‘Asylum shopping’ in the neoliberal social imaginary

Hegemonic asylum discourse in Britain

The dominant discourses surrounding asylum and immigration in comparatively wealthy, ‘receiving’ countries such as the UK since the early 1990s have been well documented as overwhelmingly negative and characterised by an underlying suspicion of, and often an outright hostility towards, asylum seekers (Buchanan et al., 2003; Coole, 2002; ICAR, 2004; Kaye, 1998; Saxton, 2003; Smart et al., 2007; Speers, 2001). This antagonism has been clearly represented in mainstream political and news media discourse, especially during the period of New Labour’s term of office (Balch and Balabanova, 2011; Moore, 2010, 2012; Gross et al., 2007; Thomson, 2003). In the early 2000s the volume of news reports on asylum and refugee issues in the UK significantly increased as the dominant political and news narratives focused upon a supposedly enormous and growing problem of asylum seeking and an ‘asylum crisis’ facing the country (Moore, 2012). Sensationalist headlines warned the tabloid reading public that so-called, ‘bogus asylum seekers’ threatened to penetrate UK borders, while the press more generally, and national politicians, implied that economic migration or more sinister intentions were really driving asylum claims. UK news coverage thus regularly characterised asylum seekers as ‘cheating’ the system, exploiting social resources, ‘scrounging’ welfare state benefits and social housing, and taking advantage of free education or health care on the National Health Service (Cohen, 2003, 2006; Cohen et al., 2002; Jordan and Brown, 2006). Moreover, asylum claimants were frequently associated with criminality or even terrorism, and thus constructed as a threat to public safety or national security (Gross et al., 2007; Moore, 2012). Indeed, the hegemonic discourse on asylum regularly articulated asylum seekers as an accumulating mass of undeserving and duplicitous ‘intruders’, and as a group who were somehow allowed to defy the rules, or at least to avoid the conditions to which ‘ordinary’ British people were subject. Narratives dominant in mainstream media and political discourse seemed to assume a default position of suspicion, reproducing a ‘culture of disbelief’ about asylum claims (Souter, 2011; Threadgold, 2006; Weber and Gelsthorpe, 2000). In parallel, these narratives often positioned the British state as manipulated and compromised – emasculated by the supposed ‘abuse’ of its immigration system and its failure to deal with an ‘asylum crisis’ (Moore, 2010, 2012).

During this period a number of new expressions appeared within the public discourse surrounding asylum seekers and refugees serving to distinguish supposedly legitimate (‘genuine’, ‘deserving’, ‘bona fide’) from illegitimate (‘bogus’, ‘fake’, ‘cheating’) claimants. The question of inaccurate or unjust labelling became an important focal point for asylum rights organisations campaigning against the stigma and negative myths developing about asylum seekers and refugees, and an object of analysis for cultural and media researchers (Bleasdale, 2008; Buchanan et al., 2003; Gross et al., 2007; ICAR, 2004; Smart et al., 2007; Speers, 2001; Tyler, 2006). A review of Hansard reveals that the term ‘asylum shopping’ was first mentioned in Parliament on 2 March 1992, when then Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker spoke to the Commons about the ratification of the 1990 Dublin Convention – a European Community inter-governmental agreement to cooperate on asylum processes and harmonise measures. The Dublin Convention, Baker noted, ‘deals with the problem of so-called asylum shopping by setting out rules to determine which member state is to take responsibility for a given application’ (Baker, 1992, italics added). Baker’s meta-narrative reference, ‘so-called’ suggests a term coined elsewhere than mainstream UK political discourse – perhaps within the legal and policy discussions of inter-governmental meetings. It was certainly not a term with any existing currency in the UK press, which did not mention ‘asylum shopping’ until 1993. Indeed, a keyword search of Nexis and Newsbank databases shows the press at this time was more likely to refer to ‘refugees in orbit’ (Jaeger, 1988: 28) to describe the circumstances surrounding multiple asylum claims. ¹ This expression, potentially directing attention to the lack of humanitarian safeguards within the system and the consequences when states fail in their responsibilities to hear asylum claims, demonstrates the contingency of the signifier ‘asylum shopping’ within asylum discourse (see for example, Oakley, 1990; Rice, 1991; Tighe, 2008).

