"Anti-immigration rhetoric in Italy and in the USA: A comparative perspective"

By employing a discourse-analytic perspective, and drawing on both Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model and Lakoff’s framing theory, this paper presents a comparative analysis of the anti-immigration rhetorical strategies of two influential contemporary right-wing populist leaders, American President Donald Trump and League leader Matteo Salvini. Concentrating on the lexical level and on the rhetorical devices in both their speeches and social media posts, our analysis highlights remarkably similar ideas and strategies that suggest the idea of right-wing populist coordination across a globe. The rhetoric of exclusion put forward by the two leaders articulates around the idea of immigration as a threat for the security, the economy and the culture of the nation and of the people and is revealed by recurring metaphorical mappings, like IMMIGRATION IS WAR, IMMIGRATION IS NATURAL DISASTER and IMMIGRATION IS A BURDEN, but also by equivalential chains assimilating immigrants to criminals, a strategy that promotes their removal from moral concerns, or what Zygmunt Bauman terms “adiaphorization”.