The discourse of former Argentine President Mauricio Macri regarding migrants: what was said and what was silenced

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the way in which former Argentina’s President, Mauricio Macri, conceptualizes migrants in his public discourses during the first year of his term (December 2015-December 2016). We inscribe the present work within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough 1992, 2003, 2014; Hart 2014). We detected that certain themes and topics -conceptual frameworks, in terms of Cognitive Linguistics (Lakoff 2002, 2010)- were repeated throughout all the analyzed discourses. We grouped them into five categories 1) Argentina as a country of European migrants / immigrants since the beginning of the 20th century; 2) business relationships, investments; 3) drug traffic and terrorism; 4) refugees; 5) dissimilation between the in-group, Argentines, and the out-group, foreigners.