Expanding borders, contracting humanitarianism: Over a Hundred Year Review of Immigration Policy

Citation: Ibrahim, Yasmin and Howarth, Anita (2017). “Expanding borders, contracting humanitarianism”. Workshop Proceedings for Refugee Rights in Europe: current weaknesses, possible ways forward, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, London, UK, 19 May, 2017.

By Unknown - Guardian Unlimited website, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2817967

Abstract;

The EU is facing its biggest refugee-based humanitarian crisis since World War Two. This paper reviews UK government’s policy position on Europe’s refugee crisis against its ‘tradition of humanitarianism.’ Britain has historically idealised itself as sanctuary to the persecuted and those at risk. We trace Britain’s tradition of sanctuary over time through policy enactments and argue that the past provides a myth to imagine the nation but the UK has veered away from the humanitarian challenges confronting the world today. In terms of the present refugee crisis, UK’s tepid response is in tandem with the deep tensions and polarisation the issue of immigration raises within the nation-state. In view of this, the UK has adopted a highly restrictive policy towards the refugee and the asylum seeker through a series of policies which seek to delegitimise the refugees, enacting tighter barriers to entry and casting them as economic migrants and as suspect figures in a post 9/11 world where there is a distinct endeavour to constrict the provision of sanctuary in the UK. *

 Introduction

The British response to the contemporary refugee crisis often appears contradictory. Britain has been the second biggest bilateral donor of humanitarian aid in North Africa, but its “investments” in Calais to date have focused on fortifying access points to the Eurotunnel and port. Ministers talked about upholding Britain’s tradition of humanitarianism, yet refused to accept irregular migrants already in the EU and sent Royal Navy ships primarily to disrupt people smuggling networks. After strong political, media and public pressure David Cameron agreed to accept an unspecified number of unaccompanied minors already in the EU, but Britain took only a fraction of the children in Calais that charities believed were eligible under existing and new laws.

The paper deconstructs these contradictions through the lens of over 100 years of policy enactments (and lapses) on refuge and asylum since the Aliens Act of 1905. We argue that the seemingly contradictory policy approach reflects a tension between two ideational strands of thinking in British humanitarianism with its roots in Victorian England and the anti-slavery movement. From the mid-19th century, a distinctive mythology of sanctuary began to emerge that became closely associated with a British identity but by the end of the 19th century there was a growing public and political disquiet about the mass flight of Ashkenazi Jews from the Russian pogroms particularly into the east end of London.

The 1905 Aliens Act which reinstated border controls after an 80-year hiatus marked the beginning of a long retreat from the ideal of sanctuary while retaining the myth of British humanitarianism as a key part of a social imaginary of Britishness. The contradictions reflect the tensions between the myth and the reality but also between different strands in the ideational history of British humanitarianism that resurface in policy, media and public debates during periodic “migration crises”.

Sanctuary and refuge in the British ‘tradition of humanitarianism’

The term humanitarianism is a misnomer as it assumes a singularity when in fact there are different “isms”, different traditions in different countries and different strands even in the UK (see Barnett & Weiss 2011). The ideational roots in the west can be traced to the Judeo-Christian notion of sanctuary; of providing refuge for those fleeing for their lives in the most sacred cities or parts of the church or with secularisation in the nation state. Enlightenment thinking sought to conjoin the affective and the rational by aligning human compassion with concerted action and moral responsibility (see Kleingeld 1998 on Kant's cosmopolitan law). What that meant in practice differed between a radical humanist strand in Britain which was expansive, incorporating a notion of common humanity that transcended context, race or nationality and drew on Kantian notions of hospitality (see Pupavac 2010). The anti-humanist strand was rooted in British empire, conservativism and fears of radical political change and immigration. The anti-humanist strand was most powerfully symbolized by William Wilberforce and anti-slavery movement which created hierarchies between those deserving pity and those who did not (i.e. concern for foreign slave) and a dismissal of the suffering in Britain’s industrializing cities (Skinner & Lester 2012). Those ideational roots overlapped with politics and a social imaginary that conjoined ideas of sanctuary and ideas of humanitarianism producing a mythology. This social imaginary of being hospitable and open to the disenfranchised and the beleaguered witnessed an 80-year period from 1826 when the Aliens Act (1793) lapsed to 1905 which was characterized by open borders when refugees irrespective of religion, political orientation or race were allowed sanctuary in the UK (see Shaw 2015).

