The Talk About Asylum Seekers in the Swedish Parliament (PDF)

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Politics - Other International Politics Topics, grade: B, Malmö University, course: International Migration and Ethnic Relations, language: English, abstract: This study examines the political-parliamentary discourse surrounding the 2016 Swedish temporary immigration policy with a focus on political construction of asylum seekers. Both the propositional parliamentary paper and debate were put to analysis using Critical Discourse Analysis in order to find out themes ad constructions that manifests political discourse of asylum seekers. It is argued the political-parliamentary discourse surrounding the 2016 temporary immigration policy within the propositional parliamentary paper and debate served to negatively affect the image of asylum seekers via their construction as something negative through the use of words associated with 'them': overload and strain on the asylum and social system, threat to integration system, threat to national security, economic burden, queue jumpers, liars, criminals, and morally deviant. This is deemed to contribute to the 'Othering' as projection of characteristics is created through marking asylum seekers in a different language of the deviance negative other. This can result to stereotypes, exclusion and marginalisation of asylum seekers, thus diminishing their right to protection.