‘Asylum shopping’ coverage in the UK press

This article presents a discourse analysis of ‘asylum shopping’ in the UK press, contextualised by a content analysis of broad trends in the volume, distribution and thematic patterns of coverage. The content analysis is based on searches of the Newsbank and Nexis databases of all English-language UK newspapers (all dates up to 2011) using the keywords ‘asylum shopp!’ and ‘shop! for asylum’ to capture variants of the term. This yielded a total corpus of 164 articles (99 broadsheet, 30 tabloid and 35 regional). A database of these 164 articles was set up, cataloguing publication name, date, main news narrative/theme, headline, paragraphs immediately contextualising each mention of ‘asylum shopping’ and high-intensity periods, or ‘bursts’ of coverage. ²

As Figure 1 illustrates, ‘asylum shopping’ first appeared in British newspapers in 1993 but became a more established term during the early 2000s. Although the majority of articles mentioning ‘asylum shopping’ were in the broadsheet press, variations in the volume of coverage over time roughly tracked the same pattern within tabloid and regional newspapers. As such, ‘asylum shopping’ can evidently be seen to have represented a useful and newsworthy term at similar moments across press types, with coverage peaking between 2001 and 2003. Throughout 1993–2011, newspapers were largely concerned with reporting summits and formal meetings between European Union (EU) leaders and ministers discussing harmonisation and tightening of asylum rules, measures to police the expanding Schengen area (such as the 2003 EU-wide fingerprint database EURODAC, introduced to monitor and track the movement of asylum seekers) and the strengthening the ‘Dublin regulations’ intended to prevent people applying for asylum in more than one EU country.

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Figure 1.

‘Asylum shopping’ in the UK press (n = 164).

Figure 2 shows how ‘asylum shopping’ was most frequently deployed in news narratives discussing common policies on asylum between EU states in the broadsheet press, and EURODAC in tabloid and regional newspapers. Other noteworthy stories during the peak years of 2001–3 included the intensifying row between Britain and France over those seeking to cross the channel to the UK from the Red Cross Camp at Sangatte, in northern France, high-profile deportation cases under the Dublin Convention, discussions of national sovereignty vis-a-vis the EU or international human rights law, and coverage of controversial proposals in the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill. During 2001–3 – a period coinciding with the construction of an ‘asylum crisis’ in mainstream UK media and political discourse (Moore, 2010, 2012) – coverage was mainly clustered in ‘bursts’, as high-profile asylum news events such as the speeches and policy interventions of government ministers were widely reported.

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Figure 2.

News narratives featuring ‘asylum shopping’ in the UK press (n = 164).

The analysis below investigates how ‘asylum shopping’ was discursively constructed during three significant bursts of coverage ³ heavily featuring the two most important news narratives – ‘common EU asylum policy’ and ‘EURODAC’. The tools and techniques of CDA (Fairclough,1992; Predelli, 2003) employed to systematically examine ‘asylum shopping’ discourse include analysis of presupposition – especially with respect to the explanatory frameworks surrounding ‘asylum shopping’ and the legitimating ideas with which the signifier ‘asylum shopping’ is articulated; syntactic transformations of meaning – primarily those effected by processes of nominalisation surrounding ‘asylum shopping’ as a newly coined signifier; and the modality of journalistic headlines invoking ‘asylum shopping’. In this, the primary aim is not to identify further similarities or differences between different newspaper types (in fact, identical or near identical passages were frequently found across publications in their coverage of stories – suggesting the verbatim deployment of official press release material). Rather it is to explore how and why the dominant discourses at play across the press surrounding the term ‘asylum shopping’ during a purported moment of ‘crisis’ in this policy area could be articulated socially and politically as ‘common sense’.

The deployment of ‘asylum shopping’

The process of seeking asylum, customarily signified as ‘asylum seeking’, is through its collocation with ‘shopping’ re-lexicalised, metaphorically translated and re-categorised as a type of consumer activity – the logical inference being that people might, or in fact do, ‘go shopping’ for asylum as if freely browsing nations to choose the best deal on a new lifestyle. Such a proposition clearly stands in stark contrast to notions of asylum defined in international human rights law as seeking sanctuary from persecution and a recognised status as a refugee (United Nations, 1951). Through the process of nominalisation: ‘the conversion of a clause into a nominal or noun’ (Fairclough, 1992: 27), the proposition referred to above is abstracted – transformed into what appears to be a formal concept and reified. The semantic transformation effected by this subtle linguistic process serves to gloss over any question that it is either legitimate or meaningful to assume that asylum seekers might ‘shop’ for asylum. In view of its evident difference and potential challenge to this institutionalised meaning of ‘asylum’, one might expect the deployment of the term ‘asylum shopping’ within mainstream news discourse to be controversial or at least questioned. For example, formal journalistic devices such as ‘scare quotes’ could, potentially, take the edge off this ‘gloss’, signifying some measure of critical modality towards the term. Indeed, these were very common across newspaper types – used in all but three instances within the sampled coverage – as exemplified by the following:

The Foreign Secretary believes that differences in policy encourage ‘asylum-shopping’ – migrants choose the easiest EU nation to enter, then, once inside the EU, seek the nation with the most favourable conditions. (The Times, 20 June 2002)

Moves will also be taken to tackle ‘asylum shopping’ when refugees come to Britain seeking higher benefits payments after having gained asylum in other European countries. (Independent, 12 June 2002; Evening Standard, 12 June 2002) ⁴

measures were needed to ensure common policies to banish ‘asylum shopping’ where refugees choose a country with more lenient regulations. (Daily Mail, 21 June 2002)

