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.