Abstract
Wales has a long history of migration; however, the introduction of dispersed asylum seekers in 2001 has led to Wales becoming a more superdiverse nation. Wales has often been positioned as a more “tolerant nation” than England; however, the increasingly superdiverse nature of Wales in a postdevolution era may now be calling this tolerance thesis into question. Models of refugee and asylum seeker integration suggest that the absence of racism plays a key role in integration. This paper reports the findings of research that centres on refugee and asylum seeker integration in Wales. Nineteen interviews were conducted with refugees and asylum seekers who had been living in Wales for between 1 month and 12 years. Each interview was analysed using a discursive psychology approach. In this paper, I show that the interviewees appeared to negotiate a dilemma when talking about experiencing potentially racist incidents within the interviews, constructing them as trivial so as not to appear critical of the protection they have received in Wales. The findings also highlight the more everyday and banal forms of racism that are regularly experienced by refugees and asylum seekers living in Wales.
Highlights
This article reports on an analysis of talk by asylum seekers and refugees living in Wales with regard to their experiences of discrimination and racism
The data analysed in this study come from 19 individual semistructured interviews conducted with refugees and asylum seekers who were living in Wales at the time of the interview
I present an analysis of extracts from the interview data, which together illustrate two distinctive ways in which refugees and asylum seekers living in Wales constructed accounts of incidents in which they suggest they may have experienced personal discrimination, constructing incidents of discrimination as trivial and banal “hidden” forms of everyday racism
Summary
This article reports on an analysis of talk by asylum seekers and refugees living in Wales with regard to their experiences of discrimination and racism. Kirkwood, McKinlay, and McVittie (2013) carried out semistructured interviews with 15 asylum seekers living in Glasgow They found that bringing up the topic of racism was a strategy that had to be employed “delicately” (Every & Augoustinos, 2008; Goodman & Burke, 2011) and only as a last resort, in such a way as to deny that they may be making an accusation of racism. Wales, Williams (2015) suggests that the increasingly superdiverse nature of Wales has led to increased challenges to the “Tolerant Nation” thesis, which proposed that Wales' national character was both egalitarian and welcoming to immigration and positioned Wales as more accommodating of difference and diversity than other parts of the United Kingdom She draws attention to the fact that many areas of Wales have not been characterised by large‐ scale immigration, in her criticism of the tolerance thesis, Williams (2015) discusses the challenges to Welsh national identity, from inward migration from England. I examine the functions of this talk and consider the implications of these within the wider context of refugee and asylum seeker integration in a changing Wales
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