‘You are Romanian. This is going to be a problem': class, desire, and educated migrant women in France

ABSTRACT

Despite the growing scholarship on Romanian migration after the fall of state socialism in 1989, Romanian women’s migration to France remains largely unexplored. Studies have tended to focus on economic, rural, and low-skilled women’s migration to destinations with gendered labour demands. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines urban, student, and educated women’s migration, by exploring their aspirations and desires to migrate and their everyday experiences in France. Overall, France has attracted a diverse group of Romanians whose migration cannot be explained by push and pull factors alone. Student and educated women of different ages, social statuses, and skill levels invoked migration desires shaped by both personal and political reasons. This article examines women’s drivers of migration and shows that parents, fellow citizens, and social class play decisive roles in their decisions to migrate, enable their departures, and facilitate their arrivals in France. However, social class, including its associated symbolic capital, becomes less prominent in shaping women’s everyday lives in France, where their nationality and its related negative stereotypes can expose women to discrimination and exclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Romanian educated migrant women
• social class
• push–pull plus
• exclusion
• France

Acknowledgements

I thank Michael DeDad, Ancuța Ilie, Libby Pfeiffer, Julie Searcy, and Alex Tipei, as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. I am grateful to my research participants for their time and generosity sharing their migration experiences. I also thank Indiana University for funding this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Treaty of Accession of the Republic of Bulgaria and Romania (2005), Annex VII, Chapter 1 for Romania. Accessed 11 February 2022. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12005S/TXT.

2 ‘Frequently asked questions: The end of transnational arrangements for the free movement of workers on 30 April 2011.’ European Commission, 28 April 2011. Accessed 11 February 2022. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-11-259_en.htm.

3 Additionally, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Malta, Great Britain, and the Netherlands still had transitory measures for Romanians (and Bulgarians) in 2011.

4 Article L. 121-2 paragraph 5 of Code of entrance and residence of foreigners and of right to asylum [Code de l’entrée et du séjour des étrangers et du droit d’asile] 2007.

5 This project was approved by Indiana University Institutional Review Board (IRS) under the IRB Study Number 1304011078, and informed consent was obtained from all research participants about the potential uses of collected data.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Indiana University.