Muslim Migrants through the Prism of Multimodal Texts of British Media before and after Brexit

This study is theoretically based on the role of migration in a globalized world. The recent rise in immigration was one of the crucial arguments that United anti-globalists to vote for the UK to leave the EU. It was assumed that the disagreement of the British authorities with the tolerant migration policy of the EU is expressed in the discriminatory multi-modal discourse of the British media. This research analyzes Online publications about migration processes taken from four leading British Newspapers: conservative-the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail; liberal-The Guardian, The Independent. The aim of the work is to identify differences in the representation of migrants through multi-modal texts in the period before and after Brexit in the British media. The differences in representation of migrants defined by the policy of a newspaper are also brought to the foreground. A study applied a multimodal critical discourse analysis to the publications selected by the following keywords: migrant, refugee, asylum seeker. An integrated development environment (IDE) RStudio was used to analyze the frequency of published texts in a given chronological framework and determine the sentiment of selected texts. The AntConc corpus Manager was also used to identify differences in the representation of migrants and highlight clear cases of the "us and them" dichotomy. The qualitative analysis is supported by the theory of multi-modal text of G. Kress and T. van Leeuwen, as well as the conceptual opposition of "us and them". The study utilizes van Leeuwen’s approach to representation of social actors to demonstrate how the discourse on migration is constructed using two strategies: victimization, portraying people as helpless passive victims who need protection and humanitarian assistance and criminalization, representing people as active actors who commit illegal actions.