The representation of ‘immigrant’ in news discourse: a corpus-based study of semantic preference and semantic prosody

Why the words around “immigrant” matter

News stories about immigration do more than report events; they quietly teach us how to feel about the people involved. This article explores how English-language news from around the world talks about “immigrants,” and shows that repeated word choices can make immigrants seem either dangerous outsiders or vulnerable neighbors in need of support. Understanding these hidden patterns helps readers become more critical consumers of the news and more aware of how language shapes public debates.

Looking at millions of words, not a handful of headlines

Instead of focusing on a few newspapers or dramatic front pages, the researchers turned to a massive collection of online news articles in English, gathered from hundreds of websites across many countries. They used a tool called Sketch Engine to search more than two billion words of news text and zoom in on how the word “immigrant” appears in everyday reporting. This large-scale approach allowed them to see recurring patterns that cut across individual outlets or nations, revealing a shared global way of talking about immigration rather than just local habits.

The company words keep around “immigrant”

The study centers on the idea that words gain much of their meaning from the neighbors they regularly appear with. The authors examined the most frequent “collocates” of “immigrant”—that is, the words that most often sit nearby. They then grouped these partner words into broad themes such as government, law and order, movement, and types of people. Next, they analyzed how these clusters of words colored the mood around “immigrant”: did they tend to suggest threat, support, or neutral description? This combination of statistics and close reading let them see not just what topics immigrants are linked to, but also the emotional charge of those links.

Threat versus care: competing storylines

Across the global news sample, the strongest pattern is a tight link between “immigrant” and government or law-and-order language. Words like “illegal,” “undocumented,” “deportation,” “detain,” and “influx” show up again and again near “immigrant.” When the authors read sample sentences, they found that these words usually cast immigrants as sources of crime, disorder, or crisis, often mentioned in the same breath as drug trafficking or terrorism. This creates a persistent storyline in which immigrants are problems to be controlled by the state. At the same time, another storyline appears, though less often: words such as “citizenship” and “legal,” or references to “refugees,” connect immigrants to rights, protection, and community support, especially when describing local programs, legal aid, or pathways to belonging.

How different groups are pictured

The study also shows that not all immigrant groups are framed in the same way. When “immigrant” is paired with broad legal labels like “illegal,” the surrounding language is mostly negative. But when the word appears near specific ethnic terms such as “Mexican” or “Asian,” the tone is more mixed and often more sympathetic, highlighting stories of contribution, struggle, or help received. Words like “refugee” or “undocumented” are especially revealing: in some contexts they come with fear and exclusion, in others with compassion and aid. This tug-of-war suggests that global news carries two clashing images at once—immigrants as threats and immigrants as vulnerable people in need of support.

Why this matters for readers and policy

By tracing these patterns, the article concludes that the word “immigrant” in global news is rarely neutral. Instead, it is wrapped in repeated associations that either harden a divide between “us” and “them” or invite a more caring response. The threat-focused language is more common and puts legal control and security at center stage, while the humanitarian language, though present, appears less frequently and can still treat immigrants as passive recipients of help. For ordinary readers, recognizing these linguistic habits makes it easier to question how stories are framed and to see that the way we talk about immigration is not just about facts, but also about the subtle emotional currents carried by the words that surround “immigrant.”

Citation: Xie, Q., Lin, M. The representation of ‘immigrant’ in news discourse: a corpus-based study of semantic preference and semantic prosody. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 13, 287 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06614-4

Keywords: immigration media, news framing, language and perception, corpus linguistics, semantic prosody