In the 2010s, Iranians, Egyptians, and Turks rose up in revolutionary social movements as a protest to their nation’s corrupt privatization, authoritarian rule, and crony capitalist policies. In response to the dissidents, the governments intensified the persecution of the intelligentsia in the shape of mass incarceration and control over university syllabi, books, and newspaper publications. This securitization then developed into control over personal freedoms in public and cyber spaces, which inevitably led to forced mass migration and exile of the intelligentsia. In this paper, I will be presenting my analysis of newspaper articles, social media posts, and talks given by members of the government, such as presidents, prime ministers, and prominent leaders like Iran’s Supreme Leader that were published in the 2010s in the wake of their countries’ mass-protests. Through this analysis, I shed light on the ways the ruling elite labeled dissidents as marauders, terrorists, and foreign agents to ostrasize them and justify the brutal crackdown against them. I will be arguing that governments and ruling forces used divisive language to control the public sphere, marginalize, target, and alienate dissident bodies to remove them from their countries’ national imaginary, contest their belonging to their homeland, and exclude them from being a national. I will be analyzing these sources using critical discourse analysis, tracing the impacts of the dominant discourse on the social reality of protesters. These processes, I then argue, facilitated the mass-migration of dissident intellectuals–as they were dismissed, banned, or jailed in great numbers–and created a new wave of mass-migration.