Whilst scare quotes do have a distancing function within these texts, serving to indicate content ‘belonging to an outside voice’ (Fairclough, 1992: 119), or ‘borrowed from some other source’s idiolect’ (Predelli, 2003: 2), they can also serve a variety of purposes, including ‘showing a usage to be new or tentative, or introducing a new word’ (Fairclough, 1992: 120). Scare quotes do not necessarily signify journalistic scepticism towards the term – indeed, their function within each of these examples is instructive, serving to position the reader to work with and understand the proffered definitions for ‘asylum shopping’ rather than to question or challenge them. Such definitions always bypassed any explicit questioning of the origin or appearance of the neologism. However, in other articles, a second, potentially distancing caveat – the prefix, ‘so-called’ did feature, for example:

Moves will also be taken to tackle so-called asylum shopping when refugees come to Britain seeking higher benefits payments after having gained asylum in other European countries. (Yorkshire Post, 12 June 2002)

Agreement of common standards and timescales for processing asylum requests is seen as a key element in ending so-called asylum shopping, as refugees are often tempted to seek out the country where their requests take the longest to process. (Financial Times, 14 June 2002)

Some 10–20% of the 400,000 people seeking asylum in the EU every year are estimated to be involved in so-called ‘asylum shopping’ – seeking out the countries which offer the best conditions. (The Guardian, 15 January 2003)

As a metadiscursive reference to a disembodied and unidentified source of knowledge, ‘so-called’ seems to function simultaneously as a disavowal of journalistic responsibility for the term ‘asylum shopping’ and a mechanism through which both to suture its legitimacy within the text and authorise its general use. In stark contrast, responsibility and active individual agency on the part of asylum seekers or refugees are always implied within contextualising definitions of ‘asylum shopping’. Although variously nuanced across the coverage, these represent asylum seekers as ‘choosing’ their destinations, or designing strategies to maximise their potential chances for securing asylum: they ‘target countries where they will be offered the best terms’ (Financial Times, 20 June 2002) and ‘try to reach countries such as Britain where they feel they will get better treatment’ (The Times, 29 December 2002). Where definitions of ‘asylum shopping’ are not provided, the exercise of choice on the part of asylum seekers is nonetheless presupposed in representing common EU policy as a logical response, for example: ‘to stop immigrants “asylum shopping” for the most amenable country’ (The Times, 21 June 2002) and, ‘to prevent “asylum shopping”’ (Daily Express, 20 June 2002).

The unquestioning modality through which the signifier ‘asylum shopping’ is articulated in the press is reinforced by the consistency of ‘asylum shopping’ headlines positioning asylum as a problem or threat to be deterred, pre-empted, managed or guarded against. For example, in its EURODAC coverage the Financial Times represents dealing with ‘asylum shopping’ as analogous to fire fighting: EU adopts fingerprint database: immigration cross-border system aims to stamp out ‘asylum shopping’ (Financial Times, 1 March 2002). Here, the British nation is positioned as unnecessarily vulnerable, termed a ‘soft touch’ and in need of new measures of protection. Similarly, in The Times, ‘Asylum shoppers will be curbed by EU data link’ (28 February 2002) and in the Daily Mail, ‘Blitz on asylum shoppers who want the best benefits’ (11 June 2002), the notion of a problem to be addressed is uncritically reproduced, but now directly labelling a group of responsible agents – ‘asylum shoppers’. As the legitimacy of the lexicalisation, ‘asylum shopping’, is tautologically reinforced, so a more confident acceptance of the concept and a more assertive modality within the journalistic discourse is signified about the existence of the threat that ‘asylum shopping’ is supposed to represent.

The ‘common sense’ deployment in news and policy narratives of such an unusual phrase – which juxtaposes ‘shopping’ – associated with consumerism and the market, with ‘asylum seeking’, the act of seeking sanctuary – is, I would argue, rather remarkable. That such an incongruous construct should not be questioned calls attention to why this should be the case, and one important area for investigation, I suggest, is to explore further how the term ‘asylum shopping’ discourse might be understood to articulate profound anxieties concerning contemporary identities of national belonging and otherness.

