“The Ukrainian is a nefarious Gipsy” – micro-policy of the foreign immigration in the borderland settlement of Kispalád

Abstract

The study discusses the case of a village in North-Eastern Hungary for which foreign (Ukrainian) immigration is a typical process. The research aims to analyse those discursive and symbolic cultural practises by which the receiver society identifies social and labour market status of Ukrainian immigrants arriving in the settlement, regulates the process of immigration and forms relations among different ethnical groups (Hungarian, Roma, Ukrainian). The study interprets the phenomenon of foreign immigration in the context of forming types of different relations – cooperation, separation, competition – and economical, social and power inequalities among the groups.

According to the empirical research the Hungarian community of Kispalád adopts different – supportive or restrictive – local migration policies with regard to foreign migrants arriving from the same issuing settlements but with different beginner status in local life. These policies are based on the fact that if migrant persons tend to make social cohesion of the receiving Hungarian community stronger or weaker, or even block the chances of maintaining its sociocultural, economic and power dominance. The Hungarian ethnical subculture fosters integration and mobilisation skills of the settling migrants, citing common Hungarian ethnicity, but then again deprives them of any social dominance opportunities by the discourse of otherness.

In the inter-ethnical relations of local life, those informal micro-migration policies are used by the receiver community against the Ukrainian citizens. These policies also determine the functions which foreign migrants can assume in economic work sharing and which activities they are allowed within the social organisation of the target settlement.

By analysing employer discourses about foreign seasonal workers it could be demonstrated that the receiver community relies on traditional processes of ethnic Hungarian–Roma discrimination of the members of other ethnical groups as well (“the Ukrainian”). By complementing contemporary economic and social processes with special substitutional and transformational rules, the social attitude towards someone being a stranger from the “Ukraine” appears close to that towards a “Gipsy”. This process is significant as the adaptation of content elements of ethnical categories assists articulation of social differences of the “Ukrainian”, while making the system of structural inequalities stronger in the local society, a process originating in earlier times. Everyday’s strategies which can promote integration and segregation of subcultures of migrants from the Ukraine are helping functional (redistributive) tools of power-sharing among the Hungarian and the Roma in the local lived-in world.