Ascriptions of migration: Racism, migratism and Brexit

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of scholarly attempts to make sense of the nexus of race and migration in Brexit-era UK discourse. To illustrate my arguments that intend to challenge and extend existing scholarship, I discuss exemplary snapshots from news articles, blog posts and social media sources. Building on critical race and postcolonial studies as theoretical background, I trace the phenomenon of naming the discrimination against East Europeans – which is undeniably one of the driving forces of the Brexit discussion – ‘racism’. Sometimes, and this shows the pattern of the overgeneralization of the term, ‘racism’ gets extended to name the post-Brexit exclusion of any EU nationals. This use of ‘racism’, however, is based on methodological nationalism and conceptual whiteness as my analyses show. To make sense of the overlapping racist, anti-immigration and anti-EU rhetoric that marks the pre- and post-Brexit moment in the United Kingdom, this article introduces the concept of ‘migratism’ – a name for the power relation that ascribes migration to certain people, constructing them as migrants and discriminating against them. The terms ‘migratism’ and ‘migratization’ function grammatically in an analogue way to ‘racism’ and ‘racialization’. If racism is the power relation that racializes (=ascribes race to) people, migratism if the power relation that migratizes (=ascribes migration to) people. The terms are not symmetrical but have a complicated interdependent relationship. Racism and migratism are bound to each other and play a crucial role in organizing the Western nation state. The suggested concepts foreground a postcolonial understanding of race and racism and make it possible to analyse both migration-based discrimination and discrimination based on perceived migration in violence and hate crimes connected to the Brexit referendum.

Introduction

“…Once the citizens of new EU member states gained freedom of movement after the EU's 2004-13 expansion into Eastern Europe, the phenomenon that scholars have variously called 'contingent', 'liminal', 'ambivalent', or 'ambiguous' whiteness became a mass lived experience for numerous Eastern Europeans. 87 Markers of language, accent, and appearance all contributed to Eastern European workers in Western Europe being racialised as 'not quite white'. 88 Suddenly confronted with Westerners' curiosity about where they belonged within the global racial hierarchy, Eastern Europeans became subjected to 'the will to power and the regime of truth' that, according to Stuart Hall, give racialised signifiers of difference their material force.…”

Introduction: migration and nationalism

“…Here, the writings typically refer to affect, nationalist ideologies, the biopolitics of immigration, (settler) colonialism, (discursive or racial) formations, or discursive or racial practices and policies. In this sense, nationalism insofar as it strengthens the nation-state, is by its nature 'exclusionary,' and racism is central to organizing at least the western nation-state (e.g., Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991;Higham, 1955;Tudor, 2022). Different variations within this critical literature have been expressed.…”

A power-knowledge approach

“…Another by-product of deportation regimes is our categorical fetishism (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018); we reproduce the regime's categories when we select people with the experience of deportation for our interviews and when we write about 'deportees' (I am well-aware that I am doing so in this chapter as well). We migrantise our research participants as we discursively produce them as 'objects of study' (Dahinden & Anderson, 2021;Scheel & Tazzioli, 2022;Tudor, 2022). In order to understand the processes our research participants go through, we seek to identify and understand the legal procedures to which they are subject; this often leads to headaches (see Chapter 3 by Nevena Nancheva in this book).…”