‘Asylum shoppers’ and insecure national fantasies

Theories of nationalism in the contemporary conjuncture do not present ‘the nation’ as an altogether reassuring object for the subjects of democratic nation-states. The symbolic value of Britain as an ‘imagined community’, like that of all national communities perhaps, is destabilised in an era of globalisation, arguably challenging the autonomy of nation-states (Anderson, 1983; Papastergiadis, 2000). But, as Paul Gilroy contends, in postcolonial Britain, a ‘melancholic pattern has become the mechanism that sustains the unstable edifice of an increasingly brittle and empty national identity’ (Gilroy, 2004: 27–8). Gilroy uses the term post-imperial (or postcolonial) melancholia to call attention to the continuing impact of the nation’s colonial history upon its social, political and cultural life, and to name a ‘social pathology’ (Gilroy, 2004, 2005) wherein the violence of colonial and postcolonial histories is systematically buried or skipped over in the form of a historical denial of colonial power and oppression. Because of a national cultural failure to mourn ‘the loss of a fantasy of omnipotence’, and ‘work through’ the complex and difficult legacies of colonialism, including the significance of its injustices and loss of national status, he argues, symptoms of melancholia surface in contemporary cultural politics. For example, there is a tendency in Britain to focus heavily upon particular elements of the national cultural past reified as glorious (such as victory in the Second World War, or rare national sporting achievements). However, postcolonial melancholia is also symptomatically expressed in hostility towards those identified as cultural or racialised ‘others’, including immigrants and asylum seekers, who are, according to Gilroy, ‘unwanted and feared precisely because they are the unwitting bearers of the imperial and colonial past’, compelling the postcolonially melancholic to perceive ‘the unsettling shame of its bloody management’ (Gilroy, 2004: 95).

The expression of postcolonial melancholia can be detected in the news featuring ‘asylum shopping’, and notably in that covering the controversial comments of then Home Secretary David Blunkett in April 2002 concerning his Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act proposals to segregate education for young asylum seekers in special asylum accommodation centres away from mainstream schools. In his choice of rhetoric, Blunkett’s argument that some schools in Britain were in danger of being ‘swamped’ by asylum seekers remediated the anti-immigration discourse that was central to the hegemony of the new right in the 1980s, and, in particular, seemed to echo Margaret Thatcher’s assertion over two decades earlier that people in Britain feared that they ‘might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’, which in turn echoed the racist rhetoric of Enoch Powell (Smith, 1994). By invoking this discursive legacy to explain the asylum ‘problem’ Blunkett’s rhetoric re-articulated an insidious and powerful social myth concerning the threats posed to the nation by immigration. Although this policy was ultimately dropped (apparently under pressure from the Labour backbenches), some sections of the press represented the Prime Minister’s energetic defence of Blunkett and his rhetoric as a strong policy stance. For example, in ‘Blitz on asylum shoppers who want the best benefits’ (Daily Mail, 11 June 2002), Blunkett’s comments are reproduced uncritically, and the proposals for the educational segregation of asylum seekers are referred to approvingly as ‘tough plans’ risking ‘opposition’ and ‘rebellion’ from other MPs. Other articles adopted a seemingly more balanced approach by reporting this particular policy measure as politically contentious and an object of party political and intra-party debate, such as the article, ‘Blunkett retreats on asylum bill to try and appease rebels’ (The Independent, 12 June 2002). Here, while war remains the analogy of choice, the main antagonistic forces confronting Blunkett are represented more ambiguously (both as the target of his bill – illegal immigrants asylum seekers, and his rebellious political colleagues). Similarly in, ‘Tory peer slams asylum centre proposals’ (Evening Standard, 12 June 2002), Blunkett’s plans for asylum accommodation centres are described as ‘under fresh attack’. The article reports Lord Taylor, ‘claimed the sites were like concentration camps’, and ‘monstrosities … more like prisons than homes’, incidentally identifying him as ‘the only black Conservative in the House of Lords’. Although the emotive similes here offer possibilities to articulate a more humanitarian focus (and the mention of Lord Taylor’s identity a more complex national discourse on immigration), ⁶ the article instead swiftly shifts focus to outline Blunkett’s ‘blueprint for a Europewide clampdown on asylum seekers’. Despite their focus upon the controversy surrounding Blunkett’s asylum proposals, both the Independent and the Evening Standard articles report verbatim that, among other measures in the bill, ‘Moves will also be taken to tackle “asylum shopping” when refugees come to Britain seeking higher benefits payments after having gained asylum in other European countries.’ Neither article represents any challenge to the dominant policy discourse on asylum as a threat to British society, nor the presupposition that ‘asylum shopping’ should be considered a meaningful element of this threat as ongoing and evolving. Thus, although news narratives surrounding this policy proposal vary slightly, the politically charged discourse on asylum remains a constant and ‘asylum shopping’ is implicitly linked to a loaded discursive pre-history of national anxiety about immigration, race relations and potential social unrest.

