Media Discourse on Immigration and Refugee Narratives

Media discourse on immigration and refugee narratives encompasses a broad spectrum of frames, metaphors and rhetorical strategies that shape public understanding and policy responses. Traditional outlets and digital platforms alike deploy metaphors of threat, resource and journey to characterise migrants, while discourse alternates between securitisation and humanitarianism. Analyses reveal persistent ideological divides, with conservative outlets emphasising risk and control and more liberal sources foregrounding solidarity and rights. Online environments introduce new dynamics of anonymity and virality, amplifying both empathetic and xenophobic content. Methodological advances, from corpus linguistics to computational semantics, have deepened insight into how discourses evolve across time and space. Practically, this research informs media guidelines, counter-hate initiatives and communication strategies aimed at fostering inclusive public debate and mitigating discrimination.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have applied corpus-assisted discourse analysis to parliamentary records in Spanish, European and British settings, mapping how political speeches construct migration as reactive or proactive phenomena within shifting ideological cycles. By combining frequency metrics with critical theoretical frameworks, this work uncovers how legislative discourse both reflects and reinforces broader societal attitudes. Complementing this, an investigation of national media coverage in Poland during the 2015–2018 crisis revealed a sharp divide between conservative and liberal outlets: conservatives securitised migration and emphasised threats, while liberals highlighted economic contributions and solidarity. Both streams, however, relied on securitising language, demonstrating how media partisanship shapes the emotional tone and policy implications of migration narratives.

Media Discourse on Immigration and Refugee Narratives publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in media discourse on immigration and refugee narratives across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Corpus linguistics: Quantitative analysis of large text collections to identify word frequencies, collocations and usage patterns.

Critical discourse analysis: Qualitative examination of how language both reflects and shapes power relations and ideologies in texts.

Contextual embeddings: Computational word representations that capture meaning from surrounding text, enabling detection of framing changes over time.

Securitisation: Framing a social phenomenon as an existential threat that justifies extraordinary policy measures.

References

1. The representation of migration in parliamentary settings: critical cross-linguistics corpus-assisted discourse analyses. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2023).
2. A Great Divide: Polish media discourse on migration, 2015–2018. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2022).
3. The details that matter: Racism in Norwegian media during the Covid-19 pandemic. Media Culture & Society (2024).
4. Computational analysis of 140 years of US political speeches reveals more positive but increasingly polarized framing of immigration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2022).
5. Metaphors of migration over time. Discourse & Society (2021).