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Article published In: Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 22:1 (2023) ► pp.46–65

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The representation of migrant identities in UK Government documents about Brexit

A corpus-assisted analysis

ORCiD logo with link | University of Nottingham | University of Warwick
Published online: 10 November 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.22091.par
Abstract
In the English worldview, “not all immigrants are created equal” (Henderson, Ailsa and Wyn Jones, Richard. 2021. Englishness: the political force transforming Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 91). This paper provides support for the above statement by employing key semantic domain analysis (Rayson, Paul. 2008. From key words to key semantic domains. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13(4): 519–549. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and CDA to answer the research question: How are EU and extra-EU migrants constructed in Brexit-related UK Government documents published between 2016 and 2019? The analysis demonstrates that extra-EU migrants are constructed as a threat that requires UK-EU unity. At the same time, the government’s grammatical and linguistic strategies discursively exclude EU migrants from the British public. The study argues that a neoliberal construction of the acceptable EU migrant erases the identities of migrant workers in so-called “unskilled” roles and foreshadows the social exclusion of these groups brought about by the UK’s post-Brexit immigration system. The paper concludes that the documents problematise Britain’s “tolerant nation” rhetoric and threaten to weaken feelings of belonging to the UK among migrants.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Representing immigrants in public discourse
    • 2.2Constructing immigrants in British politics
    • 2.3Immigration discourses in the Brexit debate
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Analytical framework
    • 3.3Data analysis
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Representing non-EU migrants
    • 4.2Representing EU migrants
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
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