Introduction

The expansion of the European Union (EU) in 2004 and 2007 brought ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) nations into what had primarily been a Western European bloc. Several of these new member states contained large Roma minorities, and members of this community were among those exercising their new found rights of freedom of movement, settling in many countries across the EU.

The portrayal of Roma populations as ‘benefit tourists’ has become common within popular media over the last decade, both in the UK and the wider EU, evident in headlines such as ‘The Roma gipsy who sparked a crackdown on benefit tourism’ (Daily Mail, 2014) and ‘German economist denounces Roma “benefits tourism”’ (EurActiv, 2013). Indeed, the prominent use of the term ‘Roma’ in such contexts has been referred to as the ‘ethnicisation of the topic’ (Benedik, 2010: 160). However, such narratives need to be seen within a particular social and political context, specifically, the increasing problematisation of immigration since 2000 (Blinder, 2015) coupled with increasingly Eurosceptic attitudes (Ormston and Curtice, 2015). ‘Benefit tourism’ is one of a number of themes which recur in British media reporting on migrants in general, along with competition for state resources, criminality, anti-social behaviour and, more recently, purported links to terrorism (Garner et al, 2009; Gerard, 2016).

As Allen and Blinder's (2013) analysis of UK newspaper stories demonstrates, accusations of ‘benefit tourism’ are not exclusively directed at any single migrant group. Based on the British Social Attitudes survey, Curtice (2016: 8) reported that reducing the ability of migrants from other EU countries to claim welfare benefits in Britain was the most popular reform respondents wished to see. However, despite this homogenisation of migrants, as Luhman suggests: ‘One of the implications of the benefits tourism case is to show how a focus on the perceived problems of fraud and abuse can lead to the identification of certain groups of migrants as problematic’ (2015: 39).

Roma are especially vulnerable to such characterisation, as this group has been confronted with majority populations’ perceptions and media portrayal of criminality, ‘work-shyness’ and deceitfulness for many years all across the European continent (see for example McGarry, 2013).