Solving the Syrian Refugee Crisis and protecting refugees “is not someone else’s problem,” Amnesty International asserts. However, both U.S. and Chinese newspapers mainly attribute responsibility for the crisis to other players – the U.S. to Europe, and China to Europe and the U.S. At the same time, somewhat in contradiction, PD and NYT also emphasize that each and every one should take action to address solutions to the crisis. Meanwhile, most would agree that governments have a duty to help refugees, but many of the world’s wealthiest
countries are still treating refugees as somebody else’s problem, as reflected in the newspaper framing of the Syrian Refugee Crisis. Hiding behind closed borders and fears of being “flooded”, these countries, including China and the U.S. have allowed poorer, mainly Middle Eastern, African and South Asian countries, to host an incredible 86% of all refugees. The world’s system for protecting refugees is broken, and worldwide 19.5 million people have been forced to seek sanctuary abroad.
According to Zetter (1991), “within the repertoire of humanitarian concern, refugee now constitutes one of the most powerful labels. From the initial procedure of status determination - who is a refugee? - to the structural determinants of life chances which this identity then
engenders, labels infuse the world of refugees.” The media has labeled the millions of Syrians displaced from their homes by violent conflict as various types of migrants: economic migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. Furthermore, the newspapers in question have described them both as daunting masses and sympathetic individuals. These terms are vastly different, yet have often been used interchangeably in the media. Therefore, it is necessary for future studies on the topic to review the literature on mobilization and transnational flows from the body of globalization
96 research, as it will help specify the terminology used to describe various types of transnational movements of people across borders (Semmelroggen, 2015).Spanish sociologist Josetxo Beriain (2005) argues that human beings are constantly searching for meaning in a world where
everything seems mixed up and in a total chaos. Things lack natural limits, and it is the human mind that must create them.
Thus, people divide reality into “islands of meaning,” which help to identify oneself, others and the things in the world; this division lies on principles of classification, which help us to build definitions (Fernandez, 2006). The verb to define derives from the Latin word finis, limit:
to define something means to establish its limits. In the world, those limits are not solidly
established before human beings specify them. All divisions are created by human minds to help to comprehend what surrounds us. Otherwise, everything would exist in epistemological
confusion. Lines are necessary to divide, to define, and to classify. The same could be argued for borders. But these limits are not simply part of us as individuals, but are established socially.
Most of these lines represent other invisible lines that separate social entities.
Due to the borders, people can define themselves and the other, as well as a code of ownership and belonging. Borders were born alongside the ancient agrarian empires and became stronger with the rise of the nation-state. The philosophy lying behind borders has been
developed in different socio-historical formations throughout history and has performed very different roles. But within capitalism borders have carried out specific functions – connected to processes of domination and exploitation – that have nothing to do with a rationalization of the world. Whereas in the origins of capitalism borders were essential to unify the national markets, today they are used primarily to prevent movements of the multitude. Once stability is reached and free trade takes place, there is no need for borders between traders. Nevertheless, it is
97 compulsory to develop a barrier against those who have nothing to trade. This strategy is directly linked to the bureaucratic forms of identity developed by nation-states to stop the possibility of free movement (passports, visas, etc.).
In the post-modern age of information technologies and knowledge economies, borders continue to perform a key role in the capitalist system. But is it possible to think about a
borderless world when borders are so deeply embodied socially? And where, then, do refugees belong in this discourse? (Fernandez, 2006).
It would seem imperative for an analysis that focuses around newspaper framing of refugees to reach a consensus on what the term ‘refugee’ actually denotes. Yet since this term has come to be used in so many different contexts and disciplines, one all-encompassing definition would seem very difficult to attain. A look at the literature shows a multitude of definitions, some legal, some sociological, and some anthropological. The problem becomes one of how to define a concept that is labeled differently according to context and discipline.
Moreover, in a field liked to humans and human suffering, how can we avoid making the refugee simply an instrument of academic enquiry and instead ensure that the defining process serves the refugees themselves?
