The representation of migrants in Spanish judicial decisions: using corpus data to refute hate speech

Abstract

The phenomenon of immigration and its depiction in media texts have been examined profusely within the field of corpus-based discourse analysis (Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008; Baker et al., 2013; Blinder and Allen, 2016). This research seeks to present it as reflected on a corpus of 600 judicial decisions issued by Spanish courts in the years 2016 and 2017. This analysis was motivated by the rise of extreme right-wing parties in Europe in the recent years, which dehumanise immigrants and portray them as a threat to the welfare state. On a first approach, the results appear to dissociate immigration and crime since a considerable percentage of the keywords obtained (c. 20%) revolves around three major topoi, namely, family, territory/access, and legal punishment, not showing evidence of any major offences or crimes amongst the top-ranking lexicon. The study of the collocate networks of the KWs within the category legal punishment confirms our initial perception, in fact, out of 21 collocates, only the word delito (crime) itself collocates with terms referring to typified crimes such as violencia (violence). In parallel, the data were triangulated using the text-classification software UMTextStats (García-Díaz et al., 2018). The results of this second analysis confirm our initial observations.