Comparing the racialization of Central-East European migrants in Japan and the UK

Abstract

The article deploys the lens of the race-migration nexus (Erel et al., Ethnic and Racial Studies 39:1339–1360, 2016) to compare the racialization of migrants in the UK and Japan. It draws on qualitative data on the experiences of Central-East European (CEE) migrants in the two countries to unpack how whiteness is constructed in relation to different histories and patterns of immigration in each national context. While CEE migrants in Japan benefit from being perceived as implicitly white and Western ‘foreigners’, their whiteness represents a form of enduring exclusion from the ethno-nationalist Japanese society. In the UK, changing political contexts and internal European hierarchies of whiteness contribute to CEE migrants’ ambiguous position in an increasingly anti-migrant society. By comparing the mechanisms of racialization in each country through the analytics of visibility and exclusion, the article furthers ongoing debates about the intersections of race and migration. It furthermore extends the comparative analysis of whiteness to a non-Western setting, making a significant contribution to the study of local/global articulations of race.

Two-tier EU citizenship: Disposable Eastern European workers during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Through free mobility, Europeans’ understandings of community, membership and democracy were to be reconfigured, and the lives of other EU citizens and their claims to equal treatment, equal opportunity and fair play were to become part of their realities and of a shared legal as well as moral code (Kostakopoulou, 2014). And yet, in one of the clearest reflections of the EU’s internal hierarchies and uneven distribution of power, the enlargements did not immediately endow Eastern European migrant workers with the same rights as their Western European counterparts (Drnovšek Zorko and Debnár, 2021). Rather, the EU15 1 club decided to implement transitional arrangements, a series of labour market measures put in place to restrain the potential inflow of migrant workers from the EU8 2 and EU2 3 accession countries (Ulceluse and Kahanec, 2019).…”

“…All EU15 member states except for Sweden, Ireland and the United Kingdom implemented these measures for the EU8 countries, and apart from Sweden and Finland, all implemented them for the EU2 countries. In most EU15 countries, the arrangements remained in effect until 2011 and 2014, respectively, extensively shaping the economic opportunities of Eastern European migrant workers in Western Europe (Drnovšek Zorko and Debnár, 2021).…”

The ambiguous lives of ‘the other whites’: Class and racialisation of Eastern European migrants in the UK

“…The racialisation of ‘new’ Europeans was already noticeable following the EU enlargement, with research focused on the hierarchies of desirability, deservingness, accents and other markers, boundary-making processes vis-a-vis non-white individuals (e.g. Burrell, 2010; Drnovšek Zorko & Debnár, 2021; Fox et al, 2012). There is now a burgeoning literature exploring how these processes of racialisation have been strengthened by Brexit (e.g.…”

The material effects of Whiteness: Institutional racism in the German welfare state

“…Yet, Whiteness, as this literature also points out, is not merely constituted by phenotype but assumes distinctive contextual meanings – including against the backdrop of regionally specific histories of race. When we examine institutional dynamics of race, we thus need to consider more explicitly how Whiteness is configured distinctively within different settings (for a comparative exploration of Japan and the UK, see for instance Drnovšek Zorko & Debnár, 2021). What is more, the literature on Whiteness and institutional racism has, to date, engaged too little with the distinctive material effects constructions of Whiteness may have for differently racialised groups.…”