Representing immigrants as illegals, threats and victims in Malaysia: Elite voices in the media

Abstract

This article examines the way the voices of political elites are incorporated in news reporting to represent refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia as illegals, threats and victims, which reflect their ideological positioning. We also examine voices that foreground their plight and appeal for the relaxation of rules. Selected extracts are analysed to illustrate how these voices and authorial accounts are ordered in relation to each other to represent different perspectives for different purposes. To address the issue of how texts from the original are brought into the new context, we examine the relationship between the original text and the recontextualized part. Using tools from Van Leeuwen’s Social Actor Network model and Reisigl and Wodak’s discourse-historical approach, we analyse how the discursive strategies and different features of a text are used to construct particular meaning in the social world.