The Discursive Production of the Migration–Security Relation in Iceland: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus, 1909–2023

This article presents a corpus-assisted diachronic analysis of migration-related discourse across four institutional domains in Iceland, drawing on the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus (IGC), a 1.88‑billion‑word dataset spanning parliamentary debates (1909–2024), news media (1998–2023), academic journals (2004–2021), and court adjudications. Using case‑insensitive stem‑matching techniques rooted in corpus‑assisted discourse studies (CADS), the study classifies parliamentary texts into 15 discursive domains—immigration/movement, foreigners/alterity, asylum/refuge, border/legal governance, security/policing, integration/welfare, housing/quartering, morality/Ástandið, poverty/poor law, labour discipline/emergency economy, racial terms/racialised language, military/occupation, women/gender/sexuality, national identity/belonging, and welfare state/social services—and traces their evolution over 114 years across 19,502 parliamentary documents. The analysis also maps the geopolitical gaze of Icelandic parliament through a 307‑entry world gazetteer, revealing a radically Eurocentric worldview in which Africa and Latin America are discursively de‑particularised as abstract migration spaces. The principal finding challenges prevailing securitisation narratives. When the full 15‑domain classification is applied, security/policing (6,979 documents) ranks only fifth among parliamentary domains, behind morality/Ástandið (10,646), poverty/poor law (9,196), labour discipline (8,593), and housing/quartering (8,276). In this corpus, the securitisation of immigration appears primarily as a media phenomenon: in news media, security/policing accounts for over 95% of all classified immigration‑related texts. A co‑occurrence analysis further shows that 77.3% of speeches containing racial terms also contain security language, though only 19.7% of security speeches contain racial terms, with the temporal correlation between security and racial terms peaking at r=0.84 in the 2000s. These findings reframe the migration–security nexus as embedded within a broader welfare‑governance apparatus, with implications for securitisation theory, critical race theory, and Nordic comparative migration studies.