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There is mounting evidence to suggest that East European migrants in the UK have been victims of discrimination. Reports of pay gaps point to the possibility of structural discrimination, restrictions on employment operate as a kind of legal discrimination, and politicians and the media construct East European migrants as different and the source of concern. The Hungarians and Romanians we spoke with in Bristol also reported discrimination, albeit in ways that carefully deflected its racialized connotations. But they also denied that they were victims of discrimination. Why would East Europeans, the supposed victims of discrimination, deny and deflect discrimination? We argue that the discursive strategies preferred and proffered by East Europeans reflect their ambiguous position in Britain's status hierarchies. Denying discrimination and deflecting its racialized connotations help resolve this ambiguity in their favour by aligning them with other deniers and deflecters of discrimination: a white British/European majority. We examine the ways Hungarians and Romanians negotiate their ambiguous status through these different discourses about discrimination. We argue that they are not claiming they are white, but they are claiming a higher status in ways that produce whitening effects. Whiteness doesn't determine status; rather, status determines whiteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information about ethnic Hungarian labor migration in Hungary. The transborder Hungarians form a significant part of the cultural nation of Hungarians. The Hungarian national unity is being transformed into a political reality. Though Hungarian nationalists are messing out new perceptions of national unity, ordinary Hungarians from each side of the border experience their own forms of national difference. The nationalists in Hungary are fighting for all types of political and cultural membership.

Most studies of immigration policy, and especially those that theorize or explain the making and style of immigration policy, focus on Europe and North America. Is such regionalism justified, and is East Asia really so different? We examine a particular type of immigration policy: whether or not —despite global norms against ethnic discrimination--a state gives preference for return migrants who are ethnically similar but are citizens of another state. We also examine related preferences for co-ethnic foreigners. This topic has gained interest from scholars for its centrality in debates on nationhood and trans-nationality. We focus on four East Asian states (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China). We find that preferential ethnic return policy exists or has existed in both regions despite global nondiscrimination norms. However, we argue there are also some important regional variations. These include, first, a trend away from ethnic return preference in Western Europe though it is still found in Eastern Europe and East Asia. Second, Asian co-ethnic preferences are used instrumentally, for economic goals, at little cost to the state, and include preferences for skilled co-ethnics and co-ethnic investors. Eastern and Western Europeans discriminate in favor of co-ethnics to protect them or express symbolic ties, sometimes at great expense. The regional comparison exposes an apparent lack of economic rationality to European preferences, at least as compared to those in Asia, and points to future research to address causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine how nationhood is reproduced in and through the students? everyday social relations. First, I demonstrate how a nationally demarcated university system patterns the students? social relations along national lines. The students choose their friends not because they share the same nationality, but because they are there. These institutions make nationhood a parameter ? not a criterion ? of their friendship choices. Second, I examine how the students? social relations are simultaneously reproduced through the interactional practices in which they routinely engage. Through language choices, discursive practices, and embodied stances, the students communicate, constitute, and reproduce nationhood as a relevant feature of their day-to-day interactions. Institutions provide national paths along which the students? social relations take shape, and interactional practices make nationhood a salient feature of those relations. The students come to the university to pursue diverse objectives, but they leave as Romanians and Hungarians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I develop a theoretical framework for studying nationhood in the everyday lives of university students in an ethnically-mixed Transylvanian (Romanian) town. While nationalism has become a permanent fixture of political life in Romania, university students show little interest in the nationalist claims advanced in their name by local and state-wide political elites. Yet they do construct, legitimate ? and sometimes undermine ? understandings of nationhood in the course of their everyday lives. These understandings are not carbon copies of their political variants; rather, they are constituted and rendered meaningful through the routine activities in which students ordinarily engage. The students are national without being nationalist. I develop a two-part analytical framework for examining nationhood in the everyday lives of the students. First, I argue that nationhood is an underlying disposition that quietly informs the students? understandings of themselves and their predicaments. Second, it is also the practical accomplishment of the students? routine talk and interaction. Nationhood as an underlying disposition informs nationhood as a practice. My two-part framework challenges assumptions in the literature on nationalism about the popular resonance of nationalist politics by calling for a more grounded approach to the ways in nationhood is reproduced in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]