The Janus face of precarity – Securitisation of Roma mobility in the UK

Abstract

Technological developments and the free movement of people within the EU have enabled Member States to implement new geopolitical control measures to increase migration control and social sorting of undesired migrant groups. As part of a securitisation process, these measures are often expanded upon and justified in terms of economic threat that aims to restrain ‘opportunist Central East European migrants’, who are associated with welfare dependence and cheap labour. Although unemployed Roma migrants are exposed to social exclusion due to the stigma of ‘benefit shoppers’, this paper explores how current neoliberal labour market structures facilitate new securitisation processes and fuel the precarity of Roma, even if they are employed in the host country. Based on a multi-sited ethnography completed in The United Kingdom, it will be illustrated how communitarianism of Member States stratifies the moral values of migrants’ labour in a manner that defines the preconditions of social inclusion of newcomers in host societies. In short, this paper argues that even for migrants who are not welfare dependent and who are self-sustaining, their social inclusion is defined by engagement in the sort of labour that is culturally acknowledged by the host society.

The Politics of Free Movement of People in the United Kingdom: Beyond Securitization and De‐securitization?

“…In our case, such stories would show us how self‐sufficient entrepreneurial citizen‐subjects can very quickly be rendered as dependent and delinquent ‘others’ when navigating the interconnected vagaries of a neoliberal labour market and a set of social rights conditional on prior economic activity. They would reveal how EU citizens can, through no fault of their own, lose their precarious jobs and thereafter fail to meet welfare conditions; show us how those who cannot produce documentation because they worked in informal employment can also fall foul of those conditions; recount how part‐time workers and the low‐paid (disproportionately women and minorities) have had their work re‐classified as ‘marginal’ such that they are denied welfare; highlight the ways in which the victims of domestic abuse have lost access to welfare after leaving their (economically active) abuser on whose worker status they depended (for a range of these stories, see O'Brien's (2017) vital book); draw attention to the plight of already‐vilified groups such as Roma, whose economic strategies render them particularly prone to exclusion from social rights (Brown, 2021; Nagy, 2018); and describe how destitute EU citizens become homeless and subject to deportation (Bramley et al, 2021). Such stories would be clear that, with the end of FMoP, such marginalization remains a reality for those EU citizens in the UK – many of whom were already among the most precarious – granted a ‘pre‐settled’ status.…”

Economic Migration of Eastern Europeans in the UK after the UK Referendum Held in 2016

“…Modern slavery workers are invisible people, but very visible are Roma migrants born in the Czech Republic along with Roma migrants born in Slovakia living in the UK mainly gathered in socially excluded areas living on social benefits receiving them without any work [15]. Well -known socially excluded areas are in county Kent [16]. † † Modern slavery is a crime where the most vulnerable men, women and children are abused for criminal profit, with many victims forced to live and work in squalid conditions for little or no money.…”

Identity Game for Welfare: Circumventing Surveillance of Legal Migrants in Europe

“…On the level of political discourse, these practices seem to aspire to notions of "pan-European and cosmopolitan citizenship". However, various social groups (citizens, sub-citizens, supra-citizens and noncitizens) hold unequal positions in terms of the degree of surveillance they are subjected to, ranging from extreme deprivation to great social privilege (Nagy 2018b). This inequality reveals the inadequacy of the traditional liberal notion of citizenship as the springboard for articulating a discourse of rights.…”