Corpus-Based Analysis of Othering in UK Immigration Policy Discourse: A Diachronic Study of 2010–2024 Home Office Texts

Abstract

This study employs concordance-based corpus analysis to examine the linguistic construction of “othering” in UK immigration policy discourse produced between 2010 and 2024. Situated within the frameworks of van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square, Wodak’s (2015) discourse-historical approach, and Baker et al.’s (2008) corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, the research investigates how lexical and collocational patterns contribute to the ideological representation of migrants and asylum seekers. A purpose-built corpus of approximately 1.2 million words was compiled from Home Office policy documents, immigration legislation, and ministerial statements. The corpus was analyzed using AntConc to identify concordance patterns and collocational environments of key lexical items, including “migrant,” “asylum seeker,” “illegal,” “legitimate,” “genuine,” “bogus,” “threat,” and “queue-jumping.” The findings reveal systematic and recurrent discursive strategies of othering, primarily operationalized through dehumanization, criminalization, and welfare-threat framing. Collocational analysis demonstrates that terms such as “illegal” and “bogus” frequently co-occur with lexical items associated with criminality, fraud, and illegitimacy, while “migrant” and “asylum seeker” are regularly embedded in syntactic contexts emphasizing burden, pressure, and risk. Diachronic examination indicates a marked intensification of threat-oriented discourse following the Brexit referendum, with a significant increase in both the frequency and salience of negative collocational patterns after 2016. This shift suggests a restructuring of immigration discourse aligned with broader political and ideological transformations in UK governance. The study argues that othering in immigration policy texts is not incidental but systematically encoded through recurrent lexical and collocational choices that construct migrants as socially and morally deviant subjects. The findings contribute to corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, immigration studies, and the methodological advancement of diachronic policy discourse research.