Contracting humanitarianism

The paper examines 190 years of British enactments on sanctuary “book-ended” by the lapsing of the 1793 Aliens Act in 1826 and the 2016 Immigration Act intended, according to Theresa May, to “create a hostile environment” for illegal migrants (Travis 2016) with a begrudging concession by the government to accept an unspecified number of unaccompanied children already in the EU under the so-called “Dubs Amendment”.

Existing literature has already drawn attention to the context in which restrictions on sanctuary took place within broader geopolitical developments of mass migration and withdrawal from the colonies as well as hardening public attitudes first to immigration then to asylum and public discourses within the context of a “drain” on resources or a “lack of space” in island Britain (see Bashford & McAdam 2014; Bosworth & Guild 2008; Geddes 2005). The studies, however, focus on specific periods and what our meta-analysis does is connect these into a trajectory of policy enactments across nearly 200 years of British responses to those fleeing persecution, conflict and war and how the mythology and ideal of the UK as a refuge for sanctuary enmeshes with the actual shift away from humanitarianism both in sentiment and practice.

The narrative that emerges is dilemmatic; seeking to safeguard the mythology of humanitarianism in discourse but not necessarily backed by policy agenda and enactments. We argue that the provision of
asylum while a historical and romantic ideal has over time been mediated by the politics of race and nation space, prescribing who is admitted and who is cast out and how the entrants are constructed as a threat both to Britain’s coffers and to its values. What has ensued is a conservative form of humanitarianism which has been contracting through the years with new policy enactments and despite Britain’s status as a signatory of the European and Geneva conventions on human rights and refugees. The main objective from the 1960s had been on curbing immigration particularly from the colonies (Miles & Cleary 1993) but with the advent of the Labour Government under Tony Blair in 1997, the focus has been to restrict the number of asylum seekers and those granted refugee status (Bloch 2010).

This contracting humanitarianism has been a reaction to the loss of the empire, decreasing fiscal and moral obligations to former colonies, domestic politics, public attitudes to immigration and a fear of depletion of resources as well as anxieties over the loss of control over borders and security within an EU with expanding borders. The romantic idea of granting sanctuary was increasingly set against the burdens and practicalities of modern state, such that relief and development aid was increasingly seen as mechanisms to negotiate the contradiction between the ideal and reality and equally between moral obligation and a lack of political will. Different waves of refugee crises since the 1880s have been a testing ground for the British historical ideal of providing sanctuary and the latest refugee crisis in Calais and the Mediterranean became a theatre for this contracted humanitarianism.

The British response to the contemporary refugee crisis

From a review of policy enactments since the 1905 Aliens Act, we subsequently examine British government’s response to the contemporary refugee crisis, the biggest since World War 2 (UNHCR 2015). These responses invoke echoes of anti-humanist Wilberforce tradition specifically in the distinctions the UK government inserted between those who were deemed to be deserving or undeserving of pity, those for whom assistance was targeted and those who were ignored or neglected, as well as those whom ministers labelled as refugees, migrants and illegal migrants.
Britain’s humanitarian imperative was focused “upstream” at what the government deemed to be epicentre of the crisis in North Africa. Policy initiatives sought to contain displaced persons there and restrict the flow of asylum seekers into Britain (Brokenshire 2014; Cameron 2015b). The Government boasted of being the second biggest bilateral donor in North Africa after USA, providing £1.12 billion in humanitarian aid in the region targeted at UN camps and “hardest to reach” parts of Syria (May 2016b). Accused of betraying the British tradition of sanctuary, the government instigated the Vulnerable Persons Scheme focused on taking those Syrians vetted by UN and Home Office as those deemed “most vulnerable” and most likely to obtain refugee status directly out of the camps into Britain to apply for asylum (Cameron 2015a). The government priority was to keep irregular migrants in the region even though infrastructure in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey was collapsing and the actual meeting of humanitarian provision was “outsourced” to UN and other aid agencies. Syrians in the UN camps were labelled refugees; Eritreans, Somalians, Iraqis and Afghans were ignored.
With the mid-stream imperatives in Mediterranean we begin to see a seismic shift away from the humanitarian imperative to securitization. While in UN camps in North Africa, the displaced person could in ministerial discourses be labelled refugees fleeing persecution but once they left these and sought to cross the Mediterranean they were relabelled “migrants”, seen as complicit in criminal activity of people smuggling, putting their own and their families lives at risk (May 2015). The policy problem was framed through criminality rather than human crises which meant Britain’s Royal Navy ships were despatched primarily to break up people-smuggling networks rather than prioritizing the saving of desperate lives (Cameron 2015a).

