The representation of migrant identities in UK Government documents about Brexit
A corpus-assisted analysis
In the English worldview, “not all immigrants are created equal” (
Henderson and Wyn Jones 2021: 91). This paper provides support for the above statement by employing key semantic domain analysis (
Rayson 2008) 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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