Critics frame state anti-racist caution as enabling forced marriage

Evidence

Aisha is a fourteen year old whose father was drawn to Norway because he knew he could make ‘a career as a social welfare client.’ Embodying the stereotype of the duplicitious immigrant bent on betrayal of a generous country, he amasses wealth by investing his welfare benefits in his home country, all the while living in a great apartment in Oslo paid for by the Norwegian government. Aisha disappears one day and is presumed to be the victim of a forced marriage. Earlier, she had attempted to convince Norwegian welfare authorities of what was in store for her. Believing that they would be called racist if they took Aisha away from her family, the authorities decline to intervene. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 273

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘duplicitious immigrant bent on betrayal of a generous country’ figure is the same welfare-fraud narrative that shapes anti-immigrant discourse elsewhere in the book’s earlier chapters.