England's Green and Pleasant Lands? Categorising migrants and protecting idylls through respectibilisation

Using discourse analysis on interviews conducted with host residents from a small rural town in the south of England, the aim of this paper is to explore the way residents categorise migrants in terms of their suitability and attainability of representing the town’s ‘rural idyll’. Analysis shows how the categorisation of migrants was contingent on their social position/standing, in which those who conformed to middle-class occupations (i.e. being a ‘Doctor’) were more readily accepted than those with working-class employment. This paper demonstrates how categories of migrants were used to restrict or enable belonging to the wider rural community in order to protect the ‘rural idyll’ of the town