The international legal definition of a refugee, as contained within the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, holds that the individual must have crossed an international boundary (189 UNTS 137, 1951). However, the contemporary ‘refugee problem’
involves millions of individuals in qualitatively the same precarious situation as ‘refugees’ who remain within the borders of their state: so-called “internally displaced persons” (IDPs). Often unable to physically cross into a neighboring state, IDPs are out of reach of the international community and thus denied international protection.
98 According to German Finance Minister Wolfgange Schaeuble, the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees into Europe is part of the reality of globalization. The German government expects 800,000 or more people to arrive this year and media estimate it could be up to 1.5 million (Schmidt, 2015). German authorities are struggling to cope with the roughly 10,000 refugees arriving every day, many fleeing conflict in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Minister Schaeuble, speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund's annual meeting in Peru, said the influx was part of the reality of globalization. IMF meetings try to organize the forces of globalization "such that everyone can live with them," Schaeuble said, later adding, "In a way, with the refugee crisis we are now seeing in Germany and in Europe a meeting with the realities of globalization.”
The extensive body of literature examining globalization and transnationalism is full of contradictions and tensions. The tension of greatest significance to this study is that globalization is both an era of increased openness and of increased restrictions on movement (Shamir
2005:197; Blomley, Delaney, and Ford 2001; Sassen 1991, 1988). Such scholarship reminds us that globalization, with its inherent “hypermobility” and erasure of boundaries, is only a
voluntarily lived reality for a small class of "cosmocrats" (Adams 1999), while it remains a scarce resource for most. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the world's population is more or less permanently immobilized (Bauman 2002; Doyle and Nathan 2001). Yet, regardless of the increasing attention given to the widening mobility gap in the present era, globalization is still predominantly theorized in terms of social openness and social fluidity.
The accuracy of the claim of “free movement” across national boundaries deserves healthy skepticism and criticism in the current age in which displaced persons, such as the Syrian refugees, are still often taken into custody by governmental immigration agencies, and confined
99 to waiting rooms in ‘non-places’ before being systematically accepted or rejected from a certain nation state. Therefore, the question arises: how can the conceptual, theoretical, and abstract research of transnational studies address the real groups of refugees caught up in tide of transnational flows?
In radically changing conditions, the current relevance and utility of the concepts and labels attached to refugee studies in the context of globalization must be critically examined to see if they still describe the current state of refugees in the 21st century. Although much of the terminology attached to refugees was formulated at a time of regionally contained, mass refugee migration during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Zetter (1991) argues that the concept of refugee labeling can still offer vital insights into the impacts of institutional and bureaucratic power on the lives of refugees in a globalized era of transnational social transformations, mixed migration flows, and the continuing presence of large scale refugee migration. In the contemporary era, the formation of the refugee label reflects the causes and patterns of forced migration, which are much more complex than in the past.
Governments, rather than NGOs, are the preeminent agency in the transforming the refugee label today; therefore, the label has become politicized by institutional fractioning and also by embedding it into the wider political discourse of resistance to migrants and refugees (Pacitto and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2013). Accordingly, this study has found that these issues of politicized labeling have been reflected in the U.S. and Chinese newspaper media framing of the Syrian refugees.
Recent research has begun to establish studies of interactions between refugees and transnational processes. Soysal (1994) suggests that two institutionalized principles are at work in regard to the movements of refugees: national sovereignty and universal human rights. Soysal
100 finds that it is the latter, a new globalizing principle of human rights, which has become "a pervasive element of world culture" (1994; 6). Universal human rights announce the arrival of a post national era that in fact undermines the national order of citizenship. However, it remains to be seen how such a post national era is exemplified by governments, such as the U.S. and
Chinese government, with regards to immigration and refugee-aid policy.
This study hopes that a critical reading of the newspaper framing of the Syrian refugee crisis can offer constructive insights into the role of media framing in the context of these analytical and political anxieties, and can highlight the implications of using static frames to interpret lives that are transnational. By focusing on two different nations – the U.S. and China – through content analysis of how the New York Times and People’s Daily frame the Syrian refugee crisis contributes a unique perspective on a timely issue to the body of communication theory literature.
101
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