ABSTRACT
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘asylum’ has become an intensely controversial issue on the agendas of European governments and the European Union (EU). It is indisputable that more people have sought asylum in the last twenty years, and numbers have only tailed off since 2002. However, while it is important to establish trends in asylum up to a certain point, what is interesting from the point of view of analysing whiteness are the responses to asylum. I will begin by sketching the broad patterns of asylum in Europe before we go on to two case studies: the Republic of Ireland and the UK, which will analyse state action and demonstrate both the way that asylum seekers have been represented as threats, and how the various types of Other have been conflated into the figure of the asylum seeker.
