I regularly listen to Politico EU podcast, among many others. Today there was an article about the Irish presidential election that included the following passage:
“While the campaign was going on in this broadly positive atmosphere, the main refugee center southwest of Dublin was coming under siege from racists. And the trigger for it, as is often the case, and not just in Ireland, but an immigrant had been accused of a horrible crime. So for two nights, there was serious rioting outside this refugee center.”
my queries are:
I understood that people only officially become ‘refugees’ if their claim for asylum is approved. Prior to that, if they’ve submitted a claim, they are asylum seekers. If they have arrived without the correct visas etc and they haven’t yet submitted a claim for asylum, they are illegal or irregular immigrants. The ‘centre’ that’s being talked about here isn’t for refugees, is it? Because refugees are moved out of that system and housed elsewhere. It’s for asylum seekers and illegal migrants, right? But ‘main refugee centre’ conjures up quite a different image to ‘hotel housing asylum seekers and illegal immigrants’ even if the latter is probably closer to the actual truth.
is it correct to label everyone involved in the riots as racists? Maybe it is. But it seems quite a blanket assumption to make.
‘horrible crime’ = serious sexual assault on a 10 year old girl. Why not name the crime?
I’m not being deliberately naive here, I know why they’ve chosen to use this language. But it really makes me feel manipulated and patronised. Given that I listen to a lot of different political podcasts, the language used here really stood out to me and left me feeling that Politico could not be trusted to report this topic.