The aim of this thesis is to analyse the discourses created and shaped by pro- immigration asylum-seeker advocates who were working in the Greater Southampton Area between 2006 and 2009. Through this analysis, I assess the factors shaping these discourses and seek to understand who benefits from these discourses and, ultimately, whom they harm. Adopting the approaches of both critical discourse analysis and linguistic ethnography to situate these discourses within the wider historical contexts of immigration to Southampton, I examine the socio-economic and political conditions in Britain as a country of destination, paying particular attention to British policies of immigration and refugee settlement and integration. I then concentrate on three themes that are dominant throughout these discourses and demonstrate how these themes - and the identities that they describe and go some way to shape - are created and shaped by the language in these discourses. These three themes are liminality, helplessness and mistrust. I engage in this analysis by conducting linguistic ethnography: living and working alongside the individuals I describe herein and conducting interviews with them in order to fully understand their discursive practice. I use a triangulation method that contrasts data emerging from ethnographic interviews with the critical discourse analysis of texts produced by these discourse communities. I argue that the discourses created and shaped by these discourse communities have fostered a condition in which asylum-seekers are portrayed as being helpless, preternaturally encumbered and, at the end of the day, as being a burden on the State.