On refugees being cast as “invaders” and “fighting-age males”

I think racism often tends to be especially focussed on young men, who are often the worst victims (eg of US’s incarceration regime), which is one reason for scepticism about US additive/intersectional approaches and has created some unsavoury alliances between some liberal feminists and the racist right. There’s also been a recent revival of Hollywoodesque stereotypes of men as powerful and threatening and women as helpless and fragile, which hasn’t just come from the right.

Sure, I’d broadly agree with a lot of this. Where I find it less convincing is in the mechanisms by which these framings become dominant. The implication seems to be that the views are mainly attributable to the far right, and are then amplified or repeated by mainstream politicians and journalists. I’d argue that this is too monodirectional, and that mainstream political and media institutions are active participants in shaping the debate (once senior politicians, major newspapers, and broadcasters adopt language such as “small boats crisis,” “illegal migrants,” or “fighting-age males,” they are not simply echoing fringe rhetoric; they are normalising it to the wider audience).

In short, I’d suggest a more reciprocal relationship, where fringe parties shift the boundaries of political debate, but mainstream institutions decide which ideas are amplified, legitimised, or ignored.

Relatedly, politicians often seem remarkably resilient to scandals or criticisms until they cease to be politically useful or electorally successful, after which issues that may have been publicly known for years suddenly receive sustained media attention and become politically decisive. This pattern has been visible with a number of prominent British politicians across the political spectrum and, while it would perhaps be going too far to suggest a co-ordinated conspiracy, I do think institutional dynamics play a role (where people with the appropriate assumptions, views, incentives, and social networks tend to arrive at similar outlooks, and thus similar framings, independently).

In short, certainly one can (and should) critique the right for its inflammatory language and behaviour, but I think it would be a great mistake to ignore the role our institutions play in legitimisation.

I agree with all of this, Chris, and would add just a few more things. One is that many countries have been unwilling or hesitant to see forced recruitment (into a militia, or into an unjust war by a repressive government) as itself a type of persecution. This seems to me to be wrong, and to make the situation for this group of people even harder in many cases.
Secondly, given the rarity of in-country (or extra-territorial, but not in home country) refugee processing, and the insufficient level of it when it does happen, it’s not surprising that a family may try to first send those most able to make a dangerous and difficult trip, hoping for family reunification later. (I’ve written a bit on this, but would, especially on the first issue, but also on the second, strongly recommend the work of my friend and sometimes co-author Eilidh Beaton .) Unfortunately, states pretty much all don’t do enough of family unification for refugees, either.

(I’ll aslo add that the “unsavoury alliances between som liberal feminists and the racist right” that engels invokes isn’t something I’ve seen much of myself. If there are some examples, I’d be interested to see them. The most depressing examples I’ve seen of (extremely depressing and short-sighted) sympathy with racist rightists have been with “feminists” who explicitly identify as “radical” and “non-liberal”, but perhaps I’m missign something.)

Fox News POS Jesse Watters mused that Hegseth’s recent project to increase testosterone levels in US troops would endanger women around the world. He thought it was funny.

“Yeah, I want these guys on it, but you know what’s gonna happen? The guys that don’t need it are gonna take it, to triple boost,” Watters said Thursday, laughing. “And then they’re gonna get out there, and women on base, you guys better be careful. Port calls, women in Asia, you better be careful, because these guys are gonna be wild animals and you better watch out.”

To tie engels @9‘s and marcel proust’s @3 & @7‘s points together, and with Chris’ original claims, it might be worth turning to the recent work of Amia Srinivasan, as she helped mainstream certain strains of 1970s and 1980s radical feminism.

In the eponymous essay in her collection The Right to Sex, Srinivasan writes:

When we see consent as the sole constraint on ethically OK sex, we are pushed towards a naturalisation of sexual preference in which the rape fantasy becomes a primordial rather than a political fact. But not only the rape fantasy. Consider the [purported] supreme fuckability of “hot blonde sluts” and East Asian women, the comparative unfuckability of black women and Asian men [. . .]. These facts about “fuckability”—not whose bodies are seen as sexually available (in that sense black women, trans women and disabled women are all too fuckable), but whose bodies confer status on those who have sex with them—are political facts. They are facts that a truly intersectional feminism should demand we take seriously. (2021, p. 84)

Srinivasan was highly conscious of the extent to which this idea of cisgender, heterosexual men as “primordial” rapists was subject to capture by reactionary forces, inclined to argue that married, wealthy, racially unthreatening men in good standing with the state are socially de-risked (the reactionary idea being that if such men want sex, they could buy it, get it unproblematically from their wives, or use their social magnetism to procure it unproblematically). This reactionary argument entails that men not so favorably situated in society continue to carry around their “primordial” threat of violence.

