Can Meta-Stereotyping Account for Unwarranted Negative Reception of the UK TV Documentary “The Romanians are Coming”?

In February 2015 the UK TV station Channel 4 started screening James Bluemel’s series “The Romanians Are Coming”, a three-part documentary film about “the lives of poor Romanian people who seek work in Great Britain, seen through the eyes of the British people”. This documentary provoked strong opposition from some Romanian politicians and mass media outlets. In the UK the reaction was a contrasting one: sympathy, understanding and compassion. We showed the series to three Romanian university classes in 2017-18 and the students largely had a negative reaction similar to that of those Romanian commentators. A standard content analysis of the film, however, suggests that it gives a positive image of Romanian immigrants in the UK. Despite this, our audiences tended to form a negative perception of the film. We attribute this disparity to the wording of its title activating two classical stereotypes: that Romanians are often Roma, and that poor people are a source of social problems. The film as a whole in fact projects an opposite message, but once these stereotypes have been activated the content is automatically perceived as negative.