What does Culture Wars Rhetoric look like in the immigration debate?

Abstract

This article aims to verify how the Rhetoric of Culture Wars manifests in the immigration debate in two of the largest French daily newspapers, in terms of distribution, Le Figaro and Le Monde, the first on the right and the second on the left of the political spectrum. In the period between two presidential elections with substantially different results (2012 and 2017), all opinion articles that contained the keyword “immigration” were selected, resulting in a total of 433 articles, 345 from Le Figaro, and 88 from Le Monde. The result was a series of rhetorical constants found that would be typical of this type of cultural clash on the immigration debate, which can be tested in other contexts in future researches.