From culture to class - legitimate boundary making in German immigration debates on Southern and Eastern Europeans

Abstract

The article depicts symbolic boundary making in the German discourse on immigration. The analysis addresses the question of how wanted and unwanted immigrants are socially constructed and thereby differentiated in this discourse. The media analysis from 2008 to 2014 of so-called poverty migration from Rumania and Bulgaria and so-called new guest workers from Greece, Italy and Spain suggest that boundary making against these immigrants shifts from ethnicity and religion to an individual class-based approach. In this respect, the article discusses how a strong human rights discourse makes a dominant individualistic class-based definition of (un-) wanted immigration more likely. However, the analysis also shows that this construction of desirability refers to the ethnicity of the immigrants. In this sense, ethnic boundary making is stable in a liberal-universalistic context.

Shifting categories, changing attitudes: A boundary work approach in the study of attitudes toward migrants

“…They propose that he achieved this by drawing strong moral boundaries toward unauthorized immigrants, refugees, and Muslims, while at the same time presenting legal immigrants as morally deserving actors entitled to jobs. In the European context, Ulbricht (2019) analyzes the implications of political discourse for the construction of symbolic boundaries between wanted and unwanted immigrants in Germany. He argues that although the boundary work has largely shifted from ethnicity and religion to an individual class‐based approach, the construction of desirability remains linked to the ethnic background of migrants.…”