The Calais Migrant Crisis : The Rhetoric Used By The British Media

In the picture books The Arrival and The Little Refugee, the power of language and images has enabled the audience to see immigration through refugee’s eyes. The viewers see that it is not that

There are many different views about refugees in Australian society, where illegal boat people and over flowing detention centres are a controversial problem today. Go Back To Where You Came From is a documentary directed by Ivan O’Mahoney about a social experiment that challenges the dominant views of six Australians about refugees and asylum seekers. These six Australians are taken on a 25 day journey where they are placed into the troubled “worlds” of refugees. For a few of the Australians it is their first time overseas but, for all of them it is the most challenging and confronting experience of their lives. This essay will discuss

Innes (2010) argues that the negative discourse of asylum seekers as a threat to British society is portrayed in government literature

The documentary, “Go Back to Where You Came From” plunges six Australians participants into the intense fear and desperate situations that forces them to confront their attitudes towards the refugee seeking experience. In such a powerful social experiment, using the “Survivor” and “Big Brother” modes of reality television, powerful emotions erupt. The documentary mixes “real life” with constructed situations to produce emotional breaking points around an audience’s attitudes, especially in the heartfelt interactions with refugee families thus privileging immigrants. An audience experience the “borderline” minds’ of the participants and the unstable world of refugees for themselves. They get caught up in the turbulent emotions and crises that are inflicted by the documentary through the clever use of evidence, rhetorical questions, inclusive language and sensationalism. The author rebuts the prevailing misrepresentation of immigrants as freeloaders by providing living testimonies of so called once, “boat people” now living in Australia who are not only grateful but are willing to relinquish all they have for Australia’s sake because of the act of benevolence Australia has showed to them and their families. This is evident in the following quotes of Andrew, “They came here to be more effective in the society…. Amar without a doubt is the kind of refugee we want” and in Amar’s quotes, “If they want to go fight, to protect Australia, I will go……Australia gives us a lot, so easy

On the surface, politics is engaged with the provision of service to the public but in reality, it is merely concerned with maintaining and attaining power. Victoria Pitts’ documentary Leaky Boats (2011) shows the events of the 2001 ‘Tampa Crisis’ and how the Australian public was persuaded to perceive refugees as a threat to society. As shown through the visual representation in part A, Pitts conveys how politics and media work through tactics of sensationalism and fear mongering to manipulate the Australian public sentiment. Politics is demonstrated as a callous disregard for the public and their right to know the truth behind political actions.

Every individual will undergo many journeys throughout their lifetime - without journeys, they would be limited in experience and knowledge, and this is highlighted in many examples of media and literature. The nature of journeys also have an impact on the individual; the journey may be harsh, stressful or confusing. Anh Do’s The Happiest Refugee (2010) and Peter Skrzynecki's Migrant Hostel (1975) are two texts that convey the transformative, unstable, segregative and communicative nature of journeys.

An incident of similar proportions in terms of media reporting was the Manus Island protests of January 2015, although extensive research on media involvement has not yet come to light. This research will examine the language used in the Australian media’s portrayal of the Manus Island protests and compare this with the existing research findings on the Australian media’s portrayal of the ‘children overboard’ incident. The aim of this research is to determine whether there has been any change in the treatment of asylum seekers by the Australian media in the 14 years between both

Asylum Seekers: The Comparison of Two Sides · The points of view that the suns newspaper report are trying to express are that the immigrants are entering the country under false pretences “falsely claming benefits” which angers there readers because they were lead to believe that they were entering the country to flee from poverty and war. From the instance that the audience picks up the paper the headlines for the article is “Read this article and get angry” with a picture of 4 illegal immigrants taking a leap of freedom over a barbed wire fence. So by analysing the headline the intention of this article is to anger the reader. · The Guardians report is based more on making you fell sympathetic

The writer speaks on past experiences where class, gender, race and sexuality have possibly affected the awareness of the news media. Christie (1986: 18) describes an ‘ideal victim’ as someone who looks vulnerable, defenceless, worthy of sympathy and compassion, this would probably be upper class people, elderly women and young children, whereas young men, the homeless and those of lower class suffer from victimization more deeply, they also may find it much more problematic to attain a legitimate victim status even if their case was more severe than others (Carrabine et al, 2004). This shows that the media select stories which involve sensitive and vulnerable people because this is most likely going to intrigue the audience. The issue with