The forces unsettling national identity that Gilroy associates with the postcolonial condition are compounded further by their articulation with those of contemporary global capitalism. Ghassan Hage and Zygmunt Bauman, in their respective theoretical engagements with identity in the contemporary conjuncture, share this perspective – each demonstrating that identifying with the nation positively is also considered an unlikely prospect. For Bauman, in the context of late or ‘liquid’ modernity, where older ‘certainties’ concerning cultural or political identity seem to have been fundamentally destabilised or fragmented (Bauman, 2006a), the idea of a ‘unified, completed, secure and coherent identity’ is best seen as a ‘fantasy’, a fantasy which, as Hall notes, serves a fundamental political purpose – fixing one’s sense of one’s place in the world in relation to that of ‘others’ (Hall, 1992: 277). This fantasy also performs an important role in terms of identifying who does and does not ‘belong’ in a group or place and how the question of belonging is to be ‘decided’. For example, in racist discourses, as Gilroy argues, ‘acceptance that race, nationalism, and ethnicity are invariant relieves the anxieties that arise with a loss of certainty as to who one is and where one fits’ (Gilroy, 2004: 6). However, in respect of the negative discourses surrounding asylum seekers, the exclusionary forces are not necessarily explicitly articulated through the modality of ‘race’ or class in any straightforward way. For Bauman (2004), asylum seekers are demonised through the mythologies sustaining ‘liquid modernity’, of which ‘overpopulation’ is a very important example – legitimated by the discourse of demography. According to Bauman’s argument, an ‘overpopulated’ world (designated as such in accordance with the labour supply needs of the neoliberal capitalist system) can no longer deal with its ‘surplus’ through old methods (for example, through emigration policies to populate the uncharted territory of the ‘new world’). As a result, there is now a growing problem of ‘human waste’ in the centre (the indigenous unemployed), compounded by the migration of further redundant or conflict-ravaged populations from the periphery seeking a better life in the West (Bauman, 2004, 2005). The fallout of modernity, according to Bauman is surplus, waste or unwanted objects in both inanimate and human form. This is not a new phenomenon but has operated as a structural element of modernity since its inception. Necessitated by this waste, however, are ever new dumping grounds or repositories for the surplus – places that have, in the past, been discovered in the ‘pre-modern’ or ‘under-developed’ areas of the globe in order to process ‘waste’ away from the ‘centres’ of modernity. Now that the global market has extended throughout the world, however, there are fewer and fewer options for ‘waste disposal’, while, simultaneously, more and more waste is produced. Humans deemed ‘surplus to requirements’, according to Bauman, are therefore literally refuse-d, condemned as ‘human waste’ by the contemporary capitalist system.

The stark image depicted by Bauman, of the commodification and expendability of human existence under neoliberal capitalism provides a striking rationale for why a social myth of national privilege and wealth, however tenuous, might be so anxiously promoted on the one hand, and why those deemed to not belong or be deserving of the nation’s favour might be greeted with such hostility on the other. Indeed, such a fantasy of the nation has been consistently promoted in government policy towards asylum and immigration since the late 1990s, especially via calls for common European policy to reduce the supposed ‘pull factors’ Britain offers to asylum seekers, and to increase border security technologies to protect apparent privileges of the UK from ‘undeserving’ migrants (Moore, 2010). The reproduction of elements of this fantasy discourse can also be detected in the main news narratives featuring ‘asylum shopping’. For example, in an article about the introduction of EURODAC, the status of the nation as a choice destination is emphasised:

Britain attracts more asylum-seekers than any other EU country because of its reputation for freedom, its use of the English language and false perceptions about the level of benefits. It received 97,000 asylum applications in 2000, more than a fifth of all applications made to EU countries, and almost all the applicants came via other member states. (The Times, 28 February 2002)

While the desirability of Britain is deprecatingly framed as a burden to be managed through ever-tightening asylum control measures, national ‘popularity’ nevertheless very much remains a necessary element of this discourse. It is also the topic of the headline, ‘UK is no longer most popular target for refugees’ (The Independent, 1 March 2002), even though the report focuses upon falling application numbers and the significant impact of new border security technologies. The declining importance of the UK among EU countries ‘targeted’ is highlighted, ‘The United Kingdom has now dropped to 10th place in the league table of asylum-seekers taken in by the 16 European Union states per head of population’ – a fact represented as ‘confounding claims that Britain has become the favoured destination for refugees and economic migrants from around the world’. As such, the article contrasts strongly with The Times’ article and offers a critical perspective upon the dominant ‘asylum crisis’ discourse of this period. But in doing so, it would seem, it also offers something of a disorientating challenge to national identity-affirming assumptions about Britain’s status and reputation.

