Culture and Immigration in Context

An Ethnography of Romanian Migrant Workers in London

D. Briggs, D. Dobre

• Editorial: Palgrave Pivot
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137380616
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Emigration & Immigration

Based on ethnographic data, this revealing study presents a humane and realistic account of Romanian economic migrants and their life in the UK, providing a more balanced picture of the way new immigrant groups are depicted and popularly perceived.

1

Being Romanian in London

Abstract: This chapter introduces members of the sample and some of the preliminary views they have of how they are ideologically stereotyped. It then presents some of the populist accounts of them as ‘thieves’, ‘beggars’ and ‘scroungers of the State’, and some of the problems of contemporary migration studies and in doing so, acts as a rationale for the text – to debunk the myths attached to the Romanian workforce in London and replace it with a more accurate picture of their experiences.

Briggs, Daniel and Dobre, Dorina. Culture and Immigration in Context: An Ethnography of Romanian Migrant Workers in London. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137380616.0004.

On a Sunday, the Christian Orthodox near St Paul’s in central London is full of Romanians who pray for their nation, its people and for the UK and its people. After the service, there is a woman who distributes the free Romanian newspaper Ziarul Romanesc and a man who sells the Diaspora newspaper: both are written for Romanians living in UK. Some pass and collect and pay for them. Shortly after, and once on the metro, there sits in front of me one man in his late 30s who had left the church at the same time. He is dressed smartly and has a big flat, white box in which there is a religious painting. We are in the same carriage, and just after a while he takes out from his box the newspaper that he had bought when he left the church – Diaspora. As he starts reading it, his face drops into one of disappointment and sadness. He shakes his head and sighs as he stares endlessly at the headline How does David Cameron fight against Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants. [Field notes]

Introduction: a note from the authors

British politicians associate their movements to the UK with ambitions to steal ‘British jobs’ from ‘British people’ and scam social security benefits from the welfare system. In the media they are labelled ‘beggars’ and ‘criminals’ supposedly galvanising ‘organised crime networks’ while the police indicate that the frequency of their involvement of the criminal justice system is higher than other immigrant population. In this book, we want to talk about these people. They are from Romania and want to work in the UK. In a world of job cuts, State austerity, company downsizing and workforce streamlining, and with the ever present pressure of a competitive and aggressive individual meritocracy, they also aspire for better lives. They come to the UK in search of an alternative to the soaring unemployment and corrupt politics back home in Romania; where they risk a future of poverty and inequality under a political regime that has ‘chameleoned’ itself in the transition from communism to a supposed form of democracy. Romania has also privatised its public sectors, mishandled European Union (EU) funds, prevented its local and national economy from flourishing, while, at the same time, opened the doors to foreign investment and outsourced production to countries where labour costs are lower.

Zymunt Bauman (2011) writes that the sociologist’s role is to defamiliarise the familiar and familiarise the unfamiliar and here we try to do precisely that: familiarise you with the experience of why these Romanians left their country to work in the UK and how they experience it. It is their story for them to tell. Their accounts were made possible through the use of ethnographic methods – open-ended interviewing, observations and focus groups – to relay their experiences to a wider audience. What you encounter in the pages that follow are about the motivations of these men and women and their day-to-day experiences in the UK’s capital, London. They reflected to us honestly about their journey in the hope that we – the authors – might be able to correct some of the testimonies made against them that they felt tainted their motivations to live in the UK. It is therefore hoped that the story we have to tell can go beyond their political depiction because we reflect on wider processes which are political, structural, social, cultural and subjective, and this is where it starts.

One Tuesday evening

We are invited over to meet Remus, Marian and Dumitru at their house in East London. In the house, Remus and Dumitru live with four other Romanians who squeeze under one roof while Marian lives with other Romanians living just around the corner. They mostly work in the construction industry – when the opportunity arises because the projects are not continuously available. Their ages range from early 20s to mid 30s and they have been in London for the past two to three years. We bring beers for our after-work gathering and sip slowly from our drinks between the distraction of the television and the fluffy, black cat which jumps to and from the sofa. For the first part of our conversation, Remus and Marian are quite involved while Dumitru sits over the TV screen with a bet he placed on his prediction of the final score of a Romanian football match. Quite quickly, negative feeling about their depiction as ‘criminals’ in the media surfaces in the conversation when Remus says:

I care about what the [British] newspapers say; I want to be different than how Romanians are perceived. I want equal rights, because [in the UK] everyone steals, Polish, Italians, British people steal.

