Although the United Kingdom is committed to the protection of refugees and the integration of migrants into society, many aspects of the asylum system actually prevent access to refuge or create barriers to integration. Extant research on this topic has often paid little attention to the role of discourse in legitimising particular asylum policies and notions of integration or has otherwise neglected the social functions of asylum seeker and refugee discourse. This thesis addressed these gaps by exploring the discourse of majority group members and asylum seekers / refugees, paying attention to the relationship between place and identity and the ways that notions of intercultural contact were constructed. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with seventeen people who work to support asylum seekers and refugees, fifteen asylum seekers / refugees and thirteen Scottish locals who reside in the areas where asylum seekers are housed. The data were analysed using discourse analysis, focusing on the ways that particular narratives and descriptions function to justify or criticise certain policies or sets of social relations. The analysis illustrated that the presence of asylum seekers could be justified through portraying their countries of origin as dangerous and the host society as problem-free, whereas the presence of asylum seekers was resisted through portraying the host society as ‘full’. When discussing antagonism towards asylum seekers, interviewees constructed this as stemming from ‘ignorance’, which functioned to portray the behaviour as unwarranted while emphasising the potential for positive social change. Similarly, asylum seekers’ and refugees’ accounts of violence tended to deny or downplay racial motivation, or produce accusations of racism in a tentative or reluctant manner, implying that a ‘taboo’ on racial accusations exists even in cases of violence. The analysis also illustrated how constructions of ‘integration’ perform social actions, such as highlighting the responsibility of asylum seekers or the host society. The analysis showed how the refugee status determination process could be criticised through references to a ‘culture of disbelief’, claims that it was racist or portrayals of cultural differences that undermine the process. The right of asylum seekers to work was advocated through portraying it as consistent with the national interest. Aspects of the asylum system related to destitution, detention and deportation were criticised through portraying them as ‘tools’ that treated asylum seekers inhumanely and by constructing asylum seekers in humane ways such as ‘families’ or as ‘human’. Overall the results illustrated that, in the context of asylum seekers, notions of identity and place are linked so that constructions of place constitute identity, in the sense of portraying people as legitimately in need of refuge, and these constructions can work to justify or criticise asylum policies. Results also illustrated that victims of seemingly racist violence may construct their accounts in ways that deny or downplay racial motivations, making racist behaviour difficult to identify and challenge. The analyses suggested that ‘two-way’ constructions of integration may function to overcome the view that asylum seekers have ‘special privileges’ over other members of the community and emphasise the responsibilities of the host society. Portraying punitive asylum policies as ‘inhumane’, and constructing asylum seekers in humane ways, provides a potential strategy for reforming aspects of the asylum system.

The interrelation between gender and the asylum-seeking process has received increasing attention within academic as well as political discussions in the past decade. Looking specifically at the case of Sweden, this paper hopes to add to existing knowledge through the consideration of how tensions and contradictions regarding migrants and asylum-seekers affect women’s experiences of the asylum-seeking process. The analysis builds on the idea that the European Union Member States, Sweden included, have cultivated a “securitized” migration discourse which considers refugees and asylum-seekers as a threat to national security and stability. This has resulted in reinvigorated internal and external controls on migration and asylum, with particular structural and gendered implications for those seeking asylum in the EU. The aim of the study is to explore how these implications affect women’s experiences of seeking asylum in Sweden. It finds that women, and especially women belonging to ethic minority groups in their home-countries, are particularly vulnerable to the effects of securitization due to lack of social and economic resources, increased exposure to gender based violence (GBV) during the migratory journey, insecurities related to male-dominated and overcrowded asylum accommodation centers, and insecurities related to family fragmentation.

