Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/migration2020
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, can’t tell if language is laughing or crying.
After yet another spell of the British press and politicians using very dehumanising and derogatory rhetoric about migrants, I felt it necessary to go back to the Away Team episode of the Allusionist, about the language of migration. It originally went out early 2017, but it is never not relevant, sadly. And there’s a chunk of new material in the Minillusionist, so stick around right till the end to hear that.
On with the show.
EMMA BRIANT: Recognizing someone's humanity is crucial. Calling someone a migrant, calling someone an asylum seeker, calling them a refugee. These are official categories; but in many ways, depending on how they use them, they can change and become more negative. And they also preference how officials are sorting them over their very basic humanity.
HZ: This is Dr Emma Briant, a lecturer and researcher in journalism studies.
EMMA BRIANT: I'm a specialist in propaganda and political communication and the representation of migration and security and inequality in the media.
The category of migrant is one that embraces a lot of different groups. This is simply just somebody who is moving one place to another, and that might be internally within a country, or it might be between countries.
HZ: What does ‘immigrant’ mean?
EMMA BRIANT: Immigrant is relational. So it's somebody who's coming into the country. So when the British media is talking about immigrants, they're talking about people coming to Britain. When the French media is talking about immigrants, they're talking people coming into France. ‘Emigrant’ means people leaving, so people who migrate from Britain to France or to anywhere are emigrating to that country. So it is just about the direction of travel basically.
HZ: And what’s the distinction between ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘refugee’?
EMMA BRIANT: A refugee is somebody who according to the Refugee Convention is is fleeing war and persecution, torture, this kind of thing; political oppression. And that is a category they have to prove they are in that position. So somebody who is trying to become a refugee is called an asylum seeker. So they haven't had their case heard yet. And once their application has been heard, then if it's worked successfully and it's not rejected then they become a refugee, and they are entitled to be treated the same as any other citizen in the country, so they should be entitled to everything another citizen would get.
These kinds of categories get used very indistinctly, and I think there's an awful lot of misunderstanding.
HZ: For many years, Emma Briant has been studying how the media portrays migration, and in the British press certainly, there’s a tendency to use the relevant vocabulary inaccurately; and whether intentional or not, this misuse can cause a lot of damage.
EMMA BRIANT: All of these terms are becoming pejorative, where they once were more neutral. We hardly found anybody in our sample who was referred to as a ‘refugee’. We even found somebody who was referred to as a ‘former asylum seeker’. They were a refugee. They had had their asylum case heard, and they had won their refugee status, but they got referred to as a former asylum seeker, because asylum seeker becomes - it delegitimates them, and it's a negative category in the media. These categories have become more and more negative. Even ‘refugee’, which you know you hear more often now, after the refugee crisis, it has become a very negative term; and 'migrant' too, even though it was once neutral, has become more negative.
HZ: In 2016, the Daily Mail had front page headlines about migrants 56 times, the Daily Express 70. Whenever I looked at a shelf of our tabloids, I saw screaming in big block capitals, frequently accompanied by misleading information and vastly inflated numbers, which were sometimes later corrected in a retraction in far tinier print than the original headline.
Migrant seized every six minutes
Britain’s asylum seeker madness
Illegal migrants flooding into EU
Migrants keep pouring into EU
Migrants pay just £100 to invade Britain
Migrant mothers cost NHS £1.3bn
Migrant crisis will cost £20bn
The Invaders
Cover-up over migrants sneaking into UK
Britain faces migrant ‘disaster’
Britain faces new migrant crisis
We can’t stop new migrant surge
We can’t stop migrants
Migrant crisis getting worse
No end to migrant crisis
Migrant madness
“So-called refugees” - that one was actually a headline in the Mail on 3rd February 1900. Casting aspersion on migrants is not a recent preoccupation for them.
EMMA BRIANT: The negative associations with these categories really do cloud the way we analyze the facts. And I think the important takeaway is that including as much of the context of why people are travelling and trying to see them as human beings who are affected by these social and economic pressures and you know political transitions that are taking place around the world is the key issue.
HZ: Too bad, Emma, that the tabloids don’t seem so inclined to shout indignantly about how climate change or war cause displacement of humans.
They also don’t tend to use these sorts of terms about Brits abroad.
EMMA BRIANT: Actually people who are British, white Brits especially, who are going to live in Spain or going to live in Saudi Arabia and working for the oil industry or, you know, moving to Australia or whatever: they refer to themselves and are often referred to by the media as ‘expats'.
HZ: ‘Expatriate’, noun: one who chooses to live abroad. Sense attested in 1902. Prior meaning: ‘one who has been banished’, from French ‘expatrier’, derived from Latin ‘ex-’, ‘out of’, and ‘patria’, native country. Unlike ‘immigrant’ and ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘refugee’, ‘expat’ is a word that has become more benign with time.