The downstream imperative in Calais points not only to the demise of the humanitarian imperative but the substitution of and augmentation of securitization as its primary policy concern. Once the displaced person had reached Calais the same body deemed to be a refugee in the UN camps and a migrant crossing the Mediterranean had become an illegal and illegitimate entity because they had not sought asylum when they had first landed in the EU (see May 2016). The policy imperative was to discourage, deter and obstruct the movement of irregular migrants and it was infused with a neoliberal ethos in which the primary role of the state and hence its policy imperatives is seen as safeguarding the operation of the free market and minimal support is provided for those in acute need (Plant 2010). Calais is also a site where the contradictions between the myth of humanitarian sanctuary and the realpolitik of security are most visible and vivid, and re-enacted time and again through the casting out of those in desperate need of sanctuary both by the British and the French.
Calais as a space of contradiction and challenge.

Calais has a significance for Britain that stretches beyond its geographical proximity to Dover at the narrowest point of the English Channel to include a cultural, political and security history dating back to Shakespearian times or even earlier (Zaretsky 2015). In the lead-up to the opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994, Britain’s border with the continent was moved to Coquelles near Calais and juxtaposed controls policed jointly by the two countries were established. These controls have an added significance in that the French-Belgian seaboard also marks the end of the Schengen area of free movement and the reinstatement of border checks effectively creating a bottleneck for irregular migrants. Refugees unable to return home for fear of persecution, unable to move on because of increased fortification around the Eurotunnel and port, become trapped in Calais and forced to take risks as stowaways on passing vehicles headed for Britain or entrust their lives to people smugglers and traffickers.

Growing numbers of displaced persons congregated in Calais with the Balkan Wars in the late 1990s. The French authorities, vociferously supported by Britain have since 2002 adopted a policy of closing or discouraging semi-permanent shelters that might in their view serve as a “magnet” for “new migrants” to Calais (see Howarth & Ibrahim 2009). Forced to fend for themselves with some support from aid agencies, those trapped in Calais formed makeshift camps which became dubbed at the ‘jungle’. The harsh living conditions in the makeshift camps along with the growing number of inhabitants and police brutality against this settlement (Dhesi et al. 2015) prompted the UN to declare the camp an “indictment on society” (Taylor 2015) before it was demolished in November 2016. The British government responded by distancing itself from the humanitarian crisis and focusing on securing the border with military equipment, razor wire fencing and a wall (Ibrahim & Howarth 2017).

The tensions between the radical humanist and anti-humanist strands in British humanitarianism were laid bare in the responses to the “lone children” of Calais, unaccompanied minors who are orphans or have been separated from the family. Calais is more accessible and therefore more visible than the Mediterranean with large numbers of British aid workers volunteering there and because the Channel Tunnel and port are among the busiest thoroughfares in the world. Large numbers of British hauliers, business people and holidaymakers pass through Calais every day and witness the desperate attempts of refugees including children to stowaway. The government’s continued refusal to accept “lone children” in Calais even after the death of Aylan Kurdi was challenged by the “kindertransport” campaigners in which Britain’s Jewish community called for a similar scheme that had saved the lives of thousands of Jewish children in 1938 and 1939 (Janner-Klausner 2015). The campaign, which secured cross-party and cross-media support, culminated in the “Dubs amendment” to the 2016 Immigration Act. However, the first “children” brought over under Dubs became embroiled in a public row over their ages, the government lowered the age of a “child” to 12 and the British and French

governments were slow to process the transfers. In December 2016, a month after the informal camp known as the “jungle” was demolished aid agencies were reporting that large numbers of child refugees were missing and some of those refused transfer had launched a legal challenge to the Home Secretary for allegedly failing to implement Dubs.
Conclusion: Interpreting the imperatives

The contradictions in Britain’s response to the contemporary refugee crisis in relation to its mythological imagination through its historical trajectory places the contemporary crisis within a social mirage. The ideational provides a means to focus discourse and to anchor the social imaginary of the nation. In reality, humanitarianism has become a tainted premise affiliated with immigration policy and through the fatigued figure of the ‘refugee’ as no one’s ambit of responsibility within the neoliberal agenda of nation states.