‘Asylum shopping’ plays an important role in identifying the British nation with an image of socio-economic privilege and in the discursive assumption that it is necessary to protect or defend Britain’s privileged status. Yet the primary responsibility assumed for the state is to deny privilege through the policing of mobility, and reproduce, what Doreen Massey has called, the relations of ‘power geometry’ whereby:

Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it. (Massey, 1994: 149)

Policing migrant identities through biometric systems such as EURODAC signifies that it is necessary to identify bodies that are, and those that are not to be permitted access to Britain (the ‘genuine’ versus those suspected of being ‘illegitimate’ or ‘harmful’ asylum seekers), to differentiate between those who should and should not experience ease of mobility across borders. Public discourses representing the policing of migrant identities as such are both fundamentally important to maintaining Britain’s image and status on the world stage, and to promoting a fantasy of national affluence and aspiration in which the domestic audience can invest. As Wilson notes:

For nation-states, the engagement of biometric technology at physical borders bears a signification that neatly encapsulates the paradoxes of state sovereignty under conditions of globalisation. Biometric technology offers the possibility of rapid flows of capital and global elites through borders while simultaneously fortifying the border against unwanted intrusions from ‘deviant’ outsiders. […] In a global economy where mobility is equated with participation, the consequences of this discrimination are enormously significant. (Wilson, 2006: 95)

Yet, at the same time, the ‘asylum shopping’ coverage also communicates something of an uncertainty about this privileged status – it is evidently very vulnerable to ‘harm’, and thus potentially only precariously attached to British national identity. However, as the myth of the sovereign state’s confidence within the current system cannot be seriously questioned (Britain is still a ‘target’, if not necessarily the prime target), the identity of ‘privilege’ must instead be shored up through the representation of an antagonistic relation with an other – a constitutive outside which would threaten it – the undesirable migrant. Indeed, marking the boundaries of identity belonging inevitably involves, Hall argues, ‘the production of “frontier effects”’, where identity ‘requires what is left outside, its constitutive outside, to consolidate the process’ (Hall, 1995: 3). Asylum seekers (especially as ‘asylum shoppers’) have been discursively constructed and positioned as the ‘constitutive outside’, a threat to the identity of the nation, but also necessary to the maintenance or ‘consolidation’ of its identity at the same time (Laclau, 1990). Moreover, it is crucial to reassure the domestic audience that this threatening situation is being efficiently ‘managed’ – through the myth that the difference between ‘us-the privileged’ and ‘them-that would threaten it’ can be ‘fixed’. The invoked mechanism here for such a ‘fixing’ – science – provides some evidence for the concerns of Paul Gilroy, mentioned above, about new technological logics of justification for differentiating and classifying ‘others’ reinvigorating forms of raciological thinking.

Both the ‘undesirability’ of asylum seekers and the defensive image of British prestige were also very evident in the news coverage surrounding Tony Blair’s policy idea to link foreign aid payments to the efforts of poorer nations to collaborate with the EU in combating illegal immigration. An idea ultimately rejected both by other EU nations as well as UK MPs including Blair’s own International Development Secretary, Clare Short, who branded it ‘morally repugnant’, this Realpolitik-style proposal positioned foreign aid as a ‘weapon’ in coercing weaker nations to assist Europe in pre-empting and deterring the arrival of asylum seekers. The critical aspect of this story focused largely upon whether the policy failure represented a humiliating ‘retreat’ for the EU – as for example in, ‘EU retreats over aid cut to get deal on asylum’ (The Times, 21 June 2002); the Home Secretary David Blunkett, as in, ‘Short attacks use of aid as asylum weapon; minister angers Blunkett as she torpedoes key policy’ (Daily Mail, 21 June 2002); or for Blair on the European stage: ‘Blair forced to ease plan to punish poor nations summit’ (The Independent, 22 June 2002). However, regardless of the political interpretation of the newspaper on this point, the sense that this represented a somewhat humiliating climb-down was shared. As a faltering demonstration of national prestige, the aid story not only demonstrates the centrality of fantasies of identity fixing in ‘asylum shopping’ coverage, it arguably reveals a more fundamental anxiety about ‘power geometry’ and the dominant neoliberal logics conditioning national myth building.

Such conditions of national anxiety in a context of neoliberal globalisation resonate strongly with Hage’s theory of ‘paranoid nationalism’. Hage contends that anxiety – that the nation-state will no longer fulfil a role in shaping and securing our social aspirations and hopeful futures – forcefully conditions nationalistic hostilities towards ‘the other’. He argues that while ‘worrying is generally produced by an external threat to an object we care for’, the worrying of paranoid nationalism, ‘is the product of an insecure attachment to a nation that is no longer capable of nurturing its citizens’ (Hage, 2003: 3). Indeed, as early as the 1980s, Stuart Hall noted how the state and immigrant ‘others’ were constructed within new right discourse as threatening ‘the destruction of “our culture, our way of life”’ (Hall, 1990 [1983]: 38). Since then the ‘welfare state’ has been dramatically weakened and rolled back. Gilroy argues that ‘beleaguered regimes’, distancing themselves from ‘socialistic principles’ and ‘welfare state inclusiveness’ have ‘produced strangers and aliens as the limit against which increasingly evasive national particularity can be seen, measured and then, if need be, negatively discharged’ (Gilroy, 2004: 135). Governments no longer promise to protect their citizens from the excesses and brutalities of capitalism as a justification for their authority and to legitimise the hegemony of the capitalist system, in part, as Bauman (2006b) also argues, because they are no longer capable of making such promises. Instead ‘liquid modernity’ requires those within the system to take responsibility for their own unpredictable and ever changing social and economic circumstances, endlessly adapting to fit the needs and fluid demands of the system (Bauman, 2006a). An alternative justification for state power is necessary, according to Bauman, and this is expressed through the demonisation of certain figures as objects of fear, including asylum seekers. Asylum seekers symbolise a need for state action to contain and repress perceived threats and thus allay fears, as Kushner argues:

