La immigració a l’Hospitalet: Les representacions socials sorgides dels programes electorals

Abstract

L’Hospitalet de Llobregat and the immigration phenomenon have been closely related for decades. However, the debate around this topic is still active and the politics of the city have adopted specific discourses that have characterised in some way this collective. This work is based on Critical Discourse Analysis theory and on the classification of the political discourses about immigration in proactive and reactive. As the political is one of the most ideological types of discourse, our aim is to analyse the relationship between proactive or reactive discourse related to immigration and the social representations that come up from them. Specifically, we analyse the electoral programmes of the four most voted political parties on the 2015 municipal elections in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat (PSC, C’s, ICV-EUiA-Pirates-E and PP). For this purpose, we focus on the denominations used to refer to the migrated collective, the indirect references to them and the sections or themes where immigration is mentioned. Regarding the results, we can distinguish between the PP’s populist reactive discourse, which sees immigration as the competition; the PSC’s mixture of both reactive and proactive discourse, which states that immigration is a challenge to confront with respect and tolerance; the C’s proactive discourse of the equality, which admits some troubles associated with immigration, but claims for the equality and respect of all the collectives; and, finally, the ICV-EUiA-Pirates-E’s proactive discourse, which sees immigration as an opportunity for the rest of the citizens and proposes measures to equal the migrated collective status to the native one.