Migrants and Natives - 'Them' and 'Us'

A key contribution to understanding migration discourses of radical right and racist parties across Europe. This detailed analysis further points out a frightening development: the normalization of right-wing populist and racist discourses among mainstream parties. As such, it is a crucial book for scholars and students of political science, discourse studies and social sciences in general. 

Kristina Boréus’ rich analysis of text and talk is firmly grounded in political histories, and her focus on the interplay of mainstream and radical right rhetoric and politics offers unsettling insights into the founding ideologies of European nation states. There is reason for concern – and it’s not only the radical right we need to worry about. 

Boréus uses a commanding knowledge of migration policy and an in-depth database on policy discourses to provide a forensic account of how these policies are discussed and shaped, both from the mainstream and fringes, in six key European country cases.

This book delves into radical right and mainstream rhetoric and discourse about migrants, showing the influence on politics in Sweden, Denmark and Austria, all affluent welfare-state countries. Boréus shows in an accessible and methodologically accurate way that the rhetoric and the discourses that target migrants in a negative way contribute to naturalize discrimination and patterns of poisoning racialization.



The author contextualizes the construction of identities of belonging and exclusion within the different political landscapes and she comparatively examines and dissects discourses and policies over a four decades’ period. Her results reveal the role played over time by the radical and populist right in disseminating and influencing discourses about migrants based on threat and on native-first perspectives. Yet, the book also tells us that the mainstream parties are not to be held unaccountable of these developments, albeit there are variations in the rhetoric and politics.



This book is a very useful companion for scholars and students with an interest in comparative politics, migration issues and history. 

Kristina Borus is Professor of Political Science at Uppsala University, Sweden. She has studied ideology and ideological change, discrimination against migrants and racialized employees at Swedish workplaces, and right-wing populism in Austria, Denmark, and Sweden. Her publications in English include Patterned Inequalities and the Inequality Regime of a Swedish Housing Company (with Ulf Mrkenstam, 2015, in Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies); Nationalism and Discursive Discrimination against Immigrants in Austria, Denmark and Sweden (2013, in Wodak, R., KhosraviNik, M. & Mral, B. (eds) Right-Wing Populism in Europe, Bloomsbury Academic) and Discursive Discrimination: A Typology (2006, in European Journal of Social Theory). She takes an interest in different kinds of textual analysis as method and theory and has published Textens mening och makt (with Gran Bergstrm, Studentlitteratur), a Swedish textbook that appeared in its third edition in 2012.

Chapter 1: Refugees as threats and unequal rights as party politics Chapter 2: Who should be let in?: Perspectives on immigration Chapter 3: How should we live together?: Perspectives on integration Chapter 4: Beyond nationalism and discrimination Chapter 5: Epilogue