This paper presents a Critical Discourse Analysis of public discourse by Makis Voridis during his 2025 tenure as Greece’s Minister of Migration and Asylum, focusing on how “asylum” is constructed in policy-related discourse. Drawing on a corpus of official statements and interviews, the study combines frequency analysis with lexicogrammatical investigation to explore how language is used to legitimise exclusionary practices while maintaining a façade of legal order and institutional fairness.

The analysis applies Halliday’s model of transitivity and van Leeuwen’s framework for the representation of social actors to examine how asylum is framed as an administrative burden rather than a humanitarian right (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004; van Leeuwen 2008). Asylum is repeatedly represented as something to be processed, denied, or regulated, and never as a right owed to individuals in need of protection. Most notably, the term “refugee” is almost entirely absent from the discourse, replaced by abstract or legalistic terminology that obscures the human stakes of migration policy.

These patterns are interpreted through the concept of strategic silencing, which refers to the systematic marginalisation of refugee voices, rights, and needs. This silencing is not incidental but central to how restrictive migration policies are normalised and justified in democratic contexts. It aligns with broader European discursive shifts that reframe protection as control and humanitarian obligations as technical matters of governance (Krzyżanowski et al. 2018; Boucher & Hathaway 2022; Triandafyllidou 2017).

The paper also considers the consequences of this discursive framing for the everyday lives of asylum seekers, particularly youth. These include gaps in protection, barriers to inclusion, and restricted access to education and support – outcomes that emerge when policy discourse erases the human realities it claims to regulate.

Family reunification refers to the process of family members rejoining after being separated across borders due to migration, conflict or other circumstances (Nicholson, 2018). While there have been efforts in Europe in recent years to enhance access to information and legal support for separated family members, application procedures for reunification remain complex, expensive and time-consuming (Phillimore, 2023). This can have substantial social, emotional and psychological impacts on separated young refugees (Christ & Etzold, 2025; Morris et al., 2021). Little research, until now, has explored these impacts, and particularly how they differ according to individual factors such as a young person’s age, gender and asylum status.

This presentation introduces a pilot project at the University of Luxembourg which begins to fill these gaps. Drawing on extensive desk-based research, it examines national practices and socio-political debates shaping access to family reunification for refugees and beneficiaries of international protection across the continent. Drawing on Tilly and Tarrow’s (2015) framework of contentious politics, the paper analyses how processes of boundary activation, identity formation, polarisation and repertoires of contention shape these debates and resulting policies. As a result, despite EU-level directives and legal frameworks promoting family unity, the implementation of reunification policies for refugee families remains fragmented - with significant disparities in access in terms of eligibility, documentation requirements and procedural timelines. The paper highlights how restrictive policies and prolonged separations then adversely affect refugees’ inclusion and psychosocial well-being, paying particular attention to refugee children and youth. It concludes by arguing for more harmonised, rights-based approaches and youth-centered reform.