As Europe struggles with a humanitarian crisis the like of which it hasn’t seen for decades, the aaa coverage of the refugees dying to get to the continent has been changing in tone.
At the beginning of August, news of a “swarm” of migrants causing travel chaos and nuisance to British holidaymakers in Calais got the bulk of the attention. By the end of the month, the term “migrant” had mutated into a pejorative term to classify these people.
Since then, there has been a remarkably reflective discussion of the appropriate labels to describe different experiences of migration and asylum. Al Jazeera, for one, made a well-publicised decision to use the term “refugee” in place of “migrant” when talking about the crisis in the Mediterranean.
Labels and terminology do, of course, matter. They help us understand, for example, why people who flee war and persecution have the right to claim asylum, while others seek jobs in other countries purely for economic reasons.
Admittedly, as David Marsh recognises in his piece for The Guardian, “the term is badly tarnished after years of abuse by those who seek to strip refugees of their humanity”.
That much is certainly open to debate, but it’s not the whole story. The way we really dehumanise refugees is not by wrongly labelling them “migrants”, but by denying them a voice.
Beyond Counting
Until the world saw a tragic photograph of a drowned boy, Aylan Kurdi, the reporting of the “migrant crisis” in the mainstream media was dominated by debates about whether the numbers of people seeking to enter Europe are sustainable.
Writing in the Sunday Times, the home secretary, Theresa May warned of the “consequences of uncontrolled migration on wages, jobs and social cohesion of the destination nations”. The British government has changed tack somewhat since the Kurdi picture, but the terms of the discussion haven’t really changed. David Cameron’s response and the discussion of it are still a matter of numbers, not lives.
This is not surprising if we accept, as argued by the anthropologist Liisa Malkki in her book Purity and Exile, that public discourse routinely frames refugees as a pathological challenge to the “national order of things”, one that requires preventative and curative measures.
