Immigration, Race, and "Woke": Comparing the US and the UK

• In Event: Elites, Media, and Immigration Opinion

Abstract

While to be "woke" originally meant to be aware of racial injustice, over time it has become associated with a broad range of so-called "culture war" issues. Among others, the term has become increasingly visible in debates over migration policy, with those favoring highly restrictive policies attacking their progressive opponents for being "woke". How and why has this happened, and what are the implications for migration policy debates?

In this paper, we trace the growing salience of arguments about wokeness in discussions of immigration policy in the US and UK media, tying these arguments to the implicit racialization of immigration policy in these countries. Specifically, while explicit racial arguments opposing immigration are comparatively rare, when actors suggest that a more liberal immigration policy is "woke" , they import the original, racial connotations of the term into the policy debate.

We analyze the presence of woke, and related terms such as wokeness and wokeism, in immigration discussions in media from across the political spectrum. Specifically, in the United States we examine coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, while in the UK we draw on the Guardian and the Telegraph, covering the years 2017-2023. This produces a corpus of tens of thousands of articles mentioning migration, with a subset (still numbering in the thousands) mentioning woke. We combine quantitative and qualitative analyses of this corpus to identify how woke, wokeness, etc. are used in discussions of migration policy; which other words, if any, they replace as they become more prominent, and how the usage varies by political leaning and national context.

For instance, preliminary analyses suggest that the link between wokeness and migration policy is stronger in the United Kingdom than in the United States, perhaps because explicitly racialized arguments have become more normalized in the latter. A better understanding of the role references to wokeness play in the immigration policy debate will offer valuable insights into the drivers of that debate as well as into the ways the weaponization of culture war terms can affect policy outcomes.

Authors

• A. Maurits van der Veen, College of William & Mary

• Erik J. Bleich, Middlebury College