64 Banal dehumanisation stories, can lead to extreme negative reactions to immigrants and refugees – their removal from the human race through dehumanization.12 This banal dehumanisation in the media and elsewhere also makes way for less banal expressions. For example, in Spring 2015, in response to migrant boats sinking in the Mediterranean Sea, UK journalist Katie Hopkins of The Sun newspaper published an article entitled ‘Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants’. In the article, she refers to those migrants crossing the Mediterranean as ‘cockroaches’ and describes them as unworthy of rescue.13 This echoes words used in genocidal projects mentioned above, something observed also by Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights.14 The extreme sentiments expressed by Hopkins were, I argue, made possible by the banal dehumanisation of irregular migrants as illegal, by hyphenated noncitizenship and its assumption of exclusion, as well as by other localised antimigrant tropes.15 Hopkins was writing within a framework in which some noncitizens are fairly uncontroversially assumed excludable from institutional schemes. This is also a period in which the power of banal dehumanisation is amplified through the use of social media, which has changed the ways in which ideas are spread. This includes what have become known as ‘echo chambers’, such that social media users, as well as those who use online search engines, can find their own views amplified unchallenged, rather than being confronted with alternative perspectives, helping to reinforce their own way of understanding the world.16 The dehumanisation also involves securitisation and militarisation of discourse (and the connection between this and a narrow understanding of sovereignty). Consider the language used in a UK government document from 2007, Managing Global Migration. The 20-page document has 40 references to illegality of migration, describing government responses in the form of ‘tackling’, ‘fight’, ‘combat’ and ‘target’, for example.17 Something similar happens globally 12 Victoria Esses, Stelian Medianu, and Andrea Lawson (2013) ‘Uncertainty, Threat, and the Role of the Media in Promoting the Dehumanization of Immigrants and Refugees’, pp. 518–536 in Journal of Social Issues 69(3). 13 Katie Hopkins (2015) ‘Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants’, in the Sun 17 April 2015. 14 ‘UN Human Rights Chief urges U.K. to tackle tabloid hate speech, after migrants called “cockroaches”’, 24 April 2015, www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=158 85&LangID=E (accessed 4th April 2017). 15 For example, see Didier Fassin (2005) ‘Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies in France’, pp. 362–387 in Cultural Anthropology 20(3) p. 363. For UK context (the location for the above case study), see also Scott Blinder (2015) ‘Briefing: UK Public Opinion Toward Immigration: Overall Attitudes and Level of Concern’, Migration Observatory briefing paper 20 August 2015. 16 Alex Krasodomski-Jones (2016) ‘Talking to Ourselves? Political Debate Online and the Echo Chamber Effect’, DEMOS. 17 Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office (2007) ‘Managing Global Migration: A strategy to build stronger international alliances to manage migration’, HO and FCO June 2007. Note that this document was released the year after the 2006 UN High-level Dialogue on International Migration and Development and the year after the release of UK-made dystopian film, Children of Men, in which ‘illegal immigrants’ are kept in cages around London and at the coasts: Alfonso Cuarón (2006) Children of Men, Universal Pictures.