They then share stories about their arrival which revolve around finding work quite quickly which ‘seemed’ to be better paid than they would otherwise do in Romania but falls well below the minimum wage in the UK. Remus works for a ‘private contractor’ and is paid cash-in-hand; he has no papers. Marian, meanwhile, early in his tenure in London, worked with his uncle collecting unwanted general scrap metal from peoples’ houses. One day, he was stopped by the police and fined £400 for driving without ‘business insurance’ on his car, and in this early period, accumulated £2,000 of speeding and parking fines. He has since managed to get a National Insurance Number (NiNo) – even though he has been arrested twice. Thinking he was someone else (yet the wanted man had a different first name), the police stopped him under suspicion of other crimes. As he was arrested, the police searched his van and found a knife – which he used to cut the washing machine wires – and he was charged with ‘possession of an offensive weapon’. In court, he had no formal legal representation and the translator arrived late.

On arrival, they had no papers but had to find a job to support their living and because of this display an awkward sentiment to working without papers in the interim. In fact, it transpires over the course of our three-hour conversation the immense confusion over getting papers and obtaining some form of legitimate residency in the UK. Marian reflects ‘I got the insurance number after six months because no one told me it was important; bank account? Yellow card? They [the government] say only go to work’. But engaging in this process only seems to be a potential perpetual cycle with seemingly never-ending resolve. He is not the only one in this respect as almost all our interviewees were given conflicting advice on how to obtain the papers to work (Chapter 4).

The jobs, they reflect, involve long hours for British companies. They work, however, with a crude mixture of other immigrant groups such as Polish and Bulgarian as well as a handful of young Brits. They have no idea of how to claim benefits and express no interest to live off the State because they came to the UK to work. Humbly, Marian says ‘I would rather people who have kids, or family to get benefits not me, because they need them more than me’. Suddenly, Dumitru slumps back in the sofa and rips up his bet; with only five minutes to play, one of the teams apparently scored a goal which means his potential win is void. As the ticket sits in tatters on the floor, the referee blows his whistle to disallow the goal. We all burst out laughing while, in some disarray, Dumitru looks at the floor at his loss. He could have won £60. His focus realigns to our conversation and he reflects on the process of getting his NiNo:

DUMITRU: [They asked me a] lot of questions ‘why did you come to this country’, ‘what are you doing’, ‘why do you need these papers’. I showed them the hair stylist qualification from my country but they still asked me for a lot of papers. I showed them my qualifications but they said it is not good and then I had to show them proof that I work as a cleaner [even though he was skilled and had trained].

In fact, he was refused a NiNo twice on the grounds that he was required to show proof that he was ‘self-employed’ – yet to obtain work, these men and women need NiNos – before they are able to work. He therefore had to work without papers and NiNo and instead started to work as a cleaner illegitimately. He coupled this work with three days a week working in the construction industry to obtain some invoices to thereafter submit as proof of his employment as ‘self-employed’.

This gives you some clue to the barriers these people experienced in their early tenure as UK residents. Over the course of the book, we revisit our friends but we would also like to augment their experiences with that of 37 other Romanians – in total 40 – who we spent time with and interviewed in depth over the past three years. These preliminary introductions to their lives reveal some obvious difficulty with living in the UK and the barriers they faced when they first arrived but, to some degree, still face several years after living in the capital. There is, however, a wider picture to consider here: what are these people doing in London at this particular time? Why were they motivated to come? What is their experience of living here? In this book, we want to also answer some of these questions because their individual aspirations are not generated by their agency; it’s to say, they did not just decide one day that they would move to London to seek a better life. Marian, for instance, had indicated he would stay in Romania until 2009, but when the unemployment rate started to increase and the salary cuts took place, he decided otherwise. We can see in this short section how there are broader, structural forces which are political and economic in origin which have also contributed to their gravitation to the UK.

Why Romanians, why now, why London?

Here we try to tackle some of the pressing questions which formulate the basis for our book: What are these people doing here, in London, undertaking these forms of work (or otherwise), under these conditions? When we say ‘conditions’ we refer to their potential for labour exploitation, unbalanced political depiction conceived as a general ‘threat’ they are supposed to make against the British identity and the way of life. In recent years, political attention has increasingly focussed on the issue of immigration to the UK and questioned migrant ‘integration’ across the sectors of employment, housing, education and health (Alastair and Strang, 2008). And to some extent, perhaps there is cause for alarm. Where, for example, do these new immigrants live? On one side, the British economy is increasingly dependent upon the financial services economy and, on the other side, low-paid precarious labour, so how would it absorb these new prospective workers into existing labour markets? As Guy Standing (2011) has pointed out in The Precariat, low-wage British workers are also already living insecurely; the service sector is mostly non-unionised and has a massive turn-over of staff, many of whom already having short-term and zero hours contracts perhaps just to appear as if they have some sort of ‘job’ so that national unemployment statistics are satisfied.

