boundaries, treating ethnicity as a coexisting form of identity or solidarity. This article challenges this divide, proposing a framework for a more systematic examination of how ethnicity may facilitate, fragment or fade in cosmopolitan encounters or aspirations, starting from migrants’ perspective. Using examples from empirical research with Romanians in London, and other studies of everyday cosmopolitanism, the analysis illustrates the multiple ways in which ethnicity may shape the development and management of cosmopolitan ties, beyond the celebration of ethnic difference or recognition of persisting ethnic identities that predominate in extant research. Furthermore, it problematises the notion of ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism, exposing some of the difficulties to achieve this in practice. Whilst expanding our understanding of ethnicity within cosmopolitan sociability, the article thus calls for further reflection on how different participants imagine and negotiate cosmopolitan ventures, ethnic difference and boundaries, instead of assuming, as often done, that they can simply reconcile them.

Growing up abroad: Italian and Romanian migrants’ partial transitions to adulthood

ABSTRACT Drawing on in-depth interviews with young Italians and Romanians, representing two of the largest “old” and “new” European populations in Britain, this paper examines migrants’ experiences in the spheres of work, family and “home”, and their narratives of “growing up” abroad, to enhance our understanding of youth transitions to adulthood in the context of intra-EU migration. Contrary to accounts that see migration as a strategy to either delay or advance adulthood, our analysis offers a more complex picture, showing how migration may unevenly affect transitions to adulthood, advancing some, and delaying others. Furthermore, we extend debates around the meaning of adulthood, illustrating the central role migration plays in generating feelings of “growing up”, even when traditional markers of adulthood are absent, and how these are negotiated transnationally in relation to home-based peers, in ways that combine old and new understandings of adulthood.