This talk addresses the discursive representation of the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe and particularly refugees within the speeches of political leaders from Slovakia and Hungary. The focus is on the legitimation and justification strategies of Slovak and Hungarian politicians that lead to the rejection of the so-called "quota system" proposed by the European Commission as a response to the crisis. The overall objective is to show how these elites discursively constructed the identity of the refugees and subsequently used this construction as a way to reject any relocation mechanism that would not be on a voluntary basis. The methodology of the research follows the pragmatic and semantic approaches of Critical Discourse Studies at the intersection with the theoretical approach of post-structuralism.