The tensions within an ideational history of British humanitarianism and a long withdrawal from the ideal of sanctuary in many ways reasserts the anti-humanist traditions while exploiting the myth of refuge as a means to imagine the British nation. A layered and spatialised policy of distancing the migrant and refugee through processing protocols and extensive regulations over the labelling of the legitimate refugee reveal policies which are extensively racialized and brutal where tragic human crises are processed through neoliberal agenda and securitization imperatives. The half-hearted concession to the Dubs Amendment reveals a Britain doused in its own fantasies of sanctuary but recoiling at the sight and burden of the Other regardless of their desperate flight from conflict and war. The lone child separated from a parent or child is no exception. The recoil from the Other remains the enduring stance of this contracting humanitarianism.
*Note: A longer version of this paper is currently being written for submission to a journal for peer-review]

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migrants-calais/.

Contamination, Deception and ‘Othering’: the Media Framing of the Horsemeat Scandal

Social Identities: 

Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture

Copies available at:  

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504630.2016.1207512.

<a title="By ThereseA (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons"

ABSTRACT

Food and consumption practices are cultural symbols of communities, nations, identity and a collective imaginary which bind people in complex ways. The media framed the 2013 horsemeat scandal by fusing discourses beyond the politics of food. Three recurrent media frames and dominant discourses converged with wider political debates and cultural stereotypes in circulation in the media around immigration and intertextual discourse on historical food scandals. What this reveals is how food consumption and food-related scandals give rise to affective media debates and frames which invoke fear of the other and the transgression of a sacred British identity, often juxtaposing ‘Britishness’ with a constructed ‘Otherness’.

Imaging the Jungles of Calais

 

Imaging the Jungles of Calais: 

Media Visuality and the Refugee Camp

Yasmin Ibrahim, Anita Howarth
Networking Knowledge Journal,  Vol 9, No 4 (2016)
 http://ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/netknow/article/view/446

 

Abstract

Calais became a space of renewed media interest in the summer of 2015, with an increased visuality into the state of refugees’ living conditions and their lives. We examine the images of the camps dubbed ‘the Jungle’ over time, when media started reporting on the camp which was demolished in 2009 and the more recent resurrections termed as ‘Jungle II’ or the ‘new Jungle’, thereafter. Earlier media coverage of the Jungle accompanied less visual depictions of their living conditions or daily existence beyond the threat they posed to their immediate environment. However, compared to 2009 there has been a surge in the number of images of the refugees, particularly a steep rise in 2014 and 2015. The refugee as an object of suffering and trauma is the subject of an abject gaze where the corporeal body is both a non-entity and invisible. Both death and the accident are ascribed to it, as inhabitants in this ‘state of exception’. We examine these aesthetics of trauma and violence in the liminal space of Calais. The increased visuality and curiosity in the camps since 2015 reinscribed the refugee as a political by-product of border politics, accentuating the refugee camp as a violent and dissonant space in civilised Europe. Despite the intimacy of the imagery, the increased visuality showcased the madness and futility produced through a border politics of legitimacy and ‘bare life’.

By Michal Bělka [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Coverage of articles and Images on the jungle in the British press from 2004 till 2015

The Non-Human Interest Story: De-Personalising the 'Jungle'

The Non-Human Interest Story: De-Personalising the Jungle

Abstract

We argue that newspapers deliberately employ techniques to dehumanise and depersonalise news stories in order to cultivate distance between the reader and human subject in newspaper accounts. We posit this as a dominant technique in discourses of immigration in newspaper discourses. In the process the migrant is narrated as the sub-human entrapped through socio-legal terminologies and deviance discourses that both silence and trivialise human suffering. We highlight the case study of the refugee settlement in Calais dubbed the ‘jungle’ to illuminate this phenomenon. We argue that the depersonalisation of immigration stories is a sustained technique in media to submerge the ethical and humanitarian paradigms presented by immigration.

 

Introduction

Britain has seen more migration into the country than most other European states however the media debates about it are often virulent and the newspapers periodically run anti-immigration campaigns in which they demand tighter border controls. Since the opening of the Channel Tunnel, Calais has become a particular point of tension. Large numbers of migrants congregate in the town and its surrounding areas while waiting to sneak or leap aboard passing vehicles headed from Britain. In their valiant attempts to cross the Channel many have lost their lives taking extreme risks in the quest for a better life. Various attempts have been made to discourage them from coming to Calais in the first place. This has ranged from blocking the construction of any shelter for them, demolishing those they build for themselves and deportation.

