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 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.