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.