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ABSTRACT
Applying selected psychoanalytic constructs from Freud and Klein to recent pervasive rhetoric around anti-immigration in the United States, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of media and policy representations of immigrants in recent news coverage in the United States regarding the Trump Administration’s response to (1) asylum claims related to domestic violence and gang violence and (2) undocumented immigrants. We illustrate how feared bad object/immigrants are constructed alongside the imagined good object/nationalism, as exemplified by Trump’s motto – “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). We argue how this paranoid-schizoid position reifies racism veiled under nationalism and discuss how social workers could work together toward the depressive position re-imagining America-as-the-whole.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes on contributors
Eunjung Lee
Eunjung Lee, PhD, MSW, RSW, Associate Professor Factor-Inwentash Chair in Mental Health & Health; at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto in Canada since 2017. She has over 20 years clinical social work practice in various mental health fields serving marginalized populations with trauma and violence experiences. She has worked as a clinical supervisor, currently keeping a small clinical consultation.
Dr. Lee is a psychotherapy-process researcher focusing on cross-cultural clinical practice in community mental health. Using critical theories in language, discourse and power, her research focuses on everyday interactions in clinical practice and simulation-based learning in social work education. Analyzing social policy and media studies, her research also explores how policy and its underlying politics construct dominant discourses that impact immigrants and refugees in a global neoliberal era, and theorize Canadian multiculturalism and welfare state.
She teaches clinical courses in mental health in the MSW program and social work theory in the doctoral program at FIFSW. She is Factor-Inwentash Chair in Social Work in Mental Health & Health.
Rupaleem Bhuyan
Rupaleem Bhuyan, joined the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work in 2008 as an Assistant Professor. She is currently an Associate Professor and an affiliate of the Women and Gender Studies Institute and a Fellow with the Center for Critical Qualitative Research at the University of Toronto.
Her interdisciplinary background in International Studies, Cultural Anthropology and Social Welfare allows her to integrate interpretive policy analysis and community-based participatory action research to address the sociocultural and political context of migration, social rights, and gender-based violence. Dr. Bhuyan explores how temporary and precarious immigration impacts immigrants’ access to social and health care services, including immigrants’ response to gender-based violence.
In 2011, Dr. Bhuyan co-created the Migrant Mothers Project, in collaboration with a network of community-based organizations, women’s rights and immigrant rights groups, and grassroots activists to document how immigration policies contribute to gendered inequality and different forms of gender-based violence. Migrant Mothers Project uses feminist, participatory, and action methods to foster deeper knowledge about the inequities that shape our lives and to identify strategies for collective action to advocate for dignity and human rights. Dr. Bhuyan is a member of the Gender Equality Network of Canada, the Rights of Non-Status Women Network, and is Co-Editor-in-Chief for Affilia: The Journal of Women and Social Work.