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.

This paper investigates the potential rupture that the United Kingdom's "Brexit" referendum of June 23, 2016, might bring about in intra-European Union youth mobilities, with a specific focus on the London region. In many respects, and counter-intuitively given the Brexit result, London has already become a "Eurocity": a magnet for young people, both highly educated and less educated, from all over Europe who, especially since the turn of the millennium, have flocked to the city and its wider region to work, study, and play. Now, these erstwhile open-ended migration trajectories have been potentially disrupted by a referendum result that few anticipated, and whose consequential results are still unclear. The main theoretical props for our analysis are the notions of "liquid migration," "tactics of belonging," "whiteness," "privilege," and "affect." Data are drawn from 60 in-depth interviews with Irish, Italian, and Romanian young-adult students and higher and lower skilled workers, carried out in late 2015 and early 2016, plus 27 reinterviews carried out in late 2016, post-Brexit. Results indicate participants' profound and generally negative reaction to Brexit and, as a consequence, a diversity of uncertainties and of plans over their future mobility: either to stay put using "tactics of belonging," or to return home earlier than planned, or to move on to another country. Finally, we find evidence that new hierarchies and boundaries are drawn between intra-European Union migrants as a result of Brexit. (Engbersen & Snel, 2013). We find these constitutive elements of liquid migration attractive for our study of contemporary youth migration within Europe, although some of our findings suggest that flexibility, openness to opportunities, and the search for security are more realistic characteristics of migrant motivations and behaviour than "intentional unpredictability."In the literature on youth life-course transitions, two concepts are important for our analysis in this paper. On the one hand, the "inclination to constant change" referred to in Bauman's quote above is advanced by Worth's (2009) notion of youth and young-adulthood as a continuous process of "becoming": we see this as more relevant and appropriate to our analysis than the traditional practice of agedefined life stages. On the other hand, the reality of sudden changes due to "fragility and vulnerability" (Bauman again) is nicely highlighted in the term "rupture" (Hörschelmann, 2011). Taken together, the notions of "rupture" and "becomings," combined with the framework of liquid migration, constitute a useful conceptual toolkit for understanding the social and spatial mobilities of young European Union (EU) citizens, both before and after the referendum of June 23, 2016, which saw 51.9% vote "leave" and 48.1% "remain."According to Bauman (2000, p. x), the key to the puzzle of liquid modernity is the premise that the "liquidity versus solidity conundrum"is not a dichotomy but that both conditions should be seen and treated as a couple "lock...

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 Britain's racialised status hierarchies.

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.

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