Abstract
Immigrants of all types – asylum-seekers, refugees, EU migrants, reunified family members – have suffered at the hands of a predominantly hostile press. Language is incendiary; the factual basis of stories is questionable; negative events dominate reporting. In this chapter, we explore the role of human rights in stories about migrants in the UK media. Through this exploration, we argue that a human rights narrative has exacerbated the negativity surrounding immigrants in the UK press. This may seem somewhat counter-intuitive given that human rights are often the very mechanism by which migrants have resisted aggressive control of borders and rampant destruction of non-nationals’ legal status by European nation states. In support of our core thesis, however, we advance a series of arguments which demonstrate that the legal architecture of human rights and their failings as a grassroots project have shaped a rhetoric which, in turn, has had a decidedly negative impact upon popular perceptions of immigration in the UK media.
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