학술논문

The representation of migrant identities in UK Government documents about Brexit: A corpus-assisted analysis.
Document Type
Article
Source
Journal of Language & Politics. 2023, Vol. 22 Issue 1, p46-65. 20p. 3 Charts.
Subject
Brexit Referendum, 2016
Government publications
Migrant labor
Immigrants
Social marginality
British withdrawal from the European Union, 2016-2020
Language
ISSN
1569-2159
Abstract
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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]