Bad News for Refugees
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BAD NEWS FOR REFUGEES philo prelims.indd 1 6/17/2013 2:27:02 PM philo prelims.indd 2 6/17/2013 2:27:02 PM Bad News for Refugees Greg Philo, Emma Briant and Pauline Donald philo prelims.indd 3 6/17/2013 2:27:02 PM First published 2013 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Copyright © Greg Philo, Emma Briant and Pauline Donald 2013 The right of Greg Philo, Emma Briant and Pauline Donald to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3433 2 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3432 5 Paperback ISBN 978 1 8496 4957 5 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4959 9 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4958 2 EPUB eBook Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset from disk by Curran Publishing Services, Norwich Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America iv philo prelims.indd 4 6/17/2013 2:27:02 PM Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 A Brief History of Contemporary Migration and Asylum 13 The Political, Economic and Environmental Contexts of Migration 13 The Global Economy 14 Asylum and Immigration in the United Kingdom 19 2 Methods, Explanations and Perspectives on Asylum 29 Methods 29 Main Explanations and Perspectives on Asylum in the United Kingdom 32 ‘Abuse’ of the Asylum System by ‘Illegal Immigrants’ 32 Alternative Perspectives 33 ‘Soft Touch’ Britain Takes Too Many 35 Alternative Perspectives 36 A Burden on Welfare and the Job Market 38 Alternative Perspectives 39 Increased Insecurity: Threat, Criminality and Terrorism 41 Alternative Perspectives 41 Increasing Deportations 42 Alternative Perspectives 43 The Benefits of Immigration 45 Alternative Perspectives 45 Problems Faced by Asylum Seekers 46 The Role of the West in Refugee Movements and Economic Forces in Migration 48 3 Media Content: Press and TV Samples, 2006 50 Case Studies of Media Content, 2006 51 Introduction to TV News Content 51 Headlines Written by Focus Group Members 52 Introduction to Newspaper Content 53 Who Speaks 55 v philo prelims.indd 5 6/17/2013 2:27:02 PM CONTENTS Themes in the Coverage 56 Conflation of Forced and Economic Migration 57 Threatening Numbers 62 A Burden on Welfare and the Job Market 68 Criminality, Threat, Deportation and Human Rights 72 Need for ‘Immigration Control’ 77 The Benefits of Immigration 80 Problems Facing Asylum Seekers 82 The Role of the West in Refugee Movements and Economic Forces in Migration 85 4 Case Studies of Media Content, 2011 87 Introduction to TV News Content 87 Introduction to Newspaper Content 88 Who Speaks 94 Conflation of Forced and Economic Migration 95 Threatening Numbers 104 Burden on Welfare and the Job Market 108 Criminality, Threat, Deportation and Human Rights 111 Need for ‘Immigration Control’ 116 The Benefits of Immigration 121 Problems Facing Asylum Seekers 122 The Role of the West in Refugee Movements and Economic Forces in Migration 129 5 Impacts of Media Coverage on Migrant Communities in the United Kingdom 131 Media Images and Impacts on Public Understanding 134 Impacts of Media Coverage on Established Migrant Groups and Descendants 138 Impacts of Media Coverage on Asylum-Seeking Communities 141 Discussions of Media Coverage 141 Conflation of Asylum Issues with ‘Illegal Immigration’ 144 ‘Immigration Control’ and Numbers 147 The ‘Burden’, Crime and Fear 148 The Asylum Process and Life in the United Kingdom 153 Community Impacts 158 Conclusion 165 Appendix 1: Guide to the Asylum Process 171 vi philo prelims.indd 6 6/17/2013 2:27:02 PM CONTENTS Appendix 2: Interviewees 177 References 179 Index 191 vii philo prelims.indd 7 6/17/2013 2:27:02 PM philo prelims.indd 8 6/17/2013 2:27:02 PM Acknowledgements Firstly we would like to thank all the asylum seekers and refugees, and their representatives and support workers, who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this book. Thanks also to the research team who helped in the gathering of data, Daniela Latina, Colin MacPherson, Catherine Happer and Mike Berry. We would also like to thank John Eldridge and David Miller of the Glasgow Media Group who helped us and gave us advice and encourage- ment. Thanks especially to Adrian Thomas, Anita Dullard, Katie Goodwin and the British Red Cross for their help and support, and to Dr Scott Blinder at the Oxford Migration Observatory. We would like to thank others in the Department of Sociology at Glasgow University: Giuliana Tiripelli, Chen Li and Yue