North African refugees in Europe and North America frequently face exploitative employment contracts that disguise unfair terms through linguistic opacity. This study conducts a forensic linguistic analysis of fifty online contracts targeting Algerian and Tunisian refugees in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada, supplemented by interviews with affected individuals. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), corpus linguistics, and legal comparison, we document how passive constructions, nominalizations, vague qualifiers, and hidden hyperlinks systematically obscure employer obligations and burden workers. Quantitatively, refugee-targeted contracts exhibit over 60% passive modal clauses, significantly higher than those found in ordinary legal documents. Qualitatively, discourse patterns frame refugees as subordinate ‘providers’ while employers remain linguistically invisible. These tactics exploit linguistic and legal vulnerability, leading to debt, wage denial, and visa risks. By situating our findings within migration theory and digital labour governance, we argue for a ‘linguistic rights’ framework that mandates plain-language contracts, multilingual accessibility, and platform oversight to protect refugee workers
International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations