Influxes and invaders: the intersections between the metaphoric construction of immigrant otherness and ethnonationalism

ABSTRACT

Metaphors are a feature of public immigration discourse, with “undesirable” immigrants referred to as invasions, influxes, and floods both in the press and by politicians. Within Australia, such metaphors date back to the arrival of Chinese immigrants during the gold rushes (1850s), reoccurring with every large-scale arrival of non-white immigrants. Enacting racialized immigration restrictions was one of the foundational acts of the new Australian nation (1901), with whiteness enshrined as fundamental to national identity within the White Australia policy. Yet despite the abolition of the policy in the 1970s and the shift to multiculturalism, increasing non-white immigration has been accompanied by an intensification of negative immigration metaphors. I argue that this is because metaphors which construct racialized immigrant Otherness simultaneously flag ethnonationalist understandings about what it means to be Australian by implicitly centring (Anglo) whiteness as the defining feature of Australian national identity in a way no longer explicitly possible.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• race
• metaphor
• ethnonationalism
• Australia
• press

Disclosure statement

This paper builds on work presented at the IMISCOE Spring Conference, 2021, Messaging, Migration and Mobility.

Notes

1 In 1981, Lebanon featured, Vietnam featured in 1986 (Simon-Davies and McGann 2018, 6) – attributable to arrivals of refugees.

2 China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Sri Lanka.

3 Later Prime Minister (1996–2007).

4 Asylum-seeker specific metaphors i.e. queue-jumper have been excluded from this analysis.

5 Asylum seeker is used to refer to all migrants seeking asylum, in place of the range of terms used in the press, i.e. illegal immigrant, boat people.

6 Used to refer to the overall tenor of the varied collocates of a term, as either positive or negative (Stubbs 1996).

7 The Australian, 22/09/2012 – Feature.

8 SMH, 04/07/1996 – News/feature

9 The Australian, 15/09/1988 – News/feature

10 The most common collocation with flow.

11 Over 80%.

12 The Australian, 29/06/2012 – Feature.

13 SMH, 03/07/1977 – Feature.

14 The Australian, 20/02/2007 – Feature.

15 SMH, 25/08/1988 – News Leader.

16 SMH, 09/12/2006 – News Feature.

17 The Australian, 25/09/1996 – Opinion.

18 The Australian, 31/08/2001 – Opinion.

19 The Australian, 11/02/2006 – Feature.

20 Protection was more prevalent but used solely to refer to asylum seekers.

21 The Australian, 18/09/2001 – Opinion.

22 The Australian, 28/02/2013 – Feature.

23 The West Australian, 19/03/1988 – News.

24 Non-English-Speaking Background.

25 Both groups first arrived in the 1970s making these the most established non-white immigrant areas.

26 The Australian, 12/03/1988 – Column.

27 A conservative, anti-immigration MP.

28 SMH, 05/08/1989 – Opinion.

29 SMH, 16/09/2006 – News feature.

30 The meaning here may be literally accurate as well as metaphorically referring to places conceptualized as white.

31 The Australian, 14/05/2018 – Commentary.

32 The Australian, 20/03/2017 – Analysis.

33 Seen as racially distinct to Northern European.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.