even more difficult for them to get work. Individuals from marginalized backgrounds
face significant difficulties due to these biased beliefs and prejudices, increasing
inequality in the employment market.
To delve into and understand the process by which race comes to matter in the
access to education and employment for immigrant and refugee communities, we can
look at Teresa Guess’s notion that “race” is a social construct created by historical,
social, cultural, and political values, and there is no scientific evidence to support it
(Guess, 2006, p. 654). She stresses the social construction and flexibility of the idea of
Whiteness, highlighting that it may be constructed, analysed, adjusted, and abandoned
(p. 660). Guess argues that historical ideologies, such as Social Darwinism, among
many others, related concepts of superiority and inferiority to distinct races, thereby
shaping race as a construct. Indeed, these deeply embedded prejudices produce social
biases that remain over time, creating challenges experienced by migrants and
refugees to access the same level of education and employment as their White
counterparts.
The next part of this essay will look at the role of media in perpetuating racial and
ethnic stereotypes. Blair Braxton expresses how the media’s representation of refugees
and asylum seekers perpetuates racism by analysing the use of particular frames which
reinforce negative stereotypes and promote fear and suspicion of these groups. In
particular, she notes that certain media outlets use the ‘criminality visual’ frame to
portray refugees and asylum seekers as criminals, depicting them as wild and untamed
people who endanger public safety (Braxton, 2021, p. 34). Photographs with a
criminality frame will show refugees participating in acts of aggressiveness or
violence; in particular, these photographs will often show young males as aggressors
with looks of hostility on their faces. Pictures like these intend to instil fright over the
entrance of perceived threatening immigrants on European land. These fear-mongering
tactics rely on the concept of ‘us against them,’ where ‘us’ refers to Europe’s safety
and sanctity, while ‘them’ refers to the presence of perceived criminals who endanger
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