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This article discusses the extent to which methods normally associated with corpus linguistics can be effectively used by critical discourse analysts. Our research is based on the analysis of a 140-million-word corpus of British news articles about refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (collectively RASIM). We discuss how processes such as collocation and concordance analysis were able to identify common categories of representation of RASIM as well as directing analysts to representative texts in order to carry out qualitative analysis. The article suggests a framework for adopting corpus approaches in critical discourse analysis.