Description
The UK has had an increasingly hostile response to refugees and asylum seekers, removing most routes that would allow individuals to claim asylum safely. The UK’s approach can be seen as representative of an increasingly hostile response across Europe, in particular towards non-European refugees. Given the recent global crises that have continued to forcibly displace individuals, understanding responses to refugees and asylum seekers is key to global politics. Taking an intersectional approach, this paper analyses how racialized and gendered language can be traced in UK legislation and debates over a twenty-year period to consider how restrictive responses have been constructed and justified. This paper contributes to the growing body of research that recognises the importance of race and gender in refugee studies (Kromczyk et al, 2021; Tudor, 2018; Young, 2015; Achiume, 2019); however, little attention has been paid to the temporal aspect of language construction. Using discourse analysis through NVivo, this paper analyses how racialized and gendered language has changed over a twenty-year period in UK asylum law and debates. Taking a largely postcolonial feminist approach (Mohanty, 1988; Spivak, 2010), this paper considers how non-European refugees are constructed as different from their European counterparts, using the different responses to Afghan and Ukrainian refugees as an example. This paper argues that discussions of vulnerable women or ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe, 2014) who cross the channel are constructed alongside the male ‘other’ who is identified as the source of threat for the women. The blame for channel crossings is placed on mostly male refugees or ‘smugglers’, rather than the circumstances which have forced asylum seekers and refugees into those journeys. In this way, restrictive responses that focus on stopping channel crossings are justified and accepted.
Key words: Migration, Refugees, Asylum Seekers, Postcolonial, Feminist theory
