Influxes and invaders: the intersections between the metaphoric construction of immigrant otherness and ethnonationalism

Abstract

Metaphors are a feature of public immigration discourse, with “undesirable” immigrants referred to as invasions, influxes, and floods both in the press and by politicians. Within Australia, such metaphors date back to the arrival of Chinese immigrants during the gold rushes (1850s), reoccurring with every large-scale arrival of non-white immigrants. Enacting racialized immigration restrictions was one of the foundational acts of the new Australian nation (1901), with whiteness enshrined as fundamental to national identity within the White Australia policy. Yet despite the abolition of the policy in the 1970s and the shift to multiculturalism, increasing non-white immigration has been accompanied by an intensification of negative immigration metaphors. I argue that this is because metaphors which construct racialized immigrant Otherness simultaneously flag ethnonationalist understandings about what it means to be Australian by implicitly centring (Anglo) whiteness as the defining feature of Australian national identity in a way no longer explicitly possible.