Romania’s immigration debate under neoliberal hegemony: Constructing diligent migrants and individualising Transylvanian Hungarians as racist

Abstract In 2020, a group of residents of the rural Transylvanian Hungarian-majority municipality of Ditró (in Hungarian), or Ditrău (in Romanian), mobilised themselves against two Sri Lankan bakers. Mainstream media portrayed the incident as xenophobic and racist, the locals as right-wing extremists, and the Sri Lankans as merely ‘migrant workers’, turning the ‘Ditrău incident’ into Romania’s first and most important nationwide immigration debate. This article analyses what the media-coverage of these events tells us about the country’s approach to immigration, and how the symbols, signs, languages, meanings, knowledges, and memories articulated around the ‘Ditrău incident’ make this and other relatable events feed into this approach. We employ discourse analysis, including Lotman’s cultural semiotics, and engage with the institutional, political, and historical framing of ‘the incident’, as well as the broader socio-political and historical context of Romania’s immigration debate. In this way, we argue that, first, the ‘Ditrău incident’ was instrumental to Romania’s dominant societal core in portraying itself as closer to ‘the West’, its absolution of any responsibility for xenophobia and racism, the reproduction of the hegemony of neoliberalism and the middle-class ideology, and the construction of ‘diligent migrant workers’. Second, ‘the incident’ was fundamental in the silencing, individualisation, and invisibilisation of working-class voices and particularising Transylvanian Hungarians as racists and extremists. Finally, it allowed Romanian mainstream actors to brand their nation as open, tolerant, and humane, while normalising the commodification and overexploitation of third-country migrant labour.