Infesting our country: discursive illusions in anti-immigration border talk

Abstract

Postmodern attempts to understand diverse communities living in close proximity within urban spaces may create a positive image of migration and immigration despite ongoing negative portrayals of migrants and immigrants in popular discourse and mainstream media. One such example includes the varied discourses used to depict individuals wishing to cross national borders. Recent and vivid reminders of the precarity of cross-border lives can be found in online and print newspapers reporting family separation, death, kidnapping, and extortion (cf. AUTHOR, 2018). This paper investigates how, despite the need to flee dangerous regions, online and print newspapers rely on negative portrayals of migrants and immigrants to forward nationalist positions. Specifically, using the Discourse of Illusion (AUTHOR, 2015) as our main analytic framework, the analysis demonstrates the ways in which dehumanization is central to forwarding ideological positions against migration and immigration. Our findings are then used to discuss larger issues of how media is transforming the ways in which political ideologies are constructed and circulated.

Pursuing social justice in gender and migration research

“…Recently, it has been facing several challenges, namely ‘anti‐gender campaigns’ (Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017; Paternotte, 2020) that include attacks on gender studies by the so‐called ‘illiberal states’ (Ergas et al., 2022) and anti‐immigration discourses in many migrant‐receiving countries (e.g. Güler, 2019; Jenks & Bhatia, 2020), among others. Against the backdrop of these macro‐level challenges, gender and migration research has been at the intersection of important theoretical and conceptual debates arising simultaneously within gender studies and migration studies.…”