The Weaponisation of Lived Experience

What follows are findings related to my research - ‘Small Boats & Tall Tales: The Great British Border Spectacle and the illegalisation of irregular migrants’. This work uses critical discourse analysis to explore the factors enabling the UK government’s policy position of illegalising migrants.

The ‘Lived Experience’ Defence

The South Asian heritage of the 3 most recent Home Secretaries (excluding Grant Shapps who lasted 8 days) plus the current Prime Minister presents a unique opportunity to instrumentalise ethnicity and lived experience in defence of restrictive immigration policies and anti-immigrant rhetoric. The visual of a brown woman rebutting accusations of governmental, institutional racism is many times more powerful and effective than if a white man were to deliver the same statement. As well as the powerful optics of a South Asian politician defending such an approach against accusations of racism, there are also multiple explicit examples of the use of lived experience as a shield for such policies:

“It is perfectly respectable for a child of immigrants like me to say that I am deeply grateful to live here and that immigration has been overwhelmingly good for the United Kingdom, but also to say that we have had too much of it in recent years and that uncontrolled and illegal migration is simply bad”
“I am, like my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) before me, subject to the most grotesque slurs for saying such simple truths about the impact of unlimited and illegal migration. The worst among them, poisoned by the extreme ideology of identity politics, suggests that a person’s skin colour should dictate their political views.. I will not be patronised on what are the appropriate views for someone of my background to hold”

The current Home Secretary’s own ethnicity and her family’s lived experience of migration is used to discredit and disregard institutional racism, systemic violence and the legacy of colonialism. The personal connection of these politicians with the subject matter is framed as reinforcing the supposed legitimacy, integrity and authority of their words. Racism and xenophobia are masked, as the government are insulated against such claims. In an incredible defence of the government’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, Suella Braverman asserts that ‘brown people can be in favour of restrictive immigration controls’ and that ‘telling us what our views are allowed to be is, itself, racist and discriminatory’! It is interesting to note that, at one point, the Tory cabinet included at least 4 MPs descended from refugees; Nadhim Zahawi (Iraq), Dominic Raab (Czech Republic), Priti Patel (Uganda), and Boris Johnson (Turkey).

Rwanda - deterrent or land of opportunity?

As well as trading on their own positionality, the policy documents highlight a trend of instrumentalising Rwanda’s global identity in defence of anti-immigrant rhetoric and restrictive immigration policies:

“there is something really quite unpleasant about the undercurrent of the tone towards Rwanda”
“comments.. about the Rwandan Government and people have been appalling and completely misinformed.. deliberate scaremongering. We know the Rwandan people to be good, decent, generous people”
“Rwanda so terribly misrepresented and traduced”
“safe and secure country with an outstanding track record of supporting asylum seekers”

It is implied that racism and a sense of superiority are behind critics’ responses to the Rwanda scheme as though liberals and the Labour opposition are the ones who are being unreasonable and discriminatory. In these policy documents, the government align themselves closely with Rwanda (a country currently prospering but synonymous with genocide and the international community’s guilt from a failure to intervene). In this way, the UK government is able to trade on the image and qualities of Rwanda, using the country as a shield to defend their restrictive immigration policies. Critics and their commentary are accused of being racist and offensive, attacking the Rwandan people themselves. This sidelines the paradox in the policy documents in the way Rwanda is presented, i.e. is it a wonderful country where people can “rebuild their lives”, or is it a disincentive so strong that people fleeing death and persecution will decide against stepping into a boat to cross the Channel?