Migration 2

These migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit ‘Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984’, but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb.

From the daily The Sun, quoted in The Guardian, 19. April 2015.

Katie Hopkins (born 1975) is a British journalist publishing in the newspapers The Sun, Daily Mail and others.

Katie Hopkins has been fined numerous times for making discriminatory and racist statements, including this one. Such statements form part of a routine strategy by right-wing populist groups, who aim to influence public opinion by repeatedly breaking taboos around middle class and liberal-democratic common sense. By doing so, they attempt to normalise right-wing ideas within public discourse. In this quote, migration is constructed as posing an extremely high risk along with great uncertainty.

*Zoe Williams (2015): Katie Hopkins calling migrants vermin recalls the darkest events of history.

2015