Li. Thank you to Yajun Deng, Yasmin, Asad Muhammed and Rimshah Kausar, and Elisa Luo for helping us to set up the focus groups. John Mark Philo helped in this and also along with Anne Beach did a wonderful job with the editing, and may soon be working on the Latin translation. Thank you also to all the journalists who spoke with us or offered us advice, and to Robert Webb and other members of the editorial and production team at Pluto Press. Pauline would like also to thank Dr Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Professor Richard Majors for their support. She would especially like to thank her family and friends who consistently encouraged and inspired her, Margaret Donald, Thomas Donald Senior, June Donald, Catherine Donald, Thomas Donald Junior, William Donald, Lynda-Anne Donald, David Donald, John Oguchukwu, Tony Vaughn and Carrie Jo Robinson. She offers love and thanks to her teacher El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Finally thanks again to all those people who invested time, energy and enthusiasm in the research and production of the book. Greg Philo, Emma Briant and Pauline Donald ix philo prelims.indd 9 6/17/2013 2:27:02 PM philo prelims.indd 10 6/17/2013 2:27:02 PM Introduction This book examines the media coverage of refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, and the impact this has on public understanding and on the everyday lives of different communities in Britain. Much of this coverage presents the issues of refuge and asylum as critical problems for the United Kingdom. Here we look at what the public is told and consider what is left out of the media narratives. We show how the TV and press coverage corresponds with key political events, and how politicians respond to public fears and anxieties which are themselves featured in and also generated by the popular press and other media. We begin by introducing a short overview of the range of existing research in this area. This includes a brief history of how asylum and refuge have come to be major political issues of debate since the late 1990s. Our own research on the content of the British media follows. In this we analyse two key periods of media coverage in 2006 and 2011. The last section of this work includes a series of interviews with a range of people who have expert knowledge of the creation of media accounts. We also interviewed individuals who had direct experience of the impact media output has on people who are actually seeking asylum. These individuals included both refugees and those who work with them. Finally, we interviewed UK citizens from estab- lished migrant communities, who commented on the nature of media coverage and the impact that it had on their own lives. Other Research Most sociological studies have focused on ‘race’ or migration rather than asylum. This research has indicated that media representation of ‘race’, migration, refugees and asylum seekers largely presents these negatively as a source of ‘moral panic’, ‘conflict’, ‘crisis’ and ‘threat’. The long-term trend in media coverage is to ‘scapegoat’, ‘stereotype’ and ‘criminalise’ migrant groups (Buchanan, Grillo and Threadgold, 2003; Castles and Kossack, 1973; Cohen, 2011; Finney, 2003; Hall PB 1 philo maintext.indd 1 6/17/2013 2:25:03 PM bad news for refugees et al., 1978; Hartman and Husband, 1974; Kendall and Wolf, 1949; Philo and Beattie, 1999; Philo et al., 1998; Said, 1978; Van Diijk, 1991; Welch and Schuster, 2005). A key phenomenon raised by media analysis in this area is the language used to describe contested issues. Since 2002, for example, attention has turned to the use of terms like ‘illegal immigrant’ in relation to those seeking asylum. Underpinning this terminology is the assumption that most asylum seekers are not in fact ‘genuine’ and that their motives are economic, something Alia and Bull refer to as the ‘ineligibility myth’ (2005: 27). The phrase ‘illegal immigrant’, imbued with the wholly negative conno- tations of ‘illegality’, conflates issues of refuge and asylum with economic immigration. In fact, most immigration and asylum laws are civil laws and not criminal laws; ‘illegal’, however, implies criminality. Asylum seekers have done nothing wrong. In 2003 the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) issued guidelines stating that: NO-ONE is an ‘illegal asylum-seeker’. This term is always incorrect. It cannot be illegal to seek asylum since everyone has the fundamental human right to request asylum under international law.