Twentieth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

Turkey has become the country that currently hosts the greatest number of refugees in the world. This overwhelming reality has also affected the discourse around immigrants and those in the country. In addition, it has been inevitably influenced by the current Post-Truth winds. The aim of this paper is to address some of the most common discourse surrounding the most prominent immigrant group in Turkey – Syrian refugees – and to understand the transition from a discourse of ‘welcomed guest’ into ‘privileged people’ – [They] live way better than [us] – as a part of ‘othering’. To do so, Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) (Reisgl & Wodak, 2001) of the prominent discourses around refugees in Turkey was implemented through fact-checking platform. We have chosen news and social media contents related to Syrian refugees in Turkey on the fact-checking website teyit.org. Our analysis shows that the most widespread strategies in the negative representations of Syrian refugees are ‘Privileged in Terms of Economy’ and ‘Privileged in Terms of Rights’. These can be defined as discourse processes through which these groups of people are systematically referred to and constructed, as one unwanted privileged group of people that are ‘milking’ a country’s resources. Our analysis also raises the need for further studies of this new type of discourse we have labelled ‘privileged discourse’ surrounding immigration in regard to the role it plays in the inclusion process.