Ideologies, interests and rhetorical strategies behind migration policies in selected European countries

This doctoral dissertation project will attempt to improve understanding of migration policy formulation and presentation. This will be done through analyzing the many societal interests that influence the formulation of migration policies at national level in the UK, France and Germany. Such interests and their interaction will be studied and identified from a corpus of selected migration policy documents and media materials. The interdisciplinary theoretical framework draws upon political, sociological and communication theories, and their attempts to conceptualize mechanisms and processes of formulation of discourses, articulation of those discourses in oral and written policy statements, and the interaction (competition, hegemonic pursuits, etc). In this work, such discourses will be identified from the corpus, with the help of discourse analysis. Discourse analysis helps to dissect the complex migration policy argumentation into components that may represent very different and even contradictory goals and value systems, that governments today need to reconcile.