Despite the dominance of human interest dimensions in news stories and despite their use to highlight the suffering of refugees in American and Canadian newspapers, we found a general absence of these in Britain’s mid-market coverage of illegal migrants in Calais. Instead the Express and Daily Mail de-personalize and de-humanize reports on illegal migrants. They are constructed as sub-human akin to animals or insects in much the same way as terrorists have been post 9/11. Alternatively, they are constructed as non-human; their basic needs denied, their presence rendered invisible by the actions of the authorities, forcing them to occupy a liminal space between life and death. The trauma and suffering of these migrants often silenced.

Human interest frames/stories and refugees

Traditionally, human interest is the second most commonly used frame and story in newspapers particularly in highly competitive media markets such as Britain, partly because they are seen as attracting and keeping readers particularly women (Neuman 1992). Although commonly associated with celebrities and tabloidization (Conboy 2013) the human-interest story has a long history of narrating the suffering of ordinary people as well (Semetko, Holli A. 2000). In the 19^th century the ‘human interest story’ referred to ‘chatty little reports of tragic or comic incidents in the lives of people’ for the New York Sun (Hughes 1940, pp.12–3) and encompassed coverage of both the trivial and the life-changing, the banal and the trauma. These were equally the distinguishing features of the Express and Daily Mail when launched in the early 1900s and they remain so today (Greenslade 2004).

            It is therefore reasonable at first glance to expect human interest dimensions to be a key feature ‘immigration stories’ given the heightened public salience, personal trauma and suffering attached to it. Such an approach would focus on the ‘personal or emotional dimension of an event, issue or problem’ (Steimel 2010, p.224); casting spotlight into private lives of individuals or groups affected by an issue and bringing a proximity between the person and the reader (Fine & White 2002). The articles would use visuals, ‘adjectives or personal vignettes … [that] can generate feelings of outrage, empathy-caring, sympathy or compassion’ (Semetko, Holli A. 2000, p.100). They would offer ‘compelling narratives’ of transcending adversity (Fine & White 2002, p. 61), being subjected to trauma and succumbing to tragedy. Human interest stories constructed in this way would appeal to a sense of a ‘common humanity’ that ‘portrays a situation that finds men all just human beings’ and ‘helps the reader consider how he would feel in the circumstances’ where the suffering is of ‘persons shown to have essentially one’s own nature’ (Hughes 1940, pp.212–5). They also potentially offer a view on a wider world than that of the reader (Park 1923).  

Existing research has highlighted such dimensions in stories about refugees who in the process are presented as ‘people’ (Steimel 2010) who were ‘suffering violence, torture or physical abuse’ and experienced ‘threats and narrow escapes’ in their home country (Steimel 2010, p.237). These stories provide a ‘human face to a far-away tragedy’ and ‘an important moment of connection with people very different from themselves’ (Robins 2003, pp.29, 44). However they are also deeply ideological and problematic. While human interest frames and stories allow the reader to identify with the suffering of refugees they provide ‘surface explanations of complex international situations’ (Robins 2003, p.44). Human interest stories may also be ‘profound in creating social linkages’ but these can also ‘direct attention away from …[what] might improve the life’ (Fine & White 2002, p.85).

We argue that while the human interest story may personalize the refugee’s trauma and suffering in their home country perpetuated by distant others, it de-personalizes what is happening in the ‘new’ country perpetuated by those more familiar to readers. Crucially when the person is labelled an illegal migrant rather than a refugee they are further de-personalized and de-humanized through this illegality making their suffering illegitimate. In migration discourses in Fortress Europe the human interest story becomes a non-human interest story with the central protagonist constructed as a sub-human or non-human. Agamben’s notion of the Muselmann captures this liminal figure of the immigrant cast between visibility and invisibility, tangible yet non-present.  

Muselmann, the central figure for Agamben in his book, The Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and Archive, is beyond trauma, morality or human dignity. Robert Bernstein (2002) in reviewing the ‘Muselmann’ refers to it as a term for those in the camps who ‘were reduced to “living corpses,” “nameless hulks”; beings who were presumably human but seemed to lack any dignity, spontaneity, or humanity. Hannah Arendt in her writings on evil observed that camps not only ‘exterminate people and degrade human beings’ but have the capacity of ‘transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not.”

