“Sad day for the UK”: The linking of debates about settling refugee children in the UK with Brexit on an anti‐immigrant news website

Date

2019-02-15

Advisors

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Wiley

Type

Article

Peer reviewed

Yes

Abstract

This article uniquely demonstrates how UK debates about supporting child refugees during the “refugee crisis” came to be used as support for leaving the European Union (EU). The research question “how did users of a news website respond to a report about the UK government's decision to allow child refugees into the UK?” is addressed with a rigorous discursive analysis of an internet discussion forum on the anti‐immigrant website MailOnline consisting of 2,014 unique posts, with a reach of 30 million viewers. Analysis demonstrated that (1) child refugees were presented as adults, (2) allowing in refugees was presented as a “burden” on taxpayers, (3) the decision was presented as opposed to the public's will, and (4) this was used as a warrant for leaving the EU. The significant implication of this analysis is that political attempts at associating the refugee crisis with the EU may have been successful in this context.

Description

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.

Keywords

Brexit, discourse analysis, European Union, migrant crisis, migrants, refugee crisis, refugees

Citation

Goodman, S. and Narang, A. (2019) “Sad day for the UK”: The linking of debates about settling refugee children in the UK with Brexit on an anti‐immigrant news website. European Journal of Social Psychology, 49 (6), pp. 1161-1172

Rights

Research Institute