Constructing Vulnerability: The Refugee ‘Other’ as Victim and Threat in UK Parliamentary Debates

Scholarship in migration studies is becoming increasingly concerned with how vulnerability is constructed at Europe’s borders and how discourses of vulnerability are used to justify border closures, particularly through gendered representations. This paper contributes to this growing area of research by considering how this same process is unfolding in UK parliamentary discourses, and the way in which ideas of vulnerability are used to frame the issue of so-called ‘small boats’. Taking an intersectional approach, this paper uses discourse analysis to examine how gendered and racialised language in UK asylum debates presents female asylum seekers as vulnerable, whilst male asylum seekers are represented as threats. The vulnerability of male asylum seekers is only recognised in cases where suffering has already occurred. Such discourses represent asylum seekers as both the victim and the threat, a duality that serves to construct them as inherently different from ‘us’, thus justifying restrictive asylum legislation.