EMMA BRIANT: Expatriates. Now, they're emigrants; they're immigrants to the countries that they have gone to. But 'immigrant' tends to be only applied when it's dealing with people we don't like. So it tends to be never us. You know, it's others. So it tends to be often applied to people with a different skin colour; people who we see as as economically less well-off; who might be coming for reasons we don't like; and so on. So I think people from other parts of the world are never referred to as expats. And frequently the term 'illegal' gets used and bandied around when nothing illegal has happened. So in relation to 'immigrant', 'asylum seeker' and so on, they will frequently prefix that with 'bogus' or 'illegal', and that should never be happening because these people are not illegal; people cannot be illegal anyway. Sometimes their actions can be illegal. And that's another matter. But the way that these terms get used, they get associated with these negative labels and it clouds the way that we see those terms.
HZ: Be vigilant for the linguistic tendencies that steer one’s interpretation of information regarding the international movement of human beings. One pernicious trend is to describe a number of refugees or migrants as a swarm or flood.
EMMA BRIANT: Flooding; deluge; waves of immigrants, and so on, yeah. Numbers are used to conflate different categories; but also they use an awful lot of rhetoric that amplifies the effect and makes the incoming migrants sound really scary and like they are bringing disaster with them. Now that's very evocative language and it amplifies the sense of fear of them arriving, of course.
HZ: And this language of amassed creatures or of nature’s force, when used to describe people, makes them seem not like individuals - not even humans at all.
EMMA BRIANT: talking about people as cockroaches and so on, rats, vermin, parasites, leeches: all of this kind of imagery dehumanizes people.
NIKESH SHUKLA: On the one hand you have this sort of language that strips away agency and the right to a body or the right to having a physical presence in the world because you become the swarm, this faceless swarm; you're not a separate entity yourself. And then, you know, when people are quite carelessly lumped in as an asylum seeker - everyone has the right to seek asylum a or refugee or any even an immigrant. These words don't have negative connotations. So you have to wonder where the negative connotations or the sort of laden burdens around these words, where they're coming from.
I'm Nikesh Shukla. I'm an author and the editor of The Good Immigrant.
HZ: The Good Immigrant is a collection of essays about race, immigration and being descended from immigrants, the writers are top notch, and the book has won a bunch of awards. Read it.
HZ: Are you an immigrant?
NIKESH SHUKLA: No, I'm a child of an immigrant. My mom and dad were immigrants to this country; but I think, being brown, decisions are made about me as I walk about.
HZ: “Where are you from? No, where are you really from?”
NIKESH SHUKLA: When people ask me where am I from - "No no no, where are you really from?" - I always just tell them I'm from London. Because the truth is much more complex than they would be able to understand.
HZ: And also much more simple than they've assumed.
NIKESH SHUKLA: Yeah exactly. But when someone says, "No, where are you really from?" what they're saying is "where your parents from?" and what they want you to say is, "Oh, my parents are Indian." But neither of my parents are. So it's not an easy answer. My dad was born in Kenya. My mum was born in Yemen. Neither of them ever lived in India. If I went to India, where I'm third generation - I feel so far removed from that. Dad is Kenyan in the same way that I'm British. My mum is a Middle Eastern in the same way that I'm British. We're all British Asian, but where are we really from? Who knows?
HZ: My dad is from South Africa. But both his parents are Lithuanian. So he's not really from South Africa. But he's never been to Lithuania. So where are we from? However, I don't get lumped in with the kind of poisonous rhetoric that is now characterising our political debates. So it's not really all about the movement of human beings, is it?
NIKESH SHUKLA: No, it's about the colour of your skin and the accent you speak in. At what point do we become British? And what what does British even mean?
HZ: What does British even mean? To me, what it is is encapsulated by the English language: this untidy, idiosyncratic, fascinating hodgepodge that bears the influence of multiple invasions and Britain’s colonialisation and foreign policy. Take out the words Britain imported, borrowed or stole from countries across the world.
Assassin. Alcohol. shampoo. Gingham. Amok. Juggernaut. Thug
Take out the French that arrived with the Normans in 1066.
Justice. Marriage. Instrument. Parliament. Religion. Tax.
Take out the Scandinavian words, that mark the Vikings’ multiple incursions for nearly 300 years before the Normans took over.
Egg. Sky. Skull. Cake. Anger. Thursday.
Take out the Germanic words that landed around 500AD when the Angles invaded, followed by the Saxons and the Jutes.
Water. Meat. Woman. King. bird. Think. Dog. Death.
Take out the Latin, that proliferated during Norman rule but had been introduced here a millennium before that, when the Romans invaded and stuck around for nearly 500 years, and brought Greek with them too. Of course, if you lose the influence of those classical languages, you lose at least 60% of modern English, plus most scientific and technological vocabulary -oh, and the word ‘Britain’ itself.