Bernstein refutes the simplistic reduction of the Muselmann into a ‘mere thing’.  He points out that the Muselman is an indefinite category of social production (both in discourse and practice), “At times a medical figure or an ethical category, at times a political limit or an anthropological concept, the Muselmann is an indefinite being in whom not only humanity and non-humanity, but also vegetative existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics, and life and death continuously pass through each other’. The Muselmann as a liminal figure between human and non-human, and represents a ‘limit experience’ where our normative ‘ethical, political, medical, and biological concepts and categories break down’ (Bernstein 2002). It’s this breakdown of categories which we draw on in this paper, where legal and ethical concepts such as ‘responsibility and dignity’ cannot address the liminal space of the Muselmann. In effect, the Muselmann is “beyond" our moral discourses (Bernstein 2002). 

The inhabitants of the ‘jungle’ are liminal figures where the moral discourses are suspended to exist beyond the moral but within illegal frameworks. The social imaginary of the ‘Muselmann’ with relevance to Calais is then amenable to ‘fiction’ where the suffering is displaced through deviance. The moral categories become obliterated in their depictions to the outer world. In mediadepictions, suffering and the human-interest dimensions are not techniques which are offered to the inhabitants of the camps in Calais. As non-humans, they stand beyond the moral discourses and like the Muselmann, their bodies are inscribed by biopolitics of Fortress Europe.

De-personalizing and de-humanizing the sub-human migrant

De-personalized stories of suffering draw on a ‘dispassionate’ style of reporting (Preston 1996, p.112) that ‘creates an emotional distance between the audience and the people suffering’ (Robinson 2002, p.29; Neveu 2002). Elsewhere we have argued that the Calais migrants are de-personalized through pseudo-rational discourses of the failure of government policy to stem the ‘flood’ of migrants into the town and across the Channel (Howarth and Ibrahim 2012; Ibrahim 2011). Dehumanizing techniques include the use of metaphors that associate illegal migrants with the degraded barbarism of the jungles and laying ‘siege’ to the white suburbia of Calais (Howarth & Ibrahim, under review).

            Here we develop this analysis further arguing that parallels can be seen in British newspaper dehumanizing of the migrants of Calais and metaphoric constructions of post 9/11 terrorists in American newspapers which reduce the other to the as the ‘animal or aggressor’ (Papacharissi & de Fatima Oliveira 2008) or in the Canadian newspapers as the ‘enemy-as-animal’ or the ‘enemy-as-insect’ (Steuter & Wills 2009). The British newspapers use of such devices can be seen in the insect metaphor of the Calais migrants ‘swarming’ trucks headed across the Channel (Mail on Sunday Reporter 2009; Rawstorne 2009). Animalistic discourses are intrinsically linked to the barbarism of the jungle but also go beyond this to include migrants ‘scavenging’ for any materials they could find that would be of use (Daily Mail 2009). The organizations working with the migrants claimed that the Calais police and authorities ‘treat people like animals’ (Daily Mail Reporter 2009; Garnham 2009). What these studies have in common is that constructions of terrorists and illegal migrants as the other do so by portraying them not only as the ‘enemy’ but also as pseudo- or sub-human in the sense of less than human.

However, there is a further, more disturbing and relatively unexplored dimension in newspaper discourses we analysed in which the Calais migrants are constructed as non-human in the sense of a negation of the human akin to Agamben’s Muselmann (1999).

The migrants of Calais: beyond the sub-human to the non-human

One way in which the Calais migrants are reduced to the sub-human is by displacing their suffering to a distant locale or a non-place – ‘war-torn’ or ‘war-ravaged’ home countries (Allen 2009a; Sheldrick 2013) where their ‘family was threatened’ (Allen 2009c) and their sons at risk of being recruited or killed by the Taliban (Fernandes 2009). In fleeing they become complicit – newspapers argue - with the criminal, the people traffickers who move them across Europe in a journey that ‘took months and involved great hardship’ (Fernandes 2009). Again  suffering in Calais is at the hands of people traffickers or the ‘inhumane squalor’ in which they live so the humane response of those who know best is to destroy these camps (Bracchi 2009). Or it is self-inflicted by burning off the tips of their fingers so their fingerprints cannot be used to identify then deport them (Bracchi 2009). Any suffering inflicted through harassment by police or treatment by border guards is ignored by the newspapers (for the counter-discourse, see Rygiel 2011).