Issues concerning immigration and asylum have attracted considerable news media coverage in countries of the Global North such as the United Kingdom during recent decades. The UK national press famous for its longevity, mass appeal and partisanship has been uniquely placed to report on and provide commentary about issues of social change such as these, especially as they have become more prominent in UK party politics. This thesis therefore analyses the press coverage of immigration issues in seven national newspapers during the final week of general election campaigns between 1918 and 2010 in order to provide a historical context to these recent developments. Using content analysis and critical discourse analysis methods, the study assesses several aspects of the representational pattern of immigration coverage and offers a perspective which emphasises continuities and contrasts across time and across the press. Over two empirical chapters, the content analysis provides a thorough profile of the coverage in terms of its volume, the news presence and access of social actors, the balance of supportive and critical voices in coverage, the lexicon used to describe immigrants and immigration processes and the themes of debate. The findings suggest that immigration has become a low-threshold political issue within recent campaigns, for which there is a core element of detailed discussion but an unprecedented expansion in superficial reference to such issues. The prominence, politicisation and problematisation of immigration have combined to frequently provide critical voices with a prominent platform. Meanwhile, supportive voices and those of immigrants were mostly marginalised. There was relatively little variation in the thematic dimension of coverage over time and to some extent across the press. A third empirical chapter offers a critical discourse analysis of the headlines in three main areas of coverage: precarious routes comprising forced and irregular migration, numbers and immigrants as voters and candidates. These aspects of the debate are examined in terms of our and their rights and responsibilities to reveal how the press has constructed the ethics and politics of immigration qualitatively.

This thesis is based on an analysis of the life testimonies about homelessness and displacement told by the Cameroonian refugee community in Johannesburg. It seeks to understand not only the experiences and the conditions of migrancy within a specific group of involuntarily displaced persons in an African city but also how these experiences are constructed and reconstructed ‘in the telling’. The main thrust of the thesis is a discourse analysis of the oral narratives and stories that Cameroonian asylum seekers and refugees living in the city of Johannesburg tell about themselves, their past, present and future, their journey to exile and their aspirations, memories of home and sense of identity as forced migrants in a global era. The data for this study was gleaned from a series of interviews with twenty Cameroonian forced migrants and the interviews are used in this thesis as my primary texts. The analysis focuses primarily on the narrative construction of migrant experiences, exploring how Cameroonian forced migrants use varied narrative strategies and patterns to articulate broader exilic discourses such as the construction of memory, identity and spaces. Therefore, through the testimonies collected and recorded from my informants, I was able to access individual lives as well as the subjective and collective experiences of Cameroonian forced migrants, and explore how they interpret and construct these experiences. Also, the testimonies provided a platform from which to examine how Cameroonian forced migrants narrativise exilic experiences, construct identities, remember the past and represent diasporic spaces. The study has produced a number of significant outcomes. Firstly, the testimonies tend to represent exile as a place that provides solutions for the predicaments of displaced persons. Secondly, the study also reveals that migrant narratives can be multidimensional and multi-functional if individual experiences and element of time are taken into account. This is evident from the multiple, shifting and somewhat contesting narratives produced by different respondents. Thirdly, because of these narrative features, the testimonies are often affected by the logic of ambivalence, emerging from the constant subversion and undermining of the same narratives using different narrative patterns, metaphors, images and symbols. Finally, the multiplicity, subversion and the shifts of the narratives therefore draw our attention to the fact that testimonies from the same refugee community have the potentials of generating different interpretations of shared experiences of displacement.

MA, Dissertation in Development Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 2011 / This research was encouraged by the recent developments in migration patterns in the world. Though immigration is not new to South Africa, with people migrating to the country from as early as the 1600s, there has been a notable increase post – 1994 at the fall of apartheid. The profile of migrants has also changed considerably to include refugees, asylum seekers and other forced migrants (Landau 2007; Jacobsen 2006). It is the emergence of a new group of immigrants in the form of asylum seekers and their relationship with the state, economy and society which makes for interesting analysis. This thesis argues that the continual framing of migration as a security issue, in relation to crime and unemployment overlooks the positive brain gain for the recipient countries (Mawadza 2007). Framing forced migration in this manner disregards the important question of why people migrate and what service they (can) provide to their countries of asylum and in the process violates their rights.