Take all that away, and what's left?
Pocket lint.
You heard from Emma Briant and Nikesh Shukla. Emma’s book Bad News For Refugees is a years-long study of the political, economic and environmental contexts of migration, and how migration has been treated in the media and in politics. She has also been working on mapping the influence of Cambridge Analytica on political campaigns - find out more about that at propagandamachine.tech.
Nikesh Shukla is the editor of The Good Immigrant collections of essays, and the author of books including The Boxer, The One Who Wrote Destiny, and What is Race? Who are Racists? Why Does Skin Colour Matter? And Other Big Questions. Find him at nikesh-shukla.com, and I’ll link to Nikesh and Emma’s work at theallusionist.org/migration2020.
And coming up in today’s Minillusionist, Nikesh and I contemplate the term ‘political correctness’.
MINILLUSIONIST
HZ: So it always felt like it has failed as a term because it's just it's really just pointed out that whatever language is being used in the context of political correctness is just a thinly veiled bit of hate speak.
NIKESH SHUKLA: Yeah, it is "I'm not racist but..."
HZ: But what should it actually mean and be used for?
NIKESH SHUKLA: Looking back on it now, it was basically saying, "Be mindful of not saying all the racist things that you really think, or the hateful things that you really think," when actually what it was trying to do was say, "Just be mindful that people have different opinions to you, and be sensitive to the fact that not everyone is the same as you." I think that requires a degree of empathy that a lot of people just seemed to not want to think about.
HZ: A brief history of the term ‘political correctness’:
Its earliest known appearance was in 1793, in the US Supreme Court’s first big case, Chisholm vs Georgia. Alexander Chisholm was suing the state of Georgia; the case was ruled in his favour, and in the judgement there was some musing over the nature of sovereignty: the role of governance; the role of the people being governed.
“The states, rather than the People, for whose sakes the States exist, are frequently the objects which attract and arrest our principal attention…”
The judgement argues that this has crept into politics and the vernacular, using the example of a toast:
“'The United States,' instead of the 'People of the United States,' is the toast given. This is not politically correct. The toast is meant to present to view the first great object in the Union: It presents only the second: It presents only the artificial person, instead of the natural persons, who spoke it into existence.”
So the political correctness there was the aspiration to an acknowledgement that the United States as an entity is composed of its people, rather than is an entity itself. In that context, it’s not being used in the ‘political correctness gone mad!’ sense that is all too familiar now.
Nor did it have that meaning yet in its next big moment, in the 1930s and 40s in Russia, where describing someone’s actions as ‘politically correct’ could be praise or disapproval: it meant they had acted in line with Communist Party principles, regardless of their own opinions or ethics. By 1970, liberal movements in the USA had borrowed this, partly to use as a compliment, for people who supported, say, the civil rights movement. But also, sometimes a bit jokingly, about members of their own who were TOO on message. And now we know where this went.
NIKESH SHUKLA: It quickly became “political correctness gone mad”. It was a very quick turnaround for that term to be subverted into the negative version of its intent which was just be mindful, be nice, be inclusive. Asking people to be politically correct is not the same as censoring you, it's just asking you to be mindful.
HZ: So maybe the terminology is the problem because 'politically' seems like it's removed from everyday experience, and 'correctness' seems likely an externally imposed standard.
NIKESH SHUKLA: Yeah, I think the term itself is really messy. I don't necessarily like it. But I think is quite interesting, in terms of terminology: the terminology around all of this is messy and ridiculous. When you think about the journey of the ethnic minority: in the 1980s we were all black and then in the 90s we became 'ethnic minorities' and then we became 'minority ethnic' for a very short period of time and then we became 'black and minority ethnic' and then we became 'Black, Asian and minority ethnic' and then even that isn't fully inclusive. And when you're talking about Black, Asian and minority ethnic, are you just talking about South Asia or are you including East Asian and Southeast Asia as well? And also within BAME there are communities that are white, and I think that's probably why there's been a move by people of colour to start to self-define as people of colour because our lived experience is a particular one; and even within being a person of colour, very specifically a non black personal colour because being Black is a very specific experience and is very different to being Asian or being brown or what have you. So the semantics of labelling is really difficult. And ultimately we can only self define. And I guess what I’m trying to say is, I don’t know what the answer is; but I’ve started referring to myself as a person of colour, which for me feels right for this time. But, you know, being a nuanced individual, my feelings might change in years to come.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is...
quire, noun: 1. Four sheets of paper or parchment folded to form eight leaves, as in medieval manuscripts.
2. Any collection of leaves one within another in a manuscript or book.
3. 25 (formerly 24) sheets of paper; one twentieth of a ream.
Try using it in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. Communicate with me at allusionistshow on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and you can find every episode of the show, along with extra material, and the full dictionary entry for the word of the day, at theallusionist.org.
