The terminology of Refugee Week
This week is Refugee Week. Like all highly politicised and emotive issues, the use of language used when we talk about refugees is extremely important and worthy of study.
In this case, I defer to Steven Poole in his indispensable book, Unspeak.
Also a threat to the fictionally homogeneous ‘community in Britain were ‘asylum seekers’, those seeking to stay in the country on the grounds that they were persecuted in their place of origin. The term ‘asylum seeker’ had gradually replaced ‘refugee’, shifting the emphasis from what a person was fleeing to the demands he was making on the country he arrived in. It was safe to call people ‘refugees’ as long as they remained elsewhere in the world (as, for example, those displaced by the 2004 Asian tsunami); but as soon as they arrived on British shores they became ‘asylum seekers’.
It’s a process of dehumanisation. You strip any element of compassion by painting refugees as scroungers which has the double effect of obscuring any possible mention of what benefits – cultural and economic – that refugees can bring to Britain. It’s simple, elegant and horribly effective.
Posted on June 15th, 2009 at 1:14pm under Human rights
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• 8 Comments |
In my other life as a youth worker I’ve spent much time with refugees from a vareity of terrible backgrounds and personal horror stories, so utterly of another world.
Their plight needs to be remembered.
[...] are occupying SOAS over the deportation of [...]
It’s rather like dole money went from National Assistance to Supplementary Benefit to Job Seekers Allowance. What’s left for Cameron to change it to? Spongers Pocket Money?
It is any different to your assumption that they bring cultural and economic benefits? What about the negatives?
List the negatives and let’s see…
[...] language of demonisation by Rumbold on 15th June, 2009 at 8:57 pm Justin highlights the importance of language when dealing with highly-charged subjects by flagging up a quote on the [...]
Quite often, in fact, one can see the term “asylum seekers” used without any evidence that the people referred to have, in fact, sought or claimed asylum.
I wonder if the Press Association does this stuff? I noticed one of their Yahoo! News stories last week (about a possible post strike) referred to Londoners having been “unanimously” opposed to last week’s Tube strike. I think (though I’ve been too generous about this before) that they actually managed to correct that one. Worth watching, the PA.
I like the general point but the particular case… if you are a ‘refugee’, it means you meet a definition agreed in 1956. Most people coming here to seek refuge – or asylum – don’t. So if you’re fleeing a civil war, you’re 15 and they killed your entire family, and specifically threatened to kill you also, the UK might agree to you staying here. But you’re a refugee only if it was the government who wanted to kill you. If it was the other side, warlords or anti-Gipsy pogromists or bigots in Jamaica, then you can’t fit the 1956 internationally agreed definition. Does that mean you get sent back? No. That’s why people get ‘indefinite leave to remain’, which is identical to refugee status without the tag, ‘refugee’. There are other kinds of asylum seekers we decided we want here, and thousands we’ve not decided about yet, and thousands more where an immigration officer took 20 minutes to decide ‘no’ but we’re waiting for the law to decide finally. But no-one gets here as a ‘refugee’, just as an ‘asylum seeker’.
Want to do the English language a favour on this lot? Find a term that’s not demeaning for all those thousands of people who we’ve decided belong here, that celebrates their courage and their resourcefulness getting here, that rewards them for their strength and welcomes them to our national community. At the minute, they’re still called asylum seekers even when they’ve been granted asylum. Forever. And that’s bogus.