In the later essay “Sex, Carceralism, and Capitalism” from the same collection, Srinivasan tries to navigate this reactionary-adjacency problem. Here, she asks, “How can a feminist criticise patriarchal practices of punishment while demanding that the rapist be tried, convicted, and locked up” (p. 177). She is not prepared to compromise on the primordial inclination of cigender, heterosexual socialization with “the rape fantasy.” Instead, she suggests that state agents may be as great or greater sexual threats to society than the sorts of people she has quoted W.E.B. Du Bois and Stuart Hall championing (p. 174). Srinivasan writes, intimately relevant to this posts’ topic:

In England and Wales, there were 1,500 accusations of sexual misconduct against police officers between 2012 and 2018. When, in March 2021, a police officer was charged with the kidnapping and murder of a young British woman, the UK government responded by announcing that plainclothes police officers would begin patrolling bars and clubs at closing time, as part of an initiative called “Project Vigilance.” (2021, pp. 177f)

I think, to engels’ point, a useful point of investigation would be the extent to which contemporary mainstream feminists like Srinivasan are succeeding, since 2021, in adumbrating a theory of intergender social relations that is not subject to reactionary capture. This is not to say that Srinivasan or her allies would ever be responsible for reactionary xenophobic gender-protectionist rhetoric in the UK or elsewhere. But this has clearly been a conceptual frontier in development for several years now, and well worth following closely.

As far as I understand it, intersectionality is the idea that systems of power and disadvantage interact, such that they cannot always be understood by considering race, class, gender, or other social relations in isolation. If that is broadly right, then one obvious application would be to critique forms of thought which privilege one axis of oppression while neglecting how it interacts with others – for example, approaches that seek to enhance the safety or interests of one group without considering the consequences for other disadvantaged groups. This, incidentally, is one reason why I am generally sceptical of reductionist approaches, whether they reduce social explanation to class, race, gender, or any other single dimension.

So I suppose I am struggling to see why this is presented as a criticism of intersectionality, rather than as an example of precisely the sort of problem that some form of interactional framework would seem particularly well placed to analyse?

So, we likely evolved in a societies of small groups of hominids where males from time to time raided other groups to kill the males and get the females (this behaviour has even been observed in chimps).
Chance are that we are instinctively wary of young males, an archetype that likely is burnt inside our brains.
Therefore linking immigrants to this kind of imagery works because it causes a strong emotional response.

IMHO, immigrants eating pets is the same: in many primates aggressive males also kill cubs (to make females oculate faster), even through this AFAIK was not common in humans perhaps in earlier stages of evolution this happened (it is now considered the most likely reason we became monogamic), and pets are somehow perceived like kids by their owners.

Several comments here perhaps inadvertently highlight something that is closely related to Chris’ original point, if not yet explicitly called out here: much of this contemporary far-right complaining about refugee crime rates exploits a combination of statistical sampling issues and extreme historical myopia.

Men indeed represent a high proportion (over 70%) of the UK’s annual refugee intake. But women are overrepresented in other immigrant categories, to the point that the UK’s net annual immigrant intake is balanced between men and women.

Now, in September 2025, the British government closed the Family Reunion Appendix for visa applicants whose sponsor has Protected status (that is, is a legally recognized refugee). The so-called “Family Migration” appendix is still available, but has an income cut-off difficult to meet for refugee families in particular. This has decreased the share of incoming migrants (including incoming migrants fleeing persecution abroad) who are female.

If your goal is to prevent young men at risk of social alienation from committing crimes, knitting them into the social fabric by ensuring that they live with their partners and minor children is a classic political-right way to do so. Instead, what we see is that the entire political class (including the Labor party, which tacked right on immigration under Keir Starmer) are decreasing opportunities for the modal non-refugee migrant (who is, statistically a woman) to come to the country, and the far-right badgering them because they retain humanitarian policies toward asylum seekers.

It’s a mug’s game if you don’t recognize the statistical play as what it is: an attempt to use (what some commenters here, no doubt well-meaningly) carefully sampled statistics and claims about human evolution or supposed sociological constants to support nativist policy platforms.

I wonder if fear of young male immigrants got any play when young German men in the late 19th/early 20th century came to the US to avoid conscription in Germany?

Anybody know if that was part of the anti-immigrant toolbox back then?

Oh, as a follow-on to my last comment: the immigrant Trumpf family’s suppression of obvious evidence of its German identity dates to war-era anti-German sentiment. Friedrich Trumpf had arrived in the United States with, according to immigration records, no known occupation. He subsequently ran in California a gambling den and the kind of brothels that popular imagination associated with Chinese proprietorship, but did not seem to get into any trouble over those facts—Germans at this time were seen as “good” immigrants, even when explicitly engaged in socially censored activities.

Friedrich died during the First World War, and his son Fred later claimed his father to have been from Sweden, a claim that Fred’s credulous son Donald later repeated.

Not only the far right but the well intentioned refugee advocate.

Over time, ‘vulnerability’ has been used to categorise particularly at risk categories of person who require special measures/procedures/policies – e.g. children, women, people with disabilities, torture survivors etc. The downside of this is that single young men, absent any other vulnerability indicator, are always omitted and by default identified as having no need for special consideration – i.e. least deserving of protection.