Withholding Compassion

This chapter examines how governments have mobilised a discourse of compassion to reinforce a divide between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ immigrants and refugees, and therefore withhold compassion from those unable to enact the conditions necessary for recognition as a worthy subject of compassion. It first explains how governments have deployed the feeling and framing rules of the emotional regime of compassion to withhold compassion from immigrants and refugees. It then describes two policy case studies that emphasised the vulnerability of immigrants and refugees: the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Programme in the UK and the Australian Syrian and Iraqi Humanitarian Programme. It also analyses Donald Trump's presidential election campaign in 2016 to show how ‘suffering citizens’ have become centred as the legitimate subjects of compassion, at the expense of migrants and refugees.