ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the rise of discourses on the figure of the 'successful entrepreneurial migrant'. It demonstrates that Romanians also reproduce this figure of the successful entrepreneur themselves through discourses of whiteness and 'hardworking'. The Romanian church reactivates and knots together a range of small-scale infrastructures of solidarity that relieve some of the atrocities of Romanian workers' life in Brussels. It also reveals, though, that a situational sense of 'shared misrecognition' reproduced by members of the church feeds an ethnicized meritocracy. The example demonstrates how a long-established large-scale infrastructure of solidarity – the trade union – was reactivated in a particular workplace. Regular encounters between unionized white Belgian employees and non-unionized Romanian self-employed resulted in the construction of a situational we-ness beyond ethnic-meritocratic performances, so that the solidarity infrastructure of the trade union eventually included the Romanians as well.
