Abstract
This paper looks at how the British media addressed the issue of migration in Europe between 2015 and 2018, four years when the topic was high on news and political agendas, due to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ and the UK’s debate on Britain’s relationship with the European Union and free movement of people. Based on a sample of 400 articles from two national newspapers, The Guardian and The Times, the paper compares the content and discourse between the left-wing and right-wing press. The paper argues that media representations turn refugees into ‘migrants’ and portray them as either a threat to the national economy and security or as passive victims of distant circumstances. The study historicizes these media narratives and reveals that the discourse they employ advances the racialised mix of knowledge and historical amnesia and reproduces the age-old hierarchies of the colonial system which divided humans into superior and inferior species. Migrant voice is largely missing from the coverage. History, that could explain the causes of ‘migration’, the distant conflicts and Britain’s role in them, is also nowhere to be found. The paper considers the exclusion of history and migrant voices from stories told to the British audience and reflects on their domestic and international implications.
Highlights
For most of its history, Britain has been a migrant country
Debates have centred around the wisdom and utility of high rates of emigration from Britain, to fear and hostility to increasing immigration into Britain from Ireland, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East (Dorling and Tomlinson, 2019)
Migrant voice is largely missing from the coverage
Summary
For most of its history, Britain has been a migrant country. British communities have never been static, with people moving in, out, and about. This discursive production of ‘threat’ generates the body of knowledge that promotes specific policy responses: the imagined extremism of migrants justifies border closures and withdrawing rights; their portrayal as violent and dangerous supports racialized biopolitics involved in practices of governance that exclude certain groups from nation-building, encourages racial profiling and surveillance practices, rationalizes spatial control, restrictions to freedom of speech and political engagement, and creation of internal divisions within the oppressed group This coverage draws on the earlier construction of Muslims as ‘enemies’ of the West, produced by Western media in the post-9/11 era. In the most paranoid versions of this logic, migrants threaten to import the “barbaric” worldviews into Western cultures, provoking social conflict’ (Forkert et al, 2020, p. 23)
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