In today’s society, the media play a big (if not biggest) role in how individuals build up their own views on migrants through their predominantly negative representation.
Newspapers are well known for their strong ideologies and beliefs on migrants with these views typically being one of fear and them ‘taking over Britain’. For example, this front cover of the Daily Mirror clearly pushes across their own negative views on the matter to their audience. Phrases such as ‘another lorry load of migrants’ implies large amounts of migrants are travelling to Britain which may reinforce this fear of taking over and overwhelming Britain with their large masses of individuals. Perhaps the word ‘lorry’ could hold connotations of supplies or stock – this could potentially dehumanize these people.
The use of stereotyping migrants can also be used to push across not only racial but political ideologies.
The image above shows Nigel Farage, the former politician who served as the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), standing in front of his campaign poster to promote ’leave’ Europe during Brexit.
Here migrants are used to pointing blame at the EU – stating that it is their fault for issues on migrants once again ‘coming in numbers’ as suggested by the image including a large number of individuals tightly packed together and demanding that we need to ‘take back control of Britain – again reinforcing the fear of migrants taking over Britain. Here we can see a clear stereotype of migrants within the picture used.
Social Media is also the main place where views on the issues are discussed. Here again, we can see examples of language being used to push across ideologies and viewpoints.
Progressive verbs such as ‘pouring’ imply great numbers of migrants and the use of hashtags (which can very easily be shared) clearly demonstrate these negative ideologies. Even the mention of the extreme terrorist group ‘ISIS’ can be seen as a dangerous stereotype of all migrants being terrorists.
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