Chapter Five: Audience Studies
1. General Images of Refugee
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立 政 治 大 學
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Middle Eastern student interview Date and time: 23/10/2016, 0430-6pm
Mona
Lebanon/
Germany
Female 24 Master student
Latifa Lebanon Female 24 Master student 6 months
Mada Iran Female 27 Master student 2 years
Naima Yemen Female 32 PhD student 1 year
Omar Syria Male 32 PhD 6 years
European student interview Date and time: 25/10/2016, 7-9pm
Viktor Serbia Male 27 Master student 2 years
Rafi Syria Male 19 Bachelor student 1 year
Bel France Female 23 Bachelor student 1 year
Olga Ukraine Female 25 Master student 1 year
The analysis of the discussions is demonstrated in three sections. The first section compares the general images of refugees among different groups of interviewees. The second section discusses the refugee issue in the news. This includes what the participants
remembered in the news, their opinions toward the representations, and how it impacted their daily lives. In the last section, the students revealed some issues they didn’t see in the news.
1. General Images of Refugee
1.1 Asian and Afro-Caribbean Group
In the pilot interview, a recurring theme was the safety issue. Vietnamese student, Nhi, described the refugees as dangerous because people around her always talked about the sexual assaults in Cologne. She stated:
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People surrounding me always say the raping news. That affects me the most because I’m a woman. I mean it happens quite often and maybe it’s dangerous. (Nhi,
September 26, 2016)
Besides Nhi, Lin described how Bangladeshi refugees robbed the locals in her country, Malaysia, and formed her negative attitude toward refugees. She explained how she felt when she learned about Germany opening its border for the refugees, “Why do they import more problems?”
The Asian students’ parents were also concerned about the safety issue. The following discussion shows how their parents put pressure on them.
Nhi: When I got accepted from the university here, my mom was very happy. And there was whole news about the refugee, she changed her attitude.
Lin: They started posting all those Germany having the issue with refugee, all the bad news on my Facebook page. They posted a lot to make sure that I’m scared and to be home by 9pm. (Asian students, September 26, 2016)
Their statements reveal that not only the news, but also the people surrounding them and their past experiences helped foster people’s perception toward refugees.
1.2 European Group
For the European students, when being asked about the first impression of the refugees, they generally connected them with negative images. Olga described the image of
“beggars” in the Ukrainian news, saying:
(They are) dirty people who run away for something. They violate your homeland.
They just being annoying. And you have to pay taxes and they use these taxes. (Olga, October 25, 2016)
Bel from France agreed with the impression, saying she usually thought of
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“somebody dirty, poor, and asking for money” due to those news portrayals of the refugees in the Calais Jungle.
In Serbia, Viktor remembered the news photos of “thousands of people mingling with a very bad condition, surrounded with violence, fighting amongst each other to get into the train which will take them to the European Union.” He stated that in his country people described refugees as “pests” and newspapers often headlined “Return to Ottoman Empire,”
implying that “the Turks or Islam is coming back again to conquer the Europe.” These negative images especially raised fears of the refugees among the lower-class citizens in Europe. Viktor depicted what the citizens believed:
Oh they’re going to come. They’re going to take our job. Why they are going to our country. So many migrants. We were working so much, now they’re going to take all of our working places. Why should we help them? It’s not our problem. Stuff like that.
(Viktor, October 25, 2016) 1.3 German Group
It is difficult to illustrate a general picture how the German students perceived the refugees since they offered various answers. For example, Jana spoke of “sad people”
because she often saw pictures of many people on a small boat. Apart from the news pictures, she told us the experience in summer when she was a volunteer and baked cookies with some refugee children:
A little girl from the refugee family joked on the crumbled cookies: “just like the bombed Syria.” (Jana, October 22, 2016)
As a second generation of Malaysian immigrants, Jan found the Moroccan refugee working in his parents’ Chinese restaurant very “friendly and hard-working.” Sabina and Lena were arguing whether the refugees came alone or came with their families. Lena
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thought of young Arab men because she and her mother usually saw refugee males walking on the street:
My mother lives in a tiny city and there are a lot of camps surround. And I think 80, 90% of the refugees which she sees are men between 20 and 40 (years old). And also when I worked in the camp there were no women which travel alone. And there were a lot of men and some families. (Lena, 25 October 2016)
On the other hand, Sabina had the memory of families when she helped the refugee children with homework in their accommodation. She stated that she seldom saw the men because they seemed to stay in their rooms and usually it was the women interacting with people.
1.4 Middle-Eastern Group
The Middle-Eastern participants seldom referred to negative issues in regard to the refugees and mostly focused on the bad conditions in the refugees’ home countries, such as war, persecution, and violation of freedom, causing the immigration. They often mentioned the experiences of their friends and the refugees they met in Germany. They knew how their friends suffered in their home countries. For example, Mada who came from Iran told a story of her friends:
They’ve come to other country. The situation for them is such difficult that they prefer to even change their religion or change I don’t know, just make a case for themselves to be able to get the kind of citizenship which I don’t agree with it. But I don’t know, I’m not that person. (Mada, October 23, 2016)
The Middle-Easterners also thought of “poor people” because they often saw “houses down and chaos all over the place” or people on the boat in the news although they
understood this was not true because some of the asylum seekers were actually rich.
In sum, the findings above reveal that people from different regions would have
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diverse opinions toward refugee due to the various information they obtained. What people usually told and the past experiences fostered the Asian students’ way of thinking. Their parents, like my parents, were more concerned about safety issues because they were heavily influenced by the news in their home countries.
For the European students, the images of “a bunch of people” and lots of “beggars”
were deeply rooted in their minds probably because these students came from transit
countries in the Balkans, Eastern Europe or France through which many asylum seekers had to pass before reaching their destinations in Germany and United Kingdom. Besides, the governments hold relatively unfriendly asylum policies and did not offer proper aid for the asylum seekers. That is why the students usually saw unpleasant situations in the refugees’
journey. Compared with the German and the Middle-Eastern participants, it shows that interviewees in these two groups were more likely to be influenced by the comments on news and their surroundings. Many of them also had relatively less interactions with refugees in the past to help them build their own judgement. That is why most of them often associated negative issues when being asked about their first impression of the refugees. Yet, after having direct interactions with refugees, their opinions on the refugee crisis and attitude actually changed. The changes in their mind of states and their interaction experiences with refugees will be discussed in the following section.
In the German groups, they gave various answers regarding the same question probably because each of them had different experiences with refugees. These experiences made them see different aspects of the refugees and stay away from news discourses. For the Middle-Eastern participants, their friends’ experiences mainly influenced the way they interpreted the refugee issue and highlighted the difficult situation in the sending countries.
By and large the Germans and the Middle-Easterners showed a more sympathetic attitude in the discussions owing to their experiences with refugees.