For these reasons, the recent politik in the UK is all about kerbing the numbers coming to the UK, in fact when the coalition liberal-conservative government came to power in 2011, there were pledges made to reduce immigration numbers to ‘tens of thousands’ (Markaki, 2012). But while some commentators attribute these features of population movement to enrich the global culture and provide economic benefits to respective host countries such as the UK, some fear that these ‘foreigners’ or ‘others’ – 250,000 of them apparently according to one British paper (Johnson, 2013) – might corrupt a supposedly well-established social system and instead seek to drain the host State of its financial resources, burdonise its health system and bung its criminal justice system. While not all politicians champion this view, there are some who have been quite vocal about the potential problems. For example, the chairman of Migration Watch, Sir Andrew Green has publically said that the lifting of work restrictions:

[Immigration of Romanians and Bulgarians to the UK] is likely to be on a scale that will have significant consequences for housing and public services. It will also add further to the competition which young British workers already face.

Others have also followed suit, making direct association with Romanians and crime. In a Guardian article titled ‘Enlargement of EU’ creates gateway for organised crime, Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) said the presence of Romanians in Britain posed a threat and warned of an ‘explosion in organised crime’. Continuing, he spoke of how discomfiting it would be to ‘live next door to Romanians’ and told the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1: ‘We have opened up the doors to countries that have not recovered from communism and I’m afraid it has become a gateway for organised crime. Everybody knows that. No one dares say it’ (Watts, 2014). In a Daily Mail article titled We’re importing a crime wave from Romania and Bulgaria: Tory MPs round on ministers as immigration curbs are lifted Conservative MP Philip Hollobone said ‘We are importing a wave of crime from Romania and Bulgaria’ and suggested that crime among Romanians in England was ‘really quite startling’, adding ‘Romanians are seven times more likely to be arrested in London than a British national’ (Chorley, 2013). Eric Pickles, The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, said that immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria ‘will cause problems’ while Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has championed the ending of free movement for EU workers.¹ Much of this rhetoric has been bolstered by aggressive campaigns against migration to the UK. For example writing in an online forum, Godfrey Bloom, Member of European Parliament (MEP) for UKIP in Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire, wrote²:

A recent investigation stated that some Romanians are working in the UK as Big Issue vendors while also claiming benefits. Almost one in three Big Issue sellers – 700 out of a nationwide force of 2,250 registered vendors according to the magazine – was said to have come from Romania. Currently 90 per cent of cash point fraud is allegedly perpetrated by Romanian gangs; a Romanian pick pocket gang committed over 180 robberies and organised crime is rife, transporting their gangs by bus. They are said to exploit children to beg and steal; they are dubbed the new ‘Fagins’ by many.³

However, there are other processes at play which have contributed to current anti-immigrant feeling. As we will see, the discontent which surrounds immigrants accessing the labour market or even perhaps eventually gaining the same rights as the British citizen are connected to the way immigrant workers are now placed in competition with native workers in blue collar industries known today as the ‘service sector’. The decline in traditional industries where working class populations had professional foundations and the now mean the same population enter into a precarious labour market of temporary work and ‘zero contract’ hours where much migrant labour flourishes. These days, large companies profit more from disposable, temporary or seasonal workers than by providing security for its workforce. Moreover, the gradual dismantling of the welfare system over the past 50 years has meant that British citizens now find themselves increasingly disadvantaged from accessing benefits and social services, the fact ...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Being Romanian in London
• 2  A Short History of Migration to the UK: From Post-war to New Labour
• 3  Politics and Immigration in Context: Some Theoretical Notes
• 4  The Slaves of Europe: The Economic Realities of Life in London for Romanians
• 5  Cultural Confusion and the Confusion of Culture: Roma, Romanians and the Exposure to Consumer Culture
• 6  From Communism to Democracy: Political Disintegration, Globalisation and the Mass Exodus from the Motherland
• 7  Discussion: Towards a Socio-Politico- Subjective Appreciation of Immigration
• References
• Index