| Audrey Macklin has proposed that in a discursive sense, the refugee is `disappearing' as a humanitarian category, and now refugees are first perceived as fraudulent, threatening and suspicious upon arrival. In this thesis, I examine Macklin's argument by looking at Tamil refugees who have arrived in Canada, and the discourse that emanates from the written Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) decisions. A critical discourse analysis is used to look past the text of the decisions and to uncover the ways that language and concepts become normalized. I attempt to demonstrate that exclusion technologies are being used at different levels, or what I call the macro and micro, which reinforce one another. I do this in order to demonstrate how `disappearance' occurs within the setting of the IRB and how this can have direct implications for the refugee population in question. |
