The compelling need to build 'walls' to protect ourselves from 'invaders': contrastive analysis of Donald Trump's and Santiago Abascal's anti-immigration discourses on Twitter.

In this study, we conduct some research on anti-immigration speech, done within the field of Critical Discourse Analysis, which analyses some of the tweets published by Donald Trump in 2019 to legitimise the building of a wall between the United States and Mexico. These tweets will then be compared with the ones written by the leader of the VOX party in Spain, concerning the migration crisis developed in Ceuta in May 2021. According to our initial research hypothesis, the discourse made by both political representatives will include some of the linguistic strategies that are commonly used in anti-immigration speech, such as those found by Wodak and Meyer (2001), Reisigl and Wodak (2001), Cap (2006), Hart (2015), Wodak (2021), and Demata (2021). For this purpose, the qualitative analysis of the tweets will be complemented with data provided by Sketch Engine. The results show that both politicians focus on denigrating and criminalising immigrants, as a strategy to trigger our fear and justify their actions against this group of people.