The Making of a Crisis: Migration and Polarisation in the French Media

• In Event: Migration "Crises": Determinants and Consequences of Politicization

Abstract

Mass inflows of immigrants are believed to create moral panic which impacts attitudes and votes. However, few scholars systematically explore the discursive construction of migration as a crisis in relation to actual migration flows. When and how does migration become a crisis? To answer this question, we draw on automated text analysis to construct a corpus extracted from French newspapers between 2008 and 2020. Our unique mixed-methods approach harnesses automated text analysis, linear regression, as well as qualitative analysis, to locate the emergence of “migration crisis” discourse in 2015, absent massive inflows of migrants or refugees in France contrary to other European countries. We find that the press labels the crisis as one of “migration or migrant” rather than one of asylum or refugees despite the humanitarian nature of inflows. We show that the “migration crisis” is a conservative construct. Conservative newspapers not only mention the migration crisis more than liberal ones which insist more on asylum and humanitarian aspects, but they also create a sense of slow-burning or creeping migration crisis, as an undercurrent in media topics.

Authors

• Michelle Reddy, University of California Berkeley

• Helene C. Thiollet, Sciences Po