‘Between a rock and a hard place’: Bulgarian highly skilled migrants’ experiences of external and internal stereotypes in the context of the European crisis

ABSTRACT

The intensification of intra-European migration has more recently coincided with the negative socio-economic consequences of the European economic crisis. The latter has revitalised dormant national stereotypes, employed into the scapegoating of migrants across Europe. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research, this article focuses on young, highly skilled Bulgarian migrants in the UK. Their experiences of internal and external national stereotypes are examined in detail. This article argues that this results in a process of double-sided othering, which has implications upon the identities of young skilled Bulgarians as they employ various strategies to make sense of their migratory choices.

KEYWORDS:

• Bulgarian migrants
• highly skilled
• stereotypes
• European crisis
• double-sided othering

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Aline Sierp and Dr Christian Karner for giving me the opportunity to contribute to this Special Issue and for their constructive criticism and support. I am also indebted to the Editor of National Identities, Professor David Kaplan, three anonymous peer reviewers, Emma Craddock and Helen Creswick for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. I wish to thank all my participants for their time and contribution to this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Elena Genova is a Sociology PhD student at the University of Nottingham. She is the co- convenor of the Postgraduate Migration Research Network. Her research interests include highly skilled migration, European citizenship and identity construction.

Notes

1 DANS is the Bulgarian abbreviation of the State Agency for National Security, which closely resembles the English verb ‘to dance’.

2 All participants are referred to by pseudonyms to preserve their anonymity.

3 As EU citizens, Bulgarian students for tuition fees purposes are treated as home students in the UK. However, the Student Awards Agency for Scotland pays the tuition fees for only Scottish residents and non-UK EU citizens. As the fee waiver does not apply to English students, this paradoxically results in giving Bulgarians more rights than the English. For more information, please see the Complete University Guide.