Reframing African Migration to Europe: An Alternative Narrative

Mediated representation of Middle Eastern and African migrants in UK and US press in the Wake of Brexit and Trumpism

“…For Jussi Laine, Africa contributes the largest pool of forced migration in history, and more so characterisation of MEA migrants in the news in general remains problematic. Such ‘media coverage has given the misleading impression of a linear, uninterrupted large-scale movement of people heading towards Europe, often represented through maps or other graphics with thick arrows from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe’ (Laine, 2020: 98). Recent scholarly explorations indicate that negative coverage of migrants valorises hostile attitudes and perceptions about migrants (Greenwood and Thomson, 2019; Wenzel and Żerkowska-Balas, 2019).…”

“…The flow of migrants across the Mediterranean to Europe reached a tipping point in 2015, generating what scholars called questionable media coverage that portrayed the issue as a crisis of existential threat (Laine, 2020) to Western societies. Laine (2020) stressed that regular opinion polls and surveys in the European Union (EU) suggest that the two topmost concerns of citizens are immigration and terrorism which are inexorably linked together. In 2016 the world witnessed two epochal events – the US presidential election and Britain referendum to exit the EU (Brexit) – that reignited immigration debates in public sphere.…”

“…Although Trump’s 2016 immigration rhetoric targeted mainly Mexican migrants, and the immigration thrust of Brexit campaign focussed on inter-EU migrants, they nonetheless impacted how migrants from Middle East and Africa (MEA) are received in developed nations and framed in Western media. Some of the adverse effects include policies that emphasised tougher restriction measures against MEA migrants to places like Europe (Moyo et al, 2020) and media reporting that projected misleading perceptions about migrants from Africa and Middle East (Laine, 2020).…”

“…The centrality of media in shaping immigration debates is such that, as posited by Bellovary et al (2020), rich world citizens’ attitudes and perceptions of migrants are more of a function of their nationality; and compared to other migrant groups those from Africa and Middle East are perceived negatively. The present study, therefore, seeks to understand how the anti-immigration rhetoric of 2016 may have shaped representation of MEA migrants, given that they contribute the largest pool of forced migration in the world (Laine, 2020), estimated to be over 22 million in 2018 (Mitchell and Afshari, 2021). While Walter Lippmann and Curtis (1922/1991) argued that media influences the picture of the world in our head, other scholars believe that institutions shape what we know about the world through the media (Hall, 1977/2019; Herman and Chomsky, 1988).…”

Access to welfare policies by immigrants: comparing centralized and decentralized governance in the examples of Turkey and Spain

“…In this rhetoric migrants are seen as undeserving 'others' who exploit the welfare system (Soroka et al 2016;Mau and Burkhardt 2009). The pandemic and economic crises have created further uncertainties and reinforced anti-immigrant attitudes (Keskinen, Norocel and Jørgensen 2016); amidst multiple overlapping crises, migrants have been used as convenient scapegoats in a strategy to combat the anxieties and insecurities caused by other kinds of societal change in the quest for stability and continuity (Laine 2020a).…”