A critical discourse study of the portrayal of immigrants as non-citizens in a sample from the Spanish press

Abstract

This study intends to contribute to critical discourse analysis (CDA) by observing how the discourse of the press represents immigrants. The objective of this paper is to observe the main linguistic characteristics used by the press to portray sub-Saharan immigrants as non-citizens, in a sample from the Spanish press. The corpus consists of the news items published in the digital editions of the newspapers El País and ABC from 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2019. The main discursive characteristics analysed to observe the representation of immigrants as non-citizens are lexis, the use of figures and the passive voice. The methodology combines qualitative and quantitative data. The analysis will show that the discourse of the press tends to represent immigrants in a negative way, to reproduce the dichotomy ‘we-they’ and to represent immigrants as ‘the other’. The findings indicate that the recurrent use of certain words to refer to immigrants, the use of figures that evoke a sense of invasion and the representation of them as passive individuals do not favour integration but on the contrary the exclusion of immigrants from Spanish society, which thus promotes non-citizenship.