Migrants here to provide maximun benefit

Today, 27/1/2019, Sajid Javid UK Home Secretary laid out that the Govt sees immigrants as an asset to generate a “maximum benefit”.

May´s thing with immigrants and freedom of movement

A couple of years ago I published research that examined how migrants were constructed both in the UK immigration legislation and in the information delivered through the UK Border Agency website. We wrote this in 2015 well before the Brexit Referendum. I read this again today and have realised how naive we were. The following is part of our conclusions:

What our results seem to suggest is that for the UK Administration, the issue of immigrant integration is not part of how immigrants are constructed in the legislation and the information that the UK immigration agencies and authorities publish and distribute. This failure to mention integration issues in the legislation is not found in other legal systems such as in Italy, where Hernández González (2016) discovered a tension between inclusion/integration and exclusion/control in the same 2007–2011 period. The language-driven evidence provided in this study corroborates that the use of the lemma ‘migrant’ in the two corpora analysed calls for a partial construction of immigrants mainly as workers who need to be tightly controlled and classified into Tiers to prevent unlawful behaviour. In doing so, migrants, an alternative word for immigrants in our research context, acquires an extremely subtle negative prosody.

Pérez-Paredes, P., Aguado. P. & Sánchez, P. (2017).  Constructing immigrants in UK legislation and Administration informative texts: a corpus-driven study (2007-2011). Discourse & Society,28,1,81-103.

Why is legal language so complicated? Legislative drafters and linguists compare notes

 

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Why is legal language so complicated? Legislative drafters and linguists compare notes
Wednesday  29 June 2016, 14.00 to 17.30
Venue:  Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR

Description: The last decades have witnessed important innovations in legislative drafting but  have we succeeded in producing perfect laws? Just because a bill has passed into law does not mean that its goals have been achieved. Indeed, the quality of legislation may not only be affected by the intrinsic drafting difficulties; the implementation of legislation may be significantly influenced by a range of ‘filtering agents’ at whom legislation is directed and who may constrain, adapt and modify the intentions that form the basis of the legislation approved in the first place. Looking at more ‘scientific’ disciplines, such as linguistics, may be of some help for the legislative drafter who wants to know how a piece of legislation has performed and the extent to which its goals will be achieved.

Speakers:
Hayley Rogers, Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, UK;
Maria De Benedetto, Roma Tre University, Italy;
Jerome Tessuto, University of Naples Federico II, Italy (TBC);
Stephen Neal, Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA; Professor of Language and Law, School of Advanced Study, University of London;
James Hadley, Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study (SAS), University of London;
William Robinson, Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London;

Chair: Giulia Adriana Pennisi, University of Palermo, Italy and Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Website:  http://www.sas.ac.uk/support-research/public-events/2016/why-legal-language-so-complicated-legislative-drafters-and-lingu

BOOKING:  This event is free but advance booking is requested.  To book please use the IALS Eventbrite page: http://bit.ly/1nN0VEw

Message distributed through the forensic-linguistics mail list

Cardiff language and Law: Symposium Nov 2015 & Corpus Approaches to Public & Professional Discourse

 

From the Forensic Linguistics e-mail list

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Symposium on “Expertise in Language and Law” will take place on Friday 27th November 2015.

This Symposium is part of the Advanced Research Residency in Language and Law which takes place at Cardiff University from October to December this year. The full program

me of events is at: http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/call/.

The Symposium is followed, on Saturday 28th November, by a Conference entitled “Corpus Approaches to Public and Professional Discourse” (http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/corpus/).