The Criminalization of NGOs: Shifting the Blame (and the Gaze) from Immigrants to Rescuers

The ‘Refugee crisis’ has been accompanied by a radical shift of public attitudes toward NGOs operating in the southern Mediterranean, whose image has quickly turned from ‘saviors of the sea’ to ‘sea taxis’ by practices of re-contextualization of migration discourses. Less attention has been directed towards the ways such criminalization of solidarity affected migrant representation and identities in turn, especially on social media. This study aims to cast a new light on the discursive practices of criminalizing NGOs and their role in shaping the dichotomy ‘Us vs Them’. The case study focuses on Twitter as a privileged arena, where different categories of users are involved in the criminalization of NGOs, fostering the normalization of anti-immigration rhetoric, thus creating room for populist and sovereigntist ideologies. Based on a corpus composed of more than 800.000 tweets posted between 2017 and 2020, this study adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods including corpus linguistics and discursive strategies. Findings show that the NGO criminalization is part of the broader process of normalization of anti-immigration rhetoric, legitimizing restrictive migration policies, fostering the building of a sovereigntist political identity and neglecting immigrants’ and refugees’ own identities and rights. Specifically, results highlight a new articulation of the Us vs Them dichotomy where ‘Us’ is represented by the in-group, a new ‘Them’ is represented by the NGO and ‘Those’ is represented by migrants. The research output as a whole seems to consolidate a present and future trajectory regarding the political discourse on migration that is based on a progressive redefinition of the attributes of illegality/crime that shifts from migrants to rescuers.