Refugees or illegal migrants? A comparative study of Polish media discourse on Ukrainian war refugees and the Polish-Belarussian border crisis

This paper aims to compare and contrast the discursive representations of migrants in the context of the ongoing migration crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border and the surge of Ukrainian refugees into Poland post-February 2022. The author chose 60 articles from the official TVP Info website using the keywords refugee, migrate, immigrants, etc. Informed by Critical Discourse Analysis, the research drew on social actor theory (van Leeuwen 2009), as well as Systemic Functional Analysis (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014). The results reveal that there are significant differences in the depiction of Ukrainian refugees versus migrants encamped on the Polish-Belarusian border. The Ukrainians were portrayed as individuals with distinct and poignant narratives, whereas for the description of migrants from the border, abstract nouns were used, presenting them as a homogeneous and threatening collective. Agentivity patterns also proved to vary depending both on the context and the time of publication of the article. The earlier articles presented the migrant as a passive patient of other agent’s actions, while the more recent ones displayed some instances of their agency. The paper may serve as a springboard for further studies on the issue of migration in Polish media discourse.