They were also reduced to the sub-human by de-legitimizing one of the basic human – and animal – needs for shelter. The two newspapers we looked at objected to any form of shelter whether provided by charities or the migrants themselves on the grounds that these served as a ‘magnet’ for more (Fagge 2009; Tristem 2007; Finan and Allen 2010). Furthermore, the repeated demolition of visible shelters formed part of a strategy of rendering their presence invisible. After the violent and brutal destruction of the Calais jungle in 2009, the migrants sought ‘hideaways’,  ‘hideouts’ and ‘hidden culverts’ to avoid detection by the police (Giannangeli 2009). Unable to openly cross the border, the migrants would  ‘hide’ on trucks or ‘smuggle’ aboard trains headed for Britain (N. Fagge 2009; Sparks 2009). Thus they were rendered invisible by authorities who refused to give legitimacy to their presence but at the same time the migrants themselves sought the protection of invisibility.

The migrants were also rendered non-human through their occupation of the liminal or betwixt and between spaces. At a temporal level, the shelters they erected were caught between the past and present located as they were on former industrial sites or wartime bunkers. Their occupation of these rendered Calais, Dunkirk and other coastline ports a ‘waiting room’ (Fagge 2009) used by migrants ‘waiting for a chance’ to smuggle aboard a vehicle headed for Britain  (Reid 2007) or playing a  ‘waiting game’ that goes on for months (Sparks 2012). The migrants also eked out a liminal existing between life and death. The desperate leaping or sneaking bodies pitched the migrants between the prospect of a new life in Britain or death while trying to get there. The containers on trucks that they hid in put the migrants at risk of suffocation (Reid 2009) or toxic chemicals (Allen 2009b) and every week more than one dies trying to cross to Britain (Bracchi 2009).

What our analysis highlights is that Britain’s mid-market press have not drawn on the typical human interest dimensions that dominate news coverage in competitive media markets and that have been used in other countries to personalize and humanize the suffering of refugees. Instead, they have labelled the Calais migrants ‘illegal’ and from that has followed a series of techniques that de-personalize, de-humanize and de-legitimize their suffering. In the process the traumatized are reduced to the sub-human with animalistic or insect-type behaviour or the non-human with illegitimate basic needs, their presence rendered invisible and their existence liminal: Agamben’s Musalman.

Critique of Suffering Research

There has been renewed interest in media depictions of suffering in the recent years. One contentious area of this research is the tendency of scholarship to portray the West as looking at those in the ‘East or the Global South’ and the East as being consumed by the West. The act of consuming suffering from a distance through technology and the subjects of the suffering become dichotomised into two kinds of humanity; those who watch from the West, and the watched being recipients of the humanitarian gaze in the East. Humanity is not universal or common and the creation of a secondary humanity in the East through the vantage point of the West congeals this into a cartographic duality of ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’. This bi-polarity of suffering has become a hermeneutic bind in media studies; elongating a colonial perspective where centre and periphery remain firmly entrenched. The subaltern remains the subject of suffering. Often such scholarships truncate humanitarian agency from longer historical trajectories of colonisation, orientalism and missionary activities (from forced conversions to proselytization). The packaging of suffering without the historical contextualisation become re-invented as a mediated commercial solidarity without quite acknowledging the commodification, aestheticisation and packaging that has happened over time through visual aids such as photography, moving images and evangelism orchestrated through technologies such as lanterna magica (magic lantern) in the 17^th century. Trauma always had an audience and suffering is a well-established trope in human communion and disaggregation. The human interest story is a residue of this integral pull in our human psyche towards the abject. In media, the human interest story and suffering become techniques which psychologically manipulate audiences while tapping into wider ideologies and belief systems. The journalistic technique of the human interest story derives its potency as an emotive tool for it can be both invoked and denied to the audience. The invitation to gaze at suffering and the denial of the suffering can be ideologically determined as in the case of the ‘Jungle’ in Calais, where the liminal status of the inhabitant puts them beyond the moral constructs of dignity, bestowing them the ambivalent binary of the Muselmann; not quite a corpse but not alive either. 

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Citation; Howarth, A. & Ibrahim, Y. (2014) ‘The Non-Human Interest Story: De-Personalizing the Migrant’  Conference Proceedings of the New Racisms: Forms of Un/belonging in Britain Today. Sussex University. 09^th May.