One of the most contentious discourses to ever exist in the Australian news media is that which concerns asylum seekers. Discourse is defined as an organisation of socially constructed knowledge about an aspect of reality (Foucault 1977; Hall 1997; van Leeuwen 2005), and racism is a system of oppression targeting members of ethnic groups who share bodily phenotypes such as skin pigmentation (Erikson 2010, Luke and Carrington 2000, Scholte 2000). This essay will firstly argue that Australia’s dominant discourse portrays asylum seekers in a racist manner. Then, it will determine this discourse to be largely constructed by the news media: the mass communication channels (such as newspapers, television, and the Internet) that report recent events

In conclusion, the trend for illegal immigrants seeking refuge is presented as a dilemma in Australian media. There is a conscious effort to protect the rights of these individuals but the difficulty arises when this must be balanced with the right to protect Australian borders. Attitudes towards immigration imparted by the media are a controversial and progressively central focus in the national discourse. While Australian authorities carve the fate of “illegal” immigrants, public attitudes towards immigrants are nevertheless, vital for modelling immigration policies and these public attitudes are being recrafted by the media through the marginalisation’s of immigrants to stir prejudice attitudes against immigrants by employing bias through

My major work is a short story consisting of four parallel plots to explore the concept of nationalism and xenophobia in Australia. It specifically looks at the impact of these concepts on refugees. My aim is to encourage my audience to formulate conscious political opinions and change hostile perceptions of refugees. My major work is set primarily in a detention center and contains accounts of 4 polarised characters highly involved in the refugee situation—a young Syrian refugee, an older Sri Lankan refugee, a photographer and a bureaucrat. The inclusion of multiple characters in a tandem-narrative structure reinforces their vastly different reactions to the effects of detention. For example, one refugee embraces hope in exchange for

The Australian media is generally considered to be an available and reliable information source for Australian society. The media therefore has a strong influence over the information of social and individual opinions. Refugees are people who have been forced to leave their home because of war, natural disasters or persecution. The media represents this ‘category’ of people using a narrow group of information, presenting a particular skew of opinion, which is passed onto the individuals who place trust in these sources. Through the media interpreting the typical Australian, generally not showing the reality of immigrants it allows society to disregard refugees or asylum seekers as they do not ‘fit’ this ideal Australian. This ideology of the Australian has caused a history of social categorization and discrimination, often based in a racial or religious difference between the British Australian settlers, and a variety of groups, including: the Indigenous community, Chinese gold rush settlers, and Mediterranean immigrants. Recently, these social categorizations have been strongly targeted toward those seeking asylum on Australia’s shores. The rapid evolution of technology and the media has caused dramatic changes in the way that society, and the individuals within it have understood and approached these issues.

Calais is not considered a place for refugees to be able to temporarily settle while trying to seek asylum in the UK. Despite the dominant perceptions of refugees not belonging in the spaces of Calais, they persist and engage in place-making activities that contest the normative views. The ‘Jungle’ they live in is portrayed as chaotic and uncivilized, a rhetoric that is reproduced by the media and politicians in their discourse and action. The government of France has attempted to clear the camps multiple times, but when one camp is demolished, another one is built. Refugees in Calais are demonstrating their resilience through place-making processes in spaces that have been deemed inhospitable to them. This case study offers valuable insights

Migrants are defined as all those who were born outside the UK and were known as ‘aliens’ or ‘foreigners’. Kostakopoulou calls this assumption into question, arguing that ‘aliens’ are by definition outside the bounds of the community by virtue of a circular reasoning which takes for granted the existence of bounded national communities, and that this which takes for granted the existence of bounded national communities, and that this process of collective self-definition is deeply political and historically dated. The composition of the current UK migrant population has of course been conditioned by immigration policy over the past 50 years. Immigration has become a major debate across the UK, with many different reasons given for and