The Racialization of the New European Migration to the UK

Abstract

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.