Skirtingų migrantų tipų įrėminimas Lietuvos Seimo narių diskurse 2020 - 2023 m /

Since 2020, the number of foreigners arriving in Lithuania has increased significantly. This increase can be attributed to 3 events. One of them is the protests against the results of the presidential elections in Belarus in 2020. The second, is the crisis of illegal migrants that started in Lithuania in 2021. And the third event is the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022. These events and the number of foreign migrants related to them were included in the agendas of the members of the Seimas. In the context of these topics, in the discourses of the members of the Seimas, different concepts describing the type of migrant, such as "economic migrant", "illegal migrant", "refugee" or "asylum seeker", were assigned to describe different people who arrived/intended to arrive in the territory of Lithuania. Since politicians have the power to shape the public's attitude towards these different groups of migrant types, it was important to investigate in this work whether these different types of migrants were framed in the discourse of Lithuanian Seimas members in a similar/equivalent way, or nevertheless differently, thus forming a different attitude towards them in society? The importance of this work is strengthened by the fact that the existing literature has not studied much about how politicians frame different types of migrants when events occur in a similar period that determine the increased number of migrants. Thus, the purpose of this work is to investigate/analyze how members of the Lithuanian Seimas discursively frame different types of foreign migrants in 2020 – 2023 and whether these types are defined similarly/equivalently in the discourse of parliamentarians. To achieve this goal, the statements of Seimas members in 2020 – 2023 about different types of foreign migrants were selected from the transcripts of Seimas meetings and the news portal Delfi.lt. These data were first analyzed using collocation analysis using the text linguistics method. Later, it was moved on to analyzing the context of these collocations and the terms themselves, using critical discourse analysis. After analysis, it was concluded that the members of the Seimas in the 2020 – 2023 period, different types of foreigners were framed quite differently, unequally. Asylum seekers were framed most neutrally among the types of migrants studied in this paper in the discourse of parliamentarians. The framing of asylum seekers by MPs is in line with the international definition. Refugees were framed more controversially in the discourse of Seimas members. The term refugees was used incorrectly, not according to the international definitions of this term. Refugees were framed in the speeches of some parliamentarians as individuals who are looking for economically better living conditions, rather than as individuals who are fleeing threats to their lives. Another aspect analyzed was the fact that the evaluation of refugee parliamentarians depends on their origin country of arrival. Ukrainian refugees were evaluated and framed more positively than refugees from the Middle East. Illegal migrants are similarly framed ambiguously. Some parliamentarians threaten this group of persons in their speeches by associating them with precisely and clearly unnamed and unfounded threats, while others frame this group through the perspective of empathy and rights. It was also discovered that illegal migrants were framed as people who intend to enter richer European countries through Lithuania, seeking economically better living conditions. Another type of migrant, economic migrants, is used in the collected data to refer to irregular migrants and is usually framed negatively. As shown by the analysis of the collocation lemma refugees, economic migrants are contrasted with refugees, due to their different reasons for arrival. In this context, economic migrants are positioned as individuals who seek personal gain.

Grantor dc:publisher

Institutional Repository of Vilnius University

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Aleksejevaitė, Rosita,

Statement dc:rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Language dc:language

lit

Repository record dc:identifier

https://repository.vu.lt/VU:ELABAETD210584649&prefLang=en_US

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vu.lt:elaba:210584649