Thesis advisor: David Hollenbach / This dissertation starts by noting a tension in Catholic Social Teaching between the right of certain persons to immigrate, and the right of polities to control their borders, and seeks to find a way to resolve that tension. In a first moment, we ask whether the "right to immigrate" made sense only before the mass international migration movements starting around 1980, and before "globalisation", and whether polities today are morally justified in adopting increasingly harsh immigration restriction measures unilaterally. After rejecting this hypothesis by using an interdisciplinary analysis of the changes in the phenomenon of human mobility in recent decades, we propose another hypothesis to resolve the tension. We claim that the two rights are not "absolute" rights, and must be kept in tension. Which one of them trumps the other in concrete situations is determined partly by a set of (moral) priority rules, and partly through political discernment via fair democratic processes (which are always necessary so as to formulate concrete policies which require the consent of the governed). The rest of this dissertation provides a well-documented argument in favour of this second hypothesis, and in the process, we formulate a number of priority rules which help activists and policy makers, qua citizens and qua Christian disciples, adjudicate between rights claims based on the right to immigrate and the right to political sovereignty. The work also includes a systematic and historical presentation of Catholic Social Teaching on migration, a case study on immigration and emigration in Malta, a diachronic analysis of concepts related to human mobility in the Hebrew Bible, a philosophical reflection on Political Sovereignty in a "globalising" world, and a virtue ethics approach to the notions of solidarity, hospitality and kinship. / Thesis (STD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

This study examines newspaper portrayals of the American insane asylum between 1887 and 1895. The focus is on the way the mental health system was represented to the public in the era of Nellie Bly, the stunt journalist who investigated a Manhattan insane asylum in 1887. The project reveals the ways in which the newspapers aggregated a variety of narratives around the insane asylum which ultimately presented the institution in such a way that served the needs of the press. For those without firsthand knowledge of the insane asylum, the newspaper was the primary source of information. In that medium, there was a system of knowledge created and disseminated, one that integrated and conflated the public answer to mental illness with other sociopolitical issues such as economics, crime, gender, and ethnicity. The content created a meaning in which the deteriorating asylum system was presented contradictorily as an ineffective yet permanent public reality. Furthermore, newspapers reinforced and augmented an existing shame around mental illness. Mental illness evolved from a private/family concern to one of public import over the course of the 19th century. Thus, mental affliction became more than a moral failing or a character flaw; it had been elevated to a social problem to be tended by the government. Therefore, the problem of the mentally ill fell under the jurisdiction of the metro newspaper, which often published articles relaying asylum expenses, investigations into the failing asylums themselves, or speculations as to the cause of a person's sickness.

There is symbiosis between theatre and belonging. This thesis examines the ways in which a sense of belonging can be more effectively facilitated for adult refugees, asylum seekers, migrants and their families through drama practices rooted in a relational ethic of care. Findings engendered by practice-based research projects in the London Boroughs of Hackney, Barking and Dagenham and Redbridge are articulated by this thesis. These projects, carried out between 2008 and 2010, were framed as creative approaches to English language learning and were developed in partnership with the charities Lifeline Projects and the Open Doors Project. They modelled access for all regardless of age or English speaking ability, focusing on participant-centred play and improvisation. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the impact of UK government policy on the lived experience of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants and their negative representation across different media has resulted in a need to develop alternative strategies for support that work in conjunction with agencies and voluntary sector organisations and fulfil a need for a sense of belonging from their clients. My methodologies have included practice-based research, interviews with participants and other practitioners and reading across the fields of performance studies, relational ethics, psychology and education. I identify ‘practice’ in practice-based research as professional practice consonant with the fields of health and social care. The theoretical frameworks I am working within include: Brown’s (2010) definition of genuine belonging; Pettersen’s (2008) mature, reciprocal care; Maslow’s (1954) hierarchy of need; Krashen’s (1983) theory of adult second language acquisition and Thompson’s (2009) argument for the radical potential of joy and beauty. The thesis addresses the need for a greater understanding of the practices which generate authentic belonging in drama and second language education outside a formal education context.

