New frontiers of otherness: impact of the pandemic on the media discourse on immigration in Spain

This text presents a study on the representation of immigration in the Spanish press from March 2020 to March 2022, the peak period of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. Based on the critical analysis of the discourse of a sample of 347 news items published in the four written press media with the largest audience in Spain, different emerging and recurrent discursive frameworks around immigration and migrants are identified and analyzed. The results of the study point to a worsening of the stigmatization of migration as an essentially problematic phenomenon and explicitly associated with the spread of the virus on a global scale. The identified discourses reinforce, in a new way, old rhetoric that speaks of migrants as potentially dangerous, under imaginaries of a certain primitivism: they are vulnerable, violent, uncivil, incomprehensible, in contrast to the positive self-representation of a native, white and civilized Europe.