‘We don’t want any immigrants or terrorists here’: The linguistic manufacturing of xenophobia in the post-2015 Poland

Abstract

This article explores the discursive patterns of legitimization of anti-immigration policies adopted by the Polish right-wing government which has been ruling the country since October 2015. It argues that legitimization of anti-immigration policies is essentially threat-based and coercive, involving a specific selection of rhetorical tools deployed to characterize different immigrant groups and individual immigrants from mainly Middle East and East African territories. Construed as ‘different’, ‘alien’ and ‘unbelonging’, in a whole lot of cultural, ideological and religious terms, they are claimed to pose an emerging threat to the safety of Poland and the personal safety and well-being of Polish citizens. The article draws on discourse space models and Proximization Theory in particular, revealing how the concepts of closeness and remoteness are manipulated in the service of threat construction and the sanctioning of tough anti-immigration measures, such as the refusal to accept non-Christian refugees from war territories in Syria. It demonstrates how Poland’s government manufactures and discursively perpetuates the aura of fear by conflating the issue of refugee migration into Europe with the problem of global terrorism, and how virtual threats to Polish cultural legacy and values are conceived to justify the government’s opposition to the idea of the multiethnic and multicultural state in general.