Résumé : La Cour nationale du droit d’asile (CNDA) est une juridiction vers laquelle se tournent les demandeurs d’asile après un premier refus du statut de réfugié à l’Office français de protection des réfugiés et des apatrides (OFPRA). Si notre recherche porte sur le phénomène bureaucratique que représente la CNDA, le cœur de cette étude vise le fonctionnement de sa sentence administrative. La sentence désigne aussi bien l’acte du jugement que le verdict rendu suite au délibéré. C’est bien à travers ce double aspect que notre enquête propose d’étudier son exercice en relation avec son histoire, ses acteurs et les conditions de son processus décisionnel. L'objectif est ici de contribuer aux fondations d’une sociologie politique de cette institution qui doit être appréhendée comme une activité sociale et politique, dont le fonctionnement ne peut se départir aussi bien des luttes de pouvoirs et des usages sociaux du droit que de la situation politique générale du pays. En cela, la question se pose : comment le traumatisme et l’exil sont-ils racontés comme récits de vie et compris comme arguments juridiques auprès d’une instance publique dont la tâche est d’accorder un statut social à des individus privés de la protection de leur État d’origine ? Pour y répondre, nous nous intéressons moins aux conditions de production de la loi qu’à sa pratique et à sa place au quotidien, dans une institution où les trajectoires et les discours posent le rapport souvent ambivalent entre la pitié d’un côté, et la légalité de l’autre. / The National Court of asylum rights (CNDA) is a jurisdiction towards which a number of asylum seekers turn after an initial refusal of asylum by the French Office of the Protection of Refugees and stateless persons (OFPRA). While our research focuses on the bureau-cratic phenomenon represented by the CNDA, the central idea of this study targets the functions of administrative sentencing. A sentence designates not only the act of judgement but also the verdict given after deliberation, and it is through these two facets of sentencing that the present document proposes to examine its subject in relation to historical context, actors, and the conditions of the decision-making process. The current document's purpose is to contribute to the underpinnings of a sociological politic which should be understood as a social and political activity, of which the function cannot separate the power conflict and social usages of rights from the general political situation of the country in question. Within this tension, a question arises: how can trauma and exile be told as a 'life story' and be understood as a 'legal argument' by which the object is to accord a 'legal social status' to individuals from whom legal protection is withheld by their respective native countries? Examining the idea of sentencing within this framework consists less of considering the conditions of a law's production and more its quotidian implementation within an institution where.an individual's trajectory.and.personal story raise questions.regarding the often ambivalent relationship between compassion and legal process.

This paper analyzes how the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy compares with the history of detention and immigration policy within the United States. President Trump believes there is a “border crisis,” wants to deter immigrants from coming to the U.S. and will “do whatever it takes to ensure border security” (Warner, 2018). A 7-year-old girl died in Customs and Border Patrol’s custody on December 7th, 2018. She suffered from dehydration and starvation (Valencia& Boyette 2018). This horrific event, and many other stories prompted me to do this research. In this thesis, I use qualitative and comparative methods of analysis by looking at the rate of immigration along the U.S. southern border under the Obama Administration and the Trump Administration. I unpack why detention is higher today than it was under Obama’s administration without a substantial spike in migration. I discuss how the human rights of these asylum seekers are being violated, in particular society’s most vulnerable social group: children. My thesis asks the question, how has the zero-tolerance policy of the Trump Administration resulted in human rights abuses? Using Foucault’s philosophy of prisons and punishment, this paper argues that the change in border policies since the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy have led to clear human rights abuses, such as child separation, for the purpose of deterring other immigrants from coming to the United States.