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 ; and Blinder and Allen, 2016 ). This research seeks to present it as reflected in 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 recent years. Such parties dehumanise immigrants and portray them as a threat to the welfare state. On first examination, the results appear to dissociate immigration and crime since a considerable percentage of the keywords obtained (about 20 percent) revolves around three major topoi (namely, ‘family’, ‘territory/access’ and ‘legal punishment’) and there is no evidence of any major offences or crimes amongst the top-ranking lexicon. The study of the collocate networks of the keywords within the category ‘legal punishment’ confirms our initial perception; in fact, out of twenty-one 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 UMUTextStats ( García-Díaz et al., 2018 ). The results of this second analysis also confirm our initial observations.