The Words That Build Borders
Language builds nations as surely as borders do. And in Britain today, it is language - not policy - that performs the quiet labour of exclusion. The words surrounding asylum seekers no longer describe; they administer. They convert lives into logistics, suffering into a problem of management. Hotels. Boats. Flows. Each term gestures toward movement, but what it really signals is control. The result is not a crisis of migration, but a crisis of description.
Even the phrase asylum seeker tightens the moral frame. It centres the seeking - the asking - not the being displaced. The seeker is cast as a petitioner before a national gatekeeper, positioned in need, not in right. Hospitality once implied duty, but the moral vocabulary has been replaced by the bureaucratic grammar of processing and accommodation. We no longer shelter people; we house cases. Compassion, too, has been outsourced to administration.
Take the phrase that now slips so easily into headlines - migrant hotels. The word performs a linguistic sleight of hand. It evokes leisure, comfort, the temporary indulgence of escape. Yet these are not hotels in any meaningful sense. They are holding pens of uncertainty, spaces of surveillance disguised as shelter. The metaphor flatters us with false generosity: confinement recast as care. In naming them hotels, the state absolves itself; the citizen, hearing the word, feels no wound.
Edward Said once wrote that language is never innocent - that every word carries an architecture of power. To name is to order, to rank, to rule. The British discourse on asylum runs on this quiet mastery of metaphor. People become waves, surges, influxes: the language of weather and disaster, not of will. A wave has no story; it arrives, overwhelms, recedes. The metaphor performs the erasure, while preserving the illusion of neutrality.
Even the neutral words are not neutral. Relocation. Dispersal. Offshoring. Each borrows its calm from the lexicon of logistics. They move bodies like goods, decisions like shipments. Violence hides inside the procedural. The small boats debate reveals the mechanism most clearly: the moral gaze is fixed on the vessels, not their voyagers. We count hulls instead of hearts. The crisis becomes material - boats, borders, numbers - rather than human.
This is how power speaks: not through shouting, but through syntax. As Foucault understood, discourse does not merely reflect authority; it reproduces it. Once human movement is framed as flow, management becomes mercy. Dams become policy. What begins as metaphor ends as detention.
What’s striking is not the malice but the normality. The humanitarian language of the early 2000s - asylum as right, not privilege - has been quietly buried beneath the rhetoric of burden and security. Even critics now echo the vocabulary they oppose. They describe the asylum “system” as broken, the process as a “crisis,” the issue as a “challenge.” The frame holds; the meaning narrows. We no longer debate morality, only efficiency.
To question language is not to dismiss difficulty. It is to remember that how we speak determines what we can imagine. A country that calls people illegal long enough begins to believe illegality lives in the body, not in the law. A nation that calls detention centres hotels learns to see confinement as kindness. The words have done their work long before the policies are written.
The task, then, begins not with reform, but with re-description. To recover a vocabulary capacious enough for compassion - one that can name without diminishing, that can see without managing. Language is not decoration; it is destiny. And when words harden into walls, it falls to those who can still speak to prise them open - not to redeem the sentence, but to release what has been enclosed within it.
