Rescaling the State and Disciplining Workers in Discourses on E.U. Polish Migration in U.K. Newspapers

Abstract

The European Union (E.U.) 2004 enlargement extended the freedom of movement of workers and persons to ten states and thus rescaled the state's power to regulate citizenship and movement. We examined how this important shift in scalar relations has been registered by discourses about migrants. To this end, we analyzed how the U.K. and the E.U. were scaled in the representations of post-E.U. accession Polish migrants in U.K. newspapers. Representations reconstructed the national scale, in this case Britain, through moralizing and ambivalent immigration discourses. However, we also found that the newspapers constructed the E.U. scale in ways that advanced open market values and erased the progressive potential of the free movement for workers. The newspapers rearticulated the changing relations of scale between the state and the E.U. in ways that legitimized differential levels of citizenship and precarious positions for both migrant and domestic workers.