The Intolerable Death of Alan Kurdi

This chapter examines the role of compassion in the phenomenon of witness bearing by telling the tragic story of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned on September 2, 2015, along with his mother, five-year-old brother, and other Syrian refugees when their boat capsized after leaving Bodrum in Turkey. A series of photographs of Alan taken by photo-journalist Nilüfer Demir have come to symbolise a perceived turning point in the emotional script of refugee reception in Europe. Drawing on the iconic visual testimony of Alan Kurdi's death, this chapter explores how compassion was mobilised in critiques of the restrictive policies and lack of action by the UK during the refugee crisis. It first considers how compassion has been used to mobilise resistance to restrictive government refugee policies before discussing the responses to Alan's death and how they engaged with a discourse of compassion.

Emotion, Colonialism and Immigration Policy

This chapter examines the connection between colonialism and the emotion of compassion in contemporary immigration policy by reviewing key discourses present in the colonial and immigration histories of Australia, the UK and the United States. It first provides an overview of the history of British colonialism and how it gave rise to the ‘civilising process’, along with the rise of the discourse of ‘benevolent colonialism’ during the second wave of empire. It then considers the emergence and development of exclusionary immigration policies from the 1890s to 2000s, focusing on the links made between race and immigration in these periods, the creation of a distinction between ‘deserving’ refugees and ‘undeserving’ asylum seekers, and the criminalisation of migration. The chapter shows how anxieties and fears about immigration have shaped the emotional regimes of immigration policy and how such regimes have been constructed around attempts to identify and exclude undesirable immigrants.

Withholding Compassion

This chapter examines how governments have mobilised a discourse of compassion to reinforce a divide between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ immigrants and refugees, and therefore withhold compassion from those unable to enact the conditions necessary for recognition as a worthy subject of compassion. It first explains how governments have deployed the feeling and framing rules of the emotional regime of compassion to withhold compassion from immigrants and refugees. It then describes two policy case studies that emphasised the vulnerability of immigrants and refugees: the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Programme in the UK and the Australian Syrian and Iraqi Humanitarian Programme. It also analyses Donald Trump's presidential election campaign in 2016 to show how ‘suffering citizens’ have become centred as the legitimate subjects of compassion, at the expense of migrants and refugees.

The Emotional Politics of Immigration and Asylum

This chapter examines the emotional politics of immigration and asylum policy. It first considers the role of emotions in social relations and in public life, with particular emphasis on the so-called affective turn in the social sciences and the relationship between emotion and reason. It then explores the role of emotions in immigration and asylum policy before defining and analysing the emotion of compassion. It also charts the rise of the politics of compassion in contemporary political discourse, along with the opportunities and challenges this produces for asylum and immigration policy. Finally, it looks at the proposal that a notion of compassion based on proximity and solidarity rather than distance and pity is more conducive to the realisation of social justice. The chapter argues that we need to take into account the role of ‘humanising’ emotions in the support and contestation of restrictive immigration policies.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter summarises the book's main themes built around the argument that a discourse of compassion has been appropriated to justify oppressive policies against migrants and refugees. These people have been met with hostility and exclusion by receiving governments, especially Australia, the UK and the United States. In analysing how people are placed within and outside of ‘circles of concern’ in contested immigration and asylum policy discourse, this book has discussed measures that emphasised the vulnerability of immigrants and refugees. It has also explored compassion as solidarity, an idea that it claims offers more promising prospects for social justice than the notion of compassion based on distance and pity, and how activists have linked compassion with outrage to address the causes of suffering and alleviate it in the long term.

Outrage, Responsibility and Accountability

This chapter examines how migrant and refugee rights activists have reclaimed a politics of outrage to challenge violent and repressive policies and hold those responsible to account. Focusing on the campaign to end Australia's use of offshore immigration detention on Manus Island and Nauru, the chapter highlights the Australian government's long-standing denial of responsibility and discrediting of the physical body as a mode of testimony and how it has obscured from public view — and physical proximity — the violence of its asylum and immigration policy. The #LetThemStay protests which took place in early 2016 against the deportation of refugees from Australia to the offshore detention centres, and the #CloseTheCamps and #BringThemHere protests reflect how asylum seekers and activists turn to the suffering body as a means of rearticulating compassion and connecting it to the feminist ethics of care, as well as directing outrage towards the causes of suffering.

Victims, Villains and Saviours

This chapter examines how the governments of Australia, the UK and the United States have co-opted discourses of compassion for ‘deserving’ immigrants and refugees to justify the enactment of violent and punitive policies. In particular, it explores the emergence of the figure of the people smuggler as a racialised and gendered villain in contemporary border enforcement narratives and as a target for outrage driven by ‘compassion’. It first considers how violent humanitarianism has been justified through three archetype and neocolonial characters developed through the border-enforcement narrative: the ‘suffering refugee’, the villainous ‘people smuggler’ and ‘migrant queue jumper’, and the saviour government. It then discusses the ways in which a discourse of compassion for ‘genuine’ victims has been employed to direct disapproval and outrage against smugglers and migrant ‘queue jumpers’. It also describes the criminalisation of solidarity and humanitarianism as part of the war on people smugglers.

A Crisis of Compassion

This book examines the role of compassion and its relationship to other emotions in asylum and immigration policy discourses in Australia, the UK and the United States. Focusing on the case of undocumented immigrants and refugees, it analyses the politics of compassion in immigration and asylum policy within the broader landscape of the rise of political cultural scripts such as ‘humanitarian reason’, ‘liberal terror’ and ‘compassionate conservativism’ in contemporary politics. This chapter presents an outline of the book's argument, first by considering the media and public hostility towards certain populations of migrants and refugees and then how compassion works as the workings of compassion as a basic social emotion. It then discusses the policy case studies that illustrate the role of a discourse of compassion within recent immigration and asylum policy debates in Australia, the UK and the United States. It also provides an overview of the chapters that follow.

Self-Care and Solidarity: The Undocumented Immigrant Youth Movement

This chapter examines how a shift from the notion of compassion that is felt at a distance to a practice of compassion as suffering with one another in solidarity has been achieved by the undocumented youth movement in the United States. It begins with an overview of the origins of the undocumented youth movement, followed by a discussion of their campaign for the rights of the country's undocumented young people, their campaign for the passage of the federal Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, and their response to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) introduced by President Barack Obama. It also considers the movement's use of storytelling as testimony in their DREAM Act campaign and shows how compassion as solidarity and co-suffering can play an important role in enabling witness bearing and the building of a more inclusive and enduring resistance to suffering and social injustice.