The migration phenomenon in Spanish and Italian legal discourse

Throughout the new century, the issue of immigration has become one of the central questions of the public, political and media debate in many European countries. This article analyses the main Spanish and Italian laws on immigration from the mid-1980s until today, with the aim to extract their key terms and to evaluate, from a contrastive perspective, their spread and semantic evolution in the laws, as well as to look at the use and the connotation of the same terms and of their variants in the press. Additionally, the way in which the cultural and linguistic issues involved in the migration phenomenon are addressed in the laws will be examined.