Unhomely Homes: Women, Family and Belonging in UK Discourses of Migration and Asylum

Abstract

Drawing on the insights of feminist theories of identity, this paper examines the ways in which problematic concepts of home, family, belonging and the ‘immigrant woman’ underpin discourses of immigration and asylum. It explores these issues through a critical reading of both government policy documents and tabloid press representations, and considers how these texts both presume and produce gendered limits to the terms of citizenship and belonging in contemporary Britain.

Keywords:

• Asylum
• Belonging
• Home
• Migration
• Women

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Helen Crowley, members of the Migrations and Immigrations Research Group at the Institute for the Study of European Transformations, London Metropolitan University, Meenakshi Thapan and participants in the ‘Women and Migration in Asia’ conference held in Delhi, December 2003, and the anonymous reviewers at JEMS for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. The Daily Mail is also the second most popular newspaper in the UK after The Sun, with circulation figures of about 2.5 million (Audit Bureau of Circulation figures for September 2003). For the purposes of this paper, I examined all Mail articles over a period of twelve months, August 2002–August 2003. In focusing on the Mail, I am not suggesting that it is only the tabloid press (and its presumed, class-inflected, readership) that participates in these discourses. A more extended examination of the specific ways in which the themes explored in this paper are articulated across a wider range of media would be a valuable area of further study, as would a more careful consideration of the class dimensions of both government and media discourses on migration and belonging. Unfortunately, both of these issues exceed the limits of this paper.

2. A pertinent example is the Refugee Council-commissioned MORI poll in 2003, which asked respondents to estimate what percentage of the world's refugees were located in the UK. The average response was 23 per cent, whereas in fact all of Europe only takes about 5 per cent of the world's total refugee population.

3. The first of these refugee resettlement programmes through approved gateways has been announced, allowing 500 refugees to be admitted from UN camps in West Africa (Guardian, 29 October 2003). The White Paper presents the gateway scheme as a way of ‘reducing the justification for those with protection needs to travel long distances before seeking protection’ (2001: 13). But it should be noted that many of the existing resettlement programmes that the White Paper cites as potential models for UK policy (e.g. Canada) have been criticised for the ways in which they select resettlement candidates on the basis of their skills and potential contribution to the economy, rather than on the basis of protection needs. See Flynn (2003) for a more extensive discussion of these tensions between questions of human rights and narrow economic interests in New Labour's immigration and asylum policy.

4. Byers’ statement is also interesting for the way that it simultaneously produces the white working class as the other problematic community in the context of migration, suggesting that resistance to multiculturalist integration is not a problem for the middle class, nor indeed for the government. Yet a very similar linking of demands on public services and threats to national identity can also be seen in the very middle-class reflections of David Goodhart's (2004) ‘Discomfort of Strangers’ article.

5. The Labour government would argue that their intense activity on this issue is a form of ‘pre-emptive strike’ to undercut the ground of racist organisations like the BNP. Nevertheless, as I try to show in this paper, the exclusionary model of belonging that underpins their own activity does nothing to challenge the conceptual roots of racism, and can, in fact, feed it further.

6. A similarly problematic juxtaposition occurred in the November 2003 Queen's Speech, where the proposals to take into care the children of rejected asylum claimants were presented at the same time as proposals to legalise civil partnerships for same-sex couples.

7. This effect is reinforced by the numerous stories that pick up the more familiar method of demonising the alien—of asylum-seekers as constituting a threat to proper British families, and to the safety of proper British women. In one such story, two young Albanian men, claiming to be 16-year-olds, are taken in by a ‘devoted Christian’ family who they proceed to ‘fleece’, while also trying to seduce the daughter. Their ‘deception led to them being placed in British schools to sit alongside unsuspecting 15- and 16-year-old girls’ and ‘sharing a home with their pretty teenage daughter’ (Mail, 2 August 2003). Another, entitled ‘Asylum for a Killer’, tells the story of a 73-year-old Algerian refugee who had killed his British wife in 1984, and was now fighting a deportation claim on the basis of his new British girlfriend's ‘claim to be pregnant’. For maximum effect, the two stories appear on the same day.

8. For an overview of some of these issues see the journal Feminist Review, 73, 2003, on exile and asylum.

9. See, for example, Alund (1999), Fortier (2000), Puwar and Raghuram (2003); Tsolidis (2001), Walter (2001) and Webster (1998).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Irene Gedalof

Irene Gedalof is Senior Lecturer in Women's Studies at London Metropolitan University