Rather than representing any real threat, asylum seekers have become scapegoats for those anxious about the world around them, about contemporary concerns such as health provision and job security, and, less tangentially, about a threatening future and a rapidly changing and increasingly complex global community whose very presence in their midst undermines the illusion of belonging to an exclusive and comforting nation-state. (Kushner, 2003: 262)

In this context, attending to ‘our relation to the future’ is important – a future which, in Hage’s terms, is characterised by a deficit of ‘hope’. More economically, socially or culturally privileged citizens (who, in past times, might have felt confident that the state would care about and support their social aspirations), now find this privilege to be more precarious, and experience intense paranoia that someone else may be receiving the care that was due to them. Hage contends:

They project the fear that is inherent in the fragility of their relationship with their own nation onto everything classified as alien. Increasingly, their attachment to such a non-feeding nation generates a specific paranoid form of nationalism. They become vindictive and bigoted, always ready to ‘defend the nation’, in the hope of re-accessing their lost hopes. (Hage, 2003: 21)

The paranoid nationalist may very well suspect that the investment of their affective resources in the nation will have little prospect of a due return. But, Hage argues, with no alternative available, they find this prospect too difficult to accept, and invest nonetheless in a ‘fantasy’ of the nation, which, ‘needs to be protected’ from this reality (Hage, 2003: 4).

‘Asylum shopping’ and the entrepreneurial self

The emasculation of the welfare state and changing relations between the nation-state and its citizens represent an incredibly important cultural shift in western democratic societies. As Paul du Gay argues, radical reforms to public services since the 1990s, towards what was termed ‘New Public Management’ or ‘entrepreneurial governance’, initiated new contractual modes of governing which redefined the relationship between the state and the public. New responsibilities were placed upon the individual (articulated as ‘empowerment’), with a greater emphasis upon competition and performance as a means through which efficiency and organisational and individual goals might be maximised:

Because a human being is considered to be continuously engaged in a project to shape his or her life as an autonomous, choosing individual driven by the desire to optimize the worth of its own existence, life for that person is represented as a single, basically undifferentiated arena for the pursuit of that endeavour. Because previously distinct forms of life are now classified primarily if not exclusively as ‘enterprise forms’, the conceptions and practices of personhood they give rise to are remarkably consistent. As schools, prisons, governmental departments and so forth are re-imagined as ‘enterprises’ they all accord an increased priority to the ‘entrepreneur’ as a category of person. In this sense, the character of the entrepreneur can no longer be represented as just one amongst a plurality of ethical personalities but must be seen as assuming an ontological priority. (du Gay, 2008 [1996]: 157)

These changes have also penetrated the style of governance of immigration and asylum, including the conduct of immigration officials and organisational practices of agencies of government concerned with managing immigration. Indeed, elements of the asylum system are run on a commercial basis, contracts for the transportation and detention of immigrants providing an important example of this (Bacon, 2005). More indirectly, however, I would argue that the ‘ontological priority’ afforded to entrepreneurial individualism contributes to cultural expectations of asylum seekers and their motivations and behaviours as individual humans making decisions about their personal futures. For ‘hard-working’ or ‘respectable’ national citizens, the responsibility to behave in this way is a daily endeavour, even if, perhaps, this is likely to be a largely fruitless endeavour, as Gordon notes:

This idea of an individual human life as ‘an enterprise of the self’ suggests that no matter what hand circumstance may have dealt a person, he or she remains always continuously engaged (even if technically ‘unemployed’) in that one enterprise, and that it is ‘part of the continuous business of living to make adequate provision for the preservation, reproduction and reconstruction of one’s own human capital.’ (Gordon, cited in du Gay, 2008 [1996]: 155)

Discourses positing asylum seekers as ‘bogus’, as ‘economic migrants in disguise’ or indeed as ‘asylum shoppers’ are, I would contend, haunted by these familiar expectations that all individuals should and will operate above all, as entrepreneurs of the self. Behind the dehumanising news narratives of asylum seekers as ‘human cargo’ is perhaps the ‘realist’ assumption that all, including asylum seekers, are encouraged to believe that the route to survival lies in recognising our personal commercial interests as our primary responsibility. As Threadgold argues, neoliberal discourses position all subjects, including asylum seekers, as individuals compelled to assume the responsibility for their own subjection by the forces of neoliberalism:

