The construction of refugees as (non-) citizens in migration policies of Belgium between 2011 and 2014

One of the reasons why international migration is so central to the politics of many European countries is the challenges it sets to citizenship. It uncovers the mechanisms of exclusion and the production of inequalities inherent to this modern conception of citizenship. At the same time, national governments seem to hold on to an exclusive form of citizenship and are adopting even more restrictive policies towards refugees with differential legal statuses as a response to the increasing numbers of asylum seekers. According to empirical research these restrictive measures are accompanied by a discourse that portrays migration as a threat to the security of the nation-state and the welfare state. These discourses on migrants are considered to have an influence on the perception, attitudes and behavior of people, both migrants and non-migrants. As such, it might be interesting to empirically investigate how refugees and their citizenship is constructed in the migration policies of national governments. Especially, as citizenship can be perceived as central instrument in the hands of the nation-state to govern migrants. We assume that the way refugees and their political agency are discursively constructed in policy plays an important role in how it is received and acted upon by refugees. We will study the asylum and migration policy of the Belgium government between 2011 and 2014. Belgium is an interesting case as it is one of the few countries in Europe where asylum requests have decreased instead of increased for the past four years. In order to understand how refugees are constructed as (non-)citizens we conducted a discourse analysis of the migration policy documents of the Belgian government between 2011 and 2014. Our analysis suggest that migrants are depoliticized by (1) framing migration as an issue of good management, (2) categorizing migrants as threat and (3) categorizing migrants as victims.

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