Constructing immigrants in UK legislation and Administration informative texts: A corpus-driven study (2007–2011)

Abstract

Research has shown that immigrants tend to be negatively constructed in the discourse of the media. In the context of the European Union (EU), British newspapers reportedly offer largely negative or partial constructions of these individuals. These representations contribute to jeopardizing the integration of this group of people, as their social construction reflects and influences the attitudes of EU citizens and the immigration policies. Our research examines the collocational profile of the lemma ‘migrant’ in the UK legislation and UK Administration informative texts from 2007 to 2011. While our results show that the UK Administration avoids an explicit negative construction of immigrants coming to the United Kingdom, we have found that they are partially constructed as a homogeneous, well-categorized group through an extremely limited set of lexical items that tend to prime their adscription to tiers. We argue that the representation of immigrants in the legislation points to the fact that UK laws and official information during the period 2007–2011 were more focused on legitimating the control over this group of individuals than on creating the conditions for better integration policies.