Metaphorical Representations of Migrants in the Italian and British Press During a Time of Crisis

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Introduction
Migration has become subject of criticism and heated debates both within Europe and the UK. Since the 1980s, a growing number of migrants have turned Italy from a traditional country of emigration to one of immigration. Over the years, both the Italian state and society have had to make adaptation efforts due to the quick nature of this inversion in migration patterns. A concern with how immigrants are viewed and represented in the host community has emerged alongside institutional efforts to regulate immigration and the legal treatment of foreigners. The first immigration law was passed in 1986 as a result of the gradual shift in public opinion towards intolerance and fear, including violent attacks. According to Caruso (2013), this transformation was also noticeable in the terminology used to classify the 'other', with a switch from the term straniero (foreigner) to immigrato (immigrant); the foreigner was typically seen favorably and rarely as a danger to social cohesiveness. The immigrant, on the other hand, came to be viewed as a significant economic and social burden who did not make any useful contributions to the nation (Tarter, 2001).
In 2011, the matter of immigration held a primary role in the political agenda of the country. In the course of the year, 331,000 new residence permits were released, of which 42.7% for family reasons and 36.0% for work reasons. Between January and August 2011, 52,000 people arrived by boat from North Africa and Italy was called to cope with the emergency (UNHCR, 2011). In the wake of the Arab Spring, irregular migration towards Italy and arrival by sea increased exponentially, applying specifically to refugees and asylum seekers. In fact, the number of asylum requests submitted in 2011 was three times the figure for 2010 (SPAR, 2011;UNHCR, 2012). The debate with France for the case of the Tunisian migrants, as well as the request to activate the burden sharing sent to the EU institutions, brought the discussions on immigration to a wider and international context. increased sharply since the election of the Conservative-led coalition government in 2010, especially after the introduction of measures to reduce net migration in (Migration Observatory, 2016. Economic issues, along with arguments regarding EU and illegality dominated the discussion of immigration problems. Indeed, the reality of the period, characterized by rising unemployment and economic instability, significantly exacerbated already-existing societal issues and had an impact on how immigration was viewed, especially in the press. Economic hardship has been shown to have an impact on people's beliefs and values, leading to less support for immigration (Jonsson & Petersen, quoted in Eydal & Ottosdottir, 2009). Critical reflection is required in light of both these shifting socio-economic and political conditions, as well as the increasingly problematic depiction of migrants in public discourse and the press.

Metaphors in Migration Discourse
Representations of migrants are created through language, and in turn, power dynamics are reproduced. It has been argued that a certain behaviour of a person or a group is perceived as being more stable and unchangeable the more abstract the manner in which it is described (Galyga et al., 2019). Abstract language is used less when reporting about negative behaviour of in-group members than when reporting about similar behavior of out-group members (Geschke et al., 2010). Much research has been carried out in exploring the discursive working of metaphors, and it is common in the study of discourse on migration to focus on the linguistic modification of the so-called RASIM terms, an acronym of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants (Baker et al., 2008;KhosraviNik, Krzyzanowski, & Wodak, 2012). The use of metaphors to represent abstract concepts constitute an in-group reaffirmation mechanism, unifying in-group members who share a common understanding of said metaphors and 'othering' those who do not (Krzyzanowski & Wodak, 2017). Wodak and Reisigl describe this as follows: "Water," natural disasters like "avalanches" and "flood disasters", military activities like "invasions", all persuasively representing "immigration" or "migrants" as something that has to be "dammed", are examples of collective symbols, just as the "ship" metaphor symbolizing the effects of immigration as an "overcrowded boat", and the "house" and "door" metaphor that metaphorizes the in-groups' (e.g., "national") territory as a "house" or "building" and the stopping of immigration as "bolting the door" (2001, p. 381).
Migrants, therefore, are framed as a threat through the use of semantic units such as metaphors and symbols.
The role that metaphor plays in political discourse has always been of great interest to metaphor scholars (Charteris-Black, 2005 and previous studies have revealed a large number of metaphors in which immigrants are the target and negatively presented as the 'other'. Both Van Der Valk (2003) and Charteris-Black (2006) for example, in analyzing right-wing political discourses on immigration in France and Britain respectively, found WATER metaphors to be among the most prominent, depicting immigrants as a danger and as losing control over immigration. Interconnected with WATER metaphors, Charteris-Black also identifies the frequent use of the CONTAINER metaphor, as containers frequently hold liquids and which could build up pressure and burst.
The use of metaphors of water and other liquids in discussions about migrants creates a powerful image of the country being overcome by waves of people, indeed research on the Italian and British press has shown how these metaphors can present migrants as a potential threat both on the countries' people and their resources. Terms like ondate/waves, afflusso/influx, and flusso/flow, for instance, are frequently used by politicians and journalists to describe the arrival of immigrants. By portraying the situation as out of control, these terms help to justify the action of stopping or blocking their movement (Caruso, 2013). In a study carried out by Caruso (2013) on the Italian press, the WAR domain was also quite frequent and included metaphorical expressions such as un esercito di/an army of, which led to the conceptual metaphor IMMIGRANTS ARE AN INVADING ARMY. "Such metaphors are used to construct relations between immigrants and the government (and the people they represent) as conflicting and potentially violent, thus legitimating practices of exclusion from national borders" (Caruso, 2013, p. 16).
Against this background, the aim of this paper is to identify the metaphorical expressions and the conceptual metaphors that emerge from the analysis of discourse related to migration during a time of crisis. More specifically, the focus is on the metaphorical portrayal of migrants entering Italy and the UK in 2011, a year that was marked by the Arab Spring and the economic crisis. Metaphors have the potential to affect how we think and feel about specific issues because of their relationship to the preconceived images we have. ijel.ccsenet.

