The creation of the stranger – the process of recreating immigrants as the Other in Canada’s government-produced texts

ABSTRACT This research analyses textual and visual representations of immigrants in government-produced texts and investigates how such depictions aid in the production of the stranger discourse. How immigrants are discussed and portrayed has an impact on how immigrant populations are perceived and treated in their host countries. By using postcolonial theory and conducting a Foucauldian critical discourse analysis (CDA), we analyse argumentative strategies through which the host and immigrant populations are portrayed, and how the politics of difference is constructed and normalized. We critically evaluate such representations for their discursive functions which contribute to immigrants’ socio-economic marginalization and racialization.