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Hungarian and Romanian migrant workers in the UK: Racism without racial difference?

Grant reference: RES-000-22-3358

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Conference paper/presentation details

The whitening of East European migrant labourers in the UK
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 more limited entry to the UK. In many respects, these migrants looked like past migrants to the UK: they left poorer parts of the world in search of work and the better life in the UK. But in other respects, they looked different: they were white. The link between racism and migration is well documented. But what happens when migrant and host are supposedly the same ‘race’? Whilst there has been increasing recognition of the ways in which the migrants have been targets of racism, there has been less attention focussed on how these same migrants are also the perpetrators of racism. The purpose of this paper is to explain how ‘race’ is wielded by different segments of the East European migrant community to assert and defend the relatively privileged position their ‘whiteness’ affords them in the UK’s racialised labour market hierarchies. Our study of Hungarians (representing the larger and unregulated wave of 2004 migrants) and Romanians (representing the smaller and more regulated wave of 2007 migrants) considers not only differences in sending context but, more importantly, differences in the local labour market context of the UK in explaining variation in the quality, intensity, and direction of racialisation. ‘Race’ is the language invoked and evoked by migrant workers to describe and ultimately constitute difference in the labour market.
http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1w6ig/BSAAnnualConference2/resources/229.htm
English

Primary contributor

Author Jon Fox

Additional details

No
11 April 2012
British Sociological Association annual conference : sociology in an age of austerity
Leeds
11 April 2012