Immigration in the Brexit campaign: Protean dogwhistles and political manipulation

In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, there has been much discussion of whether the vote was caused by anti-immigrant sentiment or by economic factors, or by some combination of these. The author uses the term “protean dogwhistle” for the way that invocations of immigration shift in terms of the groups that are associated with them. In this chapter, she provides a bit of background about dogwhistles, which allow politicians to communicate views that might alienate some voters while maintaining deniability. There are two kinds of intentional dogwhistles, which work in very different ways. They are overt dogwhistle and covert dogwhistle. Both sorts of dogwhistles have been seen as rather nefarious ways of manipulating a voting public. The Brexit campaign clearly included dogwhistle racism, and inspired and emboldened those who were explicitly racist. Because of the Norm of Racial Equality, people are defensive, and some even consider the accusation to be almost taboo in all but the very clearest cases.