The difference of course is that [asylum seekers] are not protected by any nation state, and that they are paradoxically denied any individuality by (among others) the homogenising political, policy, media and legal discourses which label and dehumanise them. And yet, they are seen as having ‘chosen’ to be asylum seekers, ‘chosen’ to come to ‘soft-touch’ Britain, and are required to self-manage and to renarrativise their own identity with resource to little else but their own psychology, and in opposition to a powerful mediatised narrative which works through many institutions to make them unrecognisable to themselves on a daily basis. (Threadgold, 2006: 225)

Indeed, I would contend that the subjection of all to these kinds of neoliberal positionings helps to explain the moral outrage that has so often been articulated in dominant discourses surrounding asylum and refugee issues, and more particularly the rhetorical force of the term ‘asylum shopping’. Within this social imaginary, it is perhaps no surprise that the asylum system should have been personified as a victim of ‘abuse’ at the hands of ‘asylum shoppers’ (Jordan and Brown, 2006), with numerous reforms suggesting a continual unease about its bureaucratic inadequacies, its inefficient and ineffectual processes apparently requiring continuous renewal and technological development in the face of the entrepreneurial spirit and individual endeavours of those who would seek to exploit its weaknesses. Articulated in this way, asylum is no longer primarily concerned with ideas such as ‘sanctuary’ or ‘hospitality’. Instead of a structure providing protection, the asylum system becomes metonym for the nation, re-articulated as that which requires protection from exploitation. Indeed, as part of a myth so in accordance with the prevailing neoliberal social imaginary it is perhaps no wonder that, despite the extraordinary novelty of the expression, calls to combat ‘asylum shopping’ should have been naturalised and incorporated so uncritically within the UK press discourse surrounding asylum and refugee issues.

Conclusion

Although asylum shopping is rarely a principal news theme in its own right, the newsworthiness, news narratives and construction of dominant discourses at play surrounding ‘asylum shopping’ have been broadly consistent across the press. Its conditions of emergence have not been critically questioned, while commonly deployed journalistic techniques highlighting its novelty have even facilitated its ‘common sense’ articulation within hegemonic asylum discourse. Featuring mostly during a conjuncture of supposed ‘asylum crisis’, ‘asylum shopping’ has become an established referent in the lexicon of asylum reporting, potentially available to be put to ideological work when needed. ‘Asylum shopping’ efficiently condenses complex destabilising anxieties surrounding a myth of national privilege and the identity of the ‘legitimate neoliberal subject’. By indexing these vulnerabilities, asylum seekers are attributed an identity that is subversive of the prevailing order. As precisely those whose interests normatively do not ‘belong’ here, the subject position of asylum seekers as consumers and privileged economic agents is unthinkable. ‘Asylum shopping’ signifies a powerful and ironic subversion of normative order, especially as asylum seekers’ choices are figured as ones of international mobility and lifestyle, challenging the existing power geometry by selecting and moving freely across borders. As Bauman notes:

Refugees have become, in a caricatured likeness to the new power elite of the globalised world, a sign of the rootlessness of the present-day human condition, and hence a focus for the sense of precariousness that feeds many present-day human fears and anxieties. Such fears and anxieties have been displaced into the popular resentment and fear of refugees, since they cannot be defused or dispersed in a direct challenge to that other embodiment of extraterritoriality – the global elite that drifts beyond the reach of human control. (Bauman, 2005: 98)

It is perhaps at moments when this extraterritorial identity is articulated most ambiguously that discourses surrounding the supposed ‘abuse’ of the asylum system, become most powerful, speaking to potential political antagonisms organised around the idea that asylum seekers could be delivered from an abject status to a cosmopolitan subject position via ‘our’ hospitality. As such, ‘asylum shopping’ threatens to radically disrupt the order of things, short circuiting our own aspirations to privilege in security and access to global mobility. This analysis highlights the tensions and inconsistencies in the neoliberal social imaginary, including between the myth of neoliberal freedoms and the very deep-seated fears and uncertainties about the future and the opportunities possible for western neoliberal subjects. Responsibility for such opportunities within the prevailing order can only belong to the individual themselves, even if the power to condition or meaningfully determine one’s future is at best very limited. How asylum seeker identities are positioned by ‘asylum shopping’ draws attention to these contradictions, including fundamental insecurities in the identity of the ‘legitimate’ British consumer-citizen, subject positioned as an entrepreneur of the self. Deconstructing ‘asylum shopping’ potentially re-politicises and calls into question those fixed oppositions of legitimacy and illegitimacy, belonging and non-belonging, as well as drawing attention to the ‘emptiness of social politics’ (Balibar, 2004: 9), all of which urgently need to be addressed to enable us to articulate our political identities as social and not solely or even primarily economic beings.