Legitimating the Return of Immigrants in Spanish Media Discourse

Abstract

The article presents the analysis of a set of articles published in a Spanish newspaper on the return plan for immigrants. Since the data indicate that the plan is described as a phenomenon that is positive both for immigrants and for Spain, it is documented here how the newspaper legitimates the plan by presenting it to its local readers. Attention is paid to how immigrants are represented both linguistically and visually and how this form of representation actually reveals the newspaper’s elite racist attitudes. The analysis, grounded in multimodal analysis and critical discourse analysis, contributes towards the study of the discursive representation of minority groups as “others” and extends the existing research by documenting how political measures against such minorities are discursively presented as actually being in their own interests.