Description
What shapes attitudes toward returning migrants? While extensive research has explored public attitudes toward immigrants and refugees, significantly less attention has been given to non-migrants’ views on return migrants. This study analyzes social media comments responding to newspaper articles about the unprecedented return migration to Romania during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings reveal a range of attitudes influenced by migrants’ perceived legal status, occupation, education level, socio-economic standing, and ethnic background, with particularly inflammatory negative comments. The article argues that these factors intersect to shape public attitudes, highlighting intra-group tensions that are intensified by migration, disproportionately affecting vulnerable returnees such as low-skilled workers and historically marginalized ethnic Roma.
Team
Elena Popa, Principal Investigator
Dr. Elena Popa is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of Anthropology at The University of Akron (UA) in the United States. She is a cultural anthropologist who researches and teaches in the nexus of migration and displacement, state and citizenship, race/ethnicity, gender, and class. Dr. Popa conducted long-term ethnographic research in both France and Romania. Before joining the UA, she was a Future Faculty Teaching Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Indiana University South Bend. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington, where she also served as President of the Romanian Studies Organization.
Anatolie Coșciug, Principal Investigator
Dr. Anatolie Coșciug is the vice-director at the Romanian Center for Comparative Migration Studies, interested in the migration to and from Romania and other related phenomena. His publications include articles in some of the most important international migration-studies publishing outlets and he is involved in consultancy, research and training projects with the some of the main migration-related organisations.
Mihaela Iosep, Research Assistant
Ped. Mihaela Iosep is an educator with interest in the field of pedagogy, youth, and education policies. Mihaela has a vast experience in the education field as a teacher and manager of public educational institutions.
Results
Conference presentations
Smart Diaspora, Timișoara, Romania
ROMIG Conference