SARS-CoV-2 as an 'illegal alien': linguistic and discursive representations in the press

This paper is divided into three sections. The first addresses 'people on the move', reviewing the main Critical Discourse Studies publications about migrants of the past 25 years. The second section is about 'viruses on the move', describing how the Covid-19 diffusion has been constructed by news media using the same discursive construction employed to describe migrants. Finally, the third section presents a brief case study on the multiple referents of the newly coined term 'Covid refugee'. Hopefully, the paper contributes to the reflection on the discourses of migration and of the recent pandemic, and highlights how linguistic representations cognitively shape reality, which is in turn regulated by laws, in turn formulated through the very medium of language.