Category Use in the Construction of Asylum Seekers

Abstract By looking at category use within the asylum debate, this paper investigates how participants construct 'asylum seekers'. Critical discursive psychology is used to study a corpus of public sphere data. Categorization is shown to be a powerful political and rhetorical strategy for participants in the asylum debate as they attempt to impose their own systems of classification onto the debate, and, in doing so, justify the (more or less) harsh treatment of asylum seekers. Three strategies that speakers use to justify the different treatment of asylum seekers are identified: first, speakers distinguish the categories of 'refugee' and 'migrant'; second, the categories of 'refugees' and 'economic migrants' are conflated; and third, the categories of 'refugee' and 'illegal immigrant' are simultaneously distinguished and conflated. We conclude by discussing some of the political implications of these analyses – in particular, how category constructions can work to focus attention on asylum seekers' legitimacy, and not on how they can be helped. Keywords: asylum seekersimmigrationdiscourse analysispublic spherecategorizationprejudiceracismpower Acknowledgements We would like to thank Nick Lynn and delegates at the BPS Quinquennial conference at the University of Manchester in Citation2005, and two anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) postgraduate studentship PTA-030-2002-00144. Notes 1. See Speer and Potter Citation (2000) for a discussion of the notions of attitude and cognition in DP. 2. Jack Straw is the ex Labour Home Secretary. 3. As Barnes et al. (Citation2004, p. 202) claim, talk about '"who" can belong "where" is a prejudiced topic that requires an amount of discursive work to make it safely sayable'. 4. See http: //news. bbc. co. uk/1/hi/indepth/ukₚolitics/2004/partyₚoliciesₐtₐglance/default. stm and http: //www. conservatives. com/tile. do? def = news. story. page&objᵢd = 119049