2004 enlargement extended the freedom of movement of workers and persons to ten states and thus rescaled the state's power to regulate citizenship and movement. We examined how this important shift in scalar relations has been registered by discourses about migrants. To this end, we analyzed how the U.K. and the E.U. were scaled in the representations of post-E.U. accession Polish migrants in U.K. newspapers. Representations reconstructed the national scale, in this case Britain, through moralizing and ambivalent immigration discourses. However, we also found that the newspapers constructed the E.U. scale in ways that advanced open market values and erased the progressive potential of the free movement for workers. The newspapers rearticulated the changing relations of scale between the state and the E.U. in ways that legitimized differential levels of citizenship and precarious positions for both migrant and domestic workers.
The United Kingdom was one of four countries to open its labor market to Polish workers post-European Union enlargement in 2004. In this study, we analyze the articulation of discourses of neoliberalism and nationalism through examination of mediated representations of Polish immigrants in four British newspapers. We argue that within the coverage analyzed, across format and political orientation, neoliberal values were promoted and the seeming tension between the two ideologies was articulated in ways that could be discursively mobilized to further particular political, economic, and media objectives. Polish immigrants were constituted as discursive pawns employed by various political and media entities toward these contrasting agendas.
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