Corpus
The social mass med greatest ca Lirola, 20 indeed, ac newspaper immigratio understood elsewhere portraying discourse i that the la Sommer, 2 Clearly im which will the time fr Corriere d and one fr two broads focus on migration The metho terms used press base representa the colloca include the    c. Contrast: Yes, the basic meaning involves the influx of water whereas the contextual meaning involves the abstract influx of foreigners into a country.
Comparison: Yes, we can understand the movement of people in terms of the movement of water.
Flusso ( These parts of the text become material for further study in order to identify metaphors at the conceptual level following the framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA). CMA "is an approach to metaphor analysis that […] aims to reveal the covert […] intentions of language users" (Charteris-Black, 2004, p. 34) which is based on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). According to Fowler (1991, p. 89), "Critical Linguistics proposes that analysis using appropriate linguistic tools, and referring to relevant historical and social context, can bring ideology, normally hidden through habitualization of discourse, to the surface for inspection". CDA aims to "make explicit political and ideological motivations that would, otherwise, be implicit or concealed" (Charteris-Black, 2004, p. 29).
CMA, therefore, analyzes metaphors in the context in which they occur and consists of three stages: identification, interpretation and explanation. These three stages are quite similar to Fairclough's (1995) three stages for conducting CDA, which, in turn, follow Halliday's (1985) functional linguistics, which argues for a view of texts in which they can be analyzed with reference to the following metafunctions: ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning, and textual meaning.
In the case of this study, CMA focuses on identifying the metaphor keywords that potentially conceptualize migrants and, in turn, immigration. This step is about classifying the findings according to source domain, and about suggesting a conceptual metaphor that a certain linguistic metaphor might be a realization of. Once again, in the case of afflusso/influx and flusso/flow, the WATER source domain was assigned and conceptual metaphors such as IMMIGRATION IS A NATURAL DISASTER, IMMIGRANTS ARE A WAVE/A TIDE/A TSUNAMI-as we will see below-were identified.

Conceptual Groupings
After having analyzed the concordance lines and collocates, four major conceptual groupings were identified in the corpus as a whole: NATURAL DISASTER (60%), CONTAINER (21%), INVASION (11%), and ANIMALS (8%). concerning the framing of immigration in Australian newspaper reports ranging from 1854 to 2018, finds these to be the most frequent metaphors, while O'Brien (2003) posits that they were recurrent in the immigration restriction debate of the early 1900s in the United States as well. Taylor (2021), investigating the Times corpus from 1800 to 2018, found that LIQUID metaphors were used in conventionalized form from 1850 onwards, and that they collocated with terms such as settler, emigrants, migrants, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers and that the number of lexicalisations increased over time. Thus, according to Taylor, "although long-standing, we have evidence that the metaphor continues to be creative and productive" (2021, p. 470).
Seeing as how immigrants often arrive by sea, the use of WATER or LIQUID metaphors in migration discourse has been considered to be topic-triggered (Charteris-Black, 2006;O'Brien, 2003), however, Santa Ana (2002) when analyzing the arrival of Mexican migrants into the United States also identifies the frequent use of WATER metaphors. According to Charteris-Black (2006), the employment of WATER metaphors in UK political discourse on immigration is quite fitting, both because of the arrival of immigrants to Britain by water, and because of the role the sea has played in the historical and cultural identities of the country. Moreover, he claims that the LIQUID metaphors which represent lack of control over migration are, "not so much about controlling the physical movement of people, but controlling the level of historical change in society over time" (2006, pp. 572−573).
Considering the common use of WATER metaphors in immigration discourse, it is clear that they have been identified in discourse concerning the Italian and British immigration crisis in 2011. A few instances of creative/novel metaphor were identified in the WATER source domain, however, the extensive use of these metaphors in the press have turned expressions such as 'flow of illegal immigrants' or 'influx of migrants' into conventional forms of referring to the arrival of migrants into the UK and Italy in particular.

IMMIGRANTS ARE A WAVE
Of particular interest is the metaphor keyword ondata/wave which is part of the conceptual metaphor IMMIGRATION IS A NATURAL DISASTER. The following example shows the use of both ondate/waves and esodo/exodus: ( It is also interesting to note the verb riversare/crash, keeping in line with the movement of the waves. Indeed, this water metaphor is intended to make us believe that there will be a complete loss of control over immigration. Just like with uncontrolled water, the host societies will be devastated by the arrival of migrants (Crespo-Fernandez, 2013).

IMMIGRANTS ARE A TIDE
The following examples demonstrate how the arrival of immigrants is portrayed negatively, as a "risk" to Italy, the UK, and the entire EU during the period under analysis and which needs to stopped.
( The president of the regional council of Puglia, Onofrio Introna, reports on the efforts which the government has asked the regions to make in order to relieve the migratory pressure on Lampedusa. (10) "That is the largest influx of people Britain has ever had and it has placed real pressures on communities up and down our country, not just pressure on schools, housing and health care-though those have been serious-but social pressures too," said Mr Cameron. [Daily Express 15.04.2011] The PRESSURE metaphor is both compatible and coherent with the WATER metaphors found in the corpus and can especially be linked to the FLOOD metaphor which evokes the image of a large body of water exerting pressure on a dam (Tóth et al., 2018).
Another metaphorical expression linked to pressione/pressure is scoppiare/burst as illustrated in the following examples: (11) Allarme immigrati arrivati da Lampedusa "Il Cara ora scoppia" [Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno 02.08.2011] Immigrant alarm arrived from Lampedusa "The Cara is now bursting" (12) BRITAIN is rushing towards a bursting point after new statistics yesterday revealed net migration had rocketed to a record high. [Daily Express 25.11.2011] If something filled with air or water bursts, or if you burst it, it breaks suddenly because there is too much pressure inside it or against it (Macmillan Dictionary). In this case the asylum seeker reception centre and Britain are containers and the pressure inside (asylum seekers/migrants) are about to make the containers burst.

IMMIGRANTS ARE A LIQUID
The terms afflusso/influx and flusso/flow have the same conceptual basis. As happens with pressure, these terms conceptualize immigrants as a fluid that can perforate the boundary of the container that represents the nation at a conceptual level. By using afflusso continuo, the portrayal of water incessantly flowing/entering emphasizes the conceptualization of the emergency and the risks. (15) Il piano Maghreb si può sintetizzare in tre punti: aiutiamoli a casa loro, svuotiamo la vasca e chiudiamo un rubinetto che, purtroppo, ancora sgocciola. [Repubblica 10.04.2011] The Maghreb plan can be summarized in three points: helping them at home, emptying the bathtub and turning off the tap, which unfortunately is still dripping.
Roberto Maroni, the pro-Lega Minister of the Interior, advocate of bilateral agreements with the governments of countries such as Tunisia, as well as with Libya's National Transitional Council, upon the finalization of the accord with Tunisia, explained that the measures would prevent clandestine immigration and thus allow Italy to 'turn off the tap' of irregular migrants from North Africa (Paoletti, 2014).
The existence of a clearly defined container implies a conscious controlling entity that fills or empties the container-just as a government controls the flow of people into and out of the country. The solutions proposed match the metaphors used to define the problem (Charteris-Black, 2006 Santa Ana suggests that while certain orientational metaphors are fixed and "impervious to change" and others are highly conventionalized to the extent that they may only reveal change over an extensive period of time, political and social metaphors "are negotiable". He states that "in contrast to highly conventionalized domains such as love, political domains are openly debated and discussed, hence the underlying structure of these domains can change" (1999, p. 218). Further research therefore, could include investigation on how metaphorical representations in the press of extra-European migrant groups differ from intra-European migrants, how the representations of these migrant groups differ between Italy and the UK, and how the representations of these migrant groups differ between routine and other crisis periods.