“And who by fire, who by water…”

Abstract In their paper on the use of the categories “refugee” and “migrant” in migration discourse, Crawley and Skleparis (2018) speak of the inadequacy of clear-cut labels in describing complex multifaceted phenomena, even though such categories dominate the anti-immigration populist narrative. In the media coverage of the 2015 European migration crisis the (immigrant) Other was typically construed as a criminal ( terrorist ) or part of a moving mass ( water ). The present study examines the “magazine” section of the coha corpus in search of possible antecedents of the (now current) dichotomous categorization into refugees and “fake” migrants in historical American English. Rooted in a conviction that historical linguistics and cognitive linguistics can benefit from drawing on each other’s insights, the analysis expands Crawley and Skleparis’ (2018) findings by